3 Systems That Close Six-Figure Deals: Inside Clay Bootcamp with Spencer Tahil

The anti-agency approach that I take is more of kind of like an embedding. I embed in their team, I talk to their team. One of the first things that I do, and aside from setting up all the infrastructure in the first month, is I go and interview every single person that I'm gonna talk to.

Mm-hmm.

Dude, what pisses you off every day? Hey, SDR number 3, what pisses you off every day? Is it like picking up the phone? Do you have like anxiety about that? What are the common responses that you're gonna get? Interview 10 SDRs, put all their answers together, mash it together with some Claude engineering, get some common queries, put that in an audit. Wow. Go to the growth manager, say, hey, we're gonna do this. 'But what are your KPIs?' Understand what he cares about, understand what pains him, and then go to the CRO or the financial controller and say, 'Hey, what ROI are you projecting on hiring us?' Understanding every single thing from that point of view allows you to understand even more so that you know how to communicate. And this approach that I take is like, when I embed, I want to know as much information as possible because for me to get done, I just need to be efficient. I'm there for 90 days. I have stuff to do. You're paying something that's not very cheap.

Hey Spencer.

Hey guys. What's up, Nathan?

Excited for this. Yeah. I wish I had my Hawaiian shirt on as well because it's the most like most fun you can have in a shirt. I've ever had, so, you know, but I'd already, I always wear mine before any other shirt, so it's dirty right now. It's in the laundry.

Unfortunate. But next time we can match our shirts.

There we go.

Yeah. We can get some Clay, like some Clay Bootcamp merch, you know, that'd be kind of cool.

We do need to do that actually. So maybe by the time this is out, we'll, uh, have fulfilled that. Um, nice. Well, super excited. You're here, really excited to talk. I know I'm going to learn a lot because I've used an innovator in the space and you think about things very differently. And I think people who watch this are going to learn a ton. I mean, we've talked with a lot of really successful people. You're also really successful, but you just have like an approach that's going to provide a lot of contrast. So hopefully you're a little cranky and opinionated.

I've never seen you cranky, but hopefully today you're like a little cantankerous and just give us some It's Wednesday, so this is my creative day, so I'm actually least cranky in the middle of the week. It's actually kind of funny. Yeah, I'm sorry, but I gave some hot takes. We just go through it and just see where we go.

All right. Okay. Nice. Okay. So quick, quick intro. Spencer runs Growth Alliance. He's super smart, very intense, very helpful. He's mentored, I think you said 12 or 13 Clay Bootcamp students so far.

Sounds right.

He's our go-to often when someone's already quite technical and they're interested in a lot of things, but you know, one of them, CRM enrichment, prompting, and just, uh, really intensive engagements with clients rather than transactional ones. Really glad to have you on the podcast. Let's dive in. Like I was saying, I see you as a, as an innovator in the space. And also I think you're not as famous as you should be.

Yet. So, okay.

I'm like, when do you post? When do you post on LinkedIn? Like, this, this post should have at least 200 likes. Come on, people, like, get with the program. We're going to change that.

We'll try to change that. A lot of people like videos. A lot of people have told me that they see my video, like when I'm like, take my phone out and I'm like walking down the streets and I'm like, yeah, so this is what's like, what's going on. This is why I don't like the industry. And they love that. They eat it up. But like, whenever I try to make a post, Like, like the other day I tried to make a post and it was like my 4 mental models or whatever. Dude, nobody liked it. I was like, what is going on?

Like, that's weird.

You just have to like not give it any effort and if people love it, it's like bewildering to me how LinkedIn works.

I see. Yeah. If people have to use their prefrontal cortex on social media, it's probably not. I don't know. What would you say your zone of genius is? That sets you apart from—

I would probably say like there's a few, uh, but if I have to like sum it up, it's definitely like in our space, right? Like in, in our context, my zones of genius are probably gonna—

I mean, yeah, yeah.

I mean like just in general, like I, I would say generally speaking, my zones of genius encompass, um, macro strategy, like macro marketing operation strategy. So we're looking at more or less the growth department and the growth strategy and how it gets executed.

Mm-hmm.

And then on the technical side, it's how associations work in CRM environment and then debugging, integrating in that. So when we look at, when we look at that in our industry, it's commonly known as like rev— revenue operations, right? So being able to see the whole picture and then get really gritty and really technical and say like, hey, this is how the API works. I would say those are my zones of genius, but I just, I come from the engineering background in the business. It's like you ask why 5 times and you do a root cause analysis.

Mm-hmm.

So it's. It's just what my teachers hammered into me. It's what my parents hammered into me. It's like, just keep asking why. And I think like, that's probably one of my zones of genius is just like being able to understand why and where things work.

Interesting.

And then like blowing them up ma— into like a macro strategy and then just kind of drilling back down and putting it back together just better, you know?

I remember reading this book many years ago, maybe probably more than 10 years ago about gifted adults and they said something like, Um, they have a, um, it's like having a, a microscope and a telescope where you can zoom in and zoom out. And what you're saying, yeah, reminds me of that, like being able to get the big picture and, and get into the nitty gritty and implement as well. And you said, you said something that surprised me. So your parents drilled it into you to, to keep asking why. Are they engineers or like?

They're not engineers, but like, I would, I would definitely say like my grandma, I mean like, I would say this phrase would come from her. It's like, do you need it or do you want it? And it's like, why do you want that toy? Like, we're walking through New York City and like, why do you want that? Like, do you just want it or do you need it? And it's just like, you know, it, it, I'm more, I'm more on the logic-based side. I've never, I mean, yes, I am like emotional, but like for the most part I can discern the emotions between why somebody is feeling some way versus what they're feeling. And I think like communication is where a lot of things fail too. So just blowing that back up, it's like understanding what something is and then like why it is that way is way different than looking at it emotionally. So that's how they were teaching me to be like, it is what it is. Here's the reasoning behind it. And then like, why is it that way? And then it's like logic-based reasoning. So that's like kind of how I grew up. I don't know if that's like sad or something. But like, it was like they were always like, try to understand why it is that way, because not every— not everybody is going to hold the door open for you in New York City. Like, not everybody is nice. And like, as a child, I remember it's like I'm holding the door for some people in Chinatown, and it's like they don't say thank you. But Dad, like, why did I say thank you? Because not everybody is like that. And then you have to like come to that realization, and it's like, ask why so you can understand. So like, it's like, it's just like little tiny things like that that it's like completely non-contextual based on this conversation. But yeah, you just have to ask why and it's, it's more fun that way. You, you get to learn more, I guess.

Love that.

Yeah.

And, um, are you going through that process? Do you notice yourself going through that process, like sitting down with a piece of paper and thinking through things and then like looking for bottlenecks or, or whatever and I actually do a lot of my sparring with Claude now.

Like I would say 85% of the work that I'm doing is like thinking and talking rather than doing. I would say if I can think about it and I can ideate a plan, then it's gonna take me so much less time to actually implement it. Like go into Clay, build a table. Okay. Instead of opening Clay, I'm gonna probably open, I don't know, like Puzzle or Miro or something or Figma and just draw the whole plan out and then I'm gonna implement it because if I know what I'm doing before I do it, then I can understand, oh, that's why it's not gonna be that way.

Right.

You give blueprints to an architect, they know how to build it, but without the blueprints, they don't know what they're doing. It takes them infinitely longer. Yep. So like, that's how I would explain what I'm doing. But mm-hmm. I have like tiny sticky notes. I'm like, okay, that pissed me off today. Mm-hmm. I don't really tend to do it a lot. I usually just kind of do it retrospectively because it's faster for me to do it and I don't have to, like you said, I don't have to use my prefrontal cortex to be able to do like a retrospective. So like every week I have an automation that pulls all of my Firefly transcripts from the whole week.

Mm-hmm.

And I have coaching calls, I have discovery calls, and I have client calls, and I have internal calls. Mm-hmm. And based on the context and based on the, the titles of the meetings, everything gets grouped together. Mm-hmm. All the coaching calls goes into one container, and then all of those transcripts get pushed into an AI parser together. And then it gives me, be like, here, here are all the lessons that you actually like talked about today in your coaching calls. Here's all the discovery call questions that you did here. Like, here's how you answered it. And then it gives me just like a retrospective of that. That's how I do my sparring now.

Interesting.

Just because it's, I just said it and I forget it. But, um, outside of that, I'm not really doing it on a piece of paper anymore because it's, um, get in the call, I talk, I do my strategy, I get out, you know, I don't have time to do, to do it so much anymore, you know?

Makes sense.

So yeah.

We were talking, uh, a little bit ago about parents, like you're, you're pretty young, right? You're, you're still in your 20s.

I'm still in my 20s. I'm not 30 yet, but my knees already hurt. But that could be like all the rock climbing that I'm doing.

Are you like just falling from great heights?

I get off the wall and I'm like, oh, my knees. I'm pretty young compared, I would say, compared to like the rest of the peers in the space, the ones that have been running like, you know, they've done, they were like a senior AE at Gong or something like this and they started Clegency and I'm like, I'm like, dude, that's not me. But I, I have worked in like some pretty cool marketing agencies. I'm with a few right now and I've run their go-to-market and I've just learned it's just, it's not what you do, it's who you do it with. Mm-hmm. And it, you know, like you just gotta be around the right people and I feel like I'm growing and the people around me are super, super smart. They're smarter than me. I, I don't like to be the smartest in the room. Like I wanna learn stuff from you, dude. You know, like you've been doing this longer than me. Like, why would I not wanna be in your company? You know? So I don't mind. It's fun. I have a good time.

Yes.

It's awesome.

Yeah. One thing, speaking of people, like I remember a spe— I don't know how busy you are these days, but I remember when you first joined Clay Bootcamp, you were like meeting with everyone in the space and just having like incredible numbers of like, I thought maybe you'd cloned yourself 5 times and Like I joked with people as well, like, I don't know how Spencer, you know, how Spencer does it if he's cloned himself. Like, do you— are you still doing that pretty aggressively?

So I have like, I have my calendar, I have two monitors up, so I just like look at— so I've, I've tried to optimize everything in my workday so that I can like leave room to be creative. So like, you know, like we've done one of these a little while ago. I just got on with Dealfront and I did their, you know, their podcast, and I was just with one of my clients, actually did their podcast. I'm just like optimizing my life to just have more fun, you know, and not like in this like silly kiddish way. And there's like 20-year-old, I want to go and do this, all these cool things. But like in a way, like for me to do good work, I've noticed that I need to like work hard and play hard and relax, and I'm trying to strike the balance. So like if you're asking me