Clay for Executive Assistants

Getting Started

Your client needs to sign in to Clay and give you delegated access to their account.

1. Have them go to Settings > Members, then select ‘Add Member’.
2. Then, have them add your email. You should receive an email from <team@clay.earth> with a sign-in link valid for 10 minutes.
   • If the link expires before you’re able to add your account, have your client remove your email under ‘Members’ and add it again.
3. Follow the instructions to set up access. Once you’re logged in, you’ll have full access to the account—meaning you’re able to see all content and add, edit, or archive people, notes, or reminders. Just the same as accessing your client’s email or calendar.

Clay Overview

If you and your client have just joined Clay, here are a couple of notes to keep in mind while you’re working it into your daily flow.

Connecting Accounts

Go to Settings and connect all your accounts—we currently support multiple emails, calendars, and Twitter, as well as LinkedIn and iMessage. The more accounts you add, the more of your client’s relationships will be represented in Clay.

Managing Duplicates

Clay tries to deduplicate contacts but errs on the side of caution so as to not incorrectly merge people. If you notice that there are two cards for one person, you can easily merge them via the button in the Command Bar (⌘K) or by hitting M with the card open.

Intelligent Search

Clay’s search can understand natural language, meaning you’re able to input something like people interested in medicine or type in compound searches such as designers in NYC or people I follow on Twitter that I've texted. This is especially useful for finding potential clients, investors, or hires!

Search understands time-based terms such as recently or a while ago, which can be helpful for seeing who you haven’t interacted with recently.

Our search is intentionally a little broad to introduce serendipity, or in other words, surface people that you might not have been directly looking for but still may be helpful.

Home

The Home feed will notify you any time someone changes their Twitter link, location, or bio, is mentioned in the news, has a birthday coming up, or hasn’t been interacted with recently (via the connected accounts).

• Use this to notify your client if someone they’ve starred shows up so they can reach out and congratulate them or reconnect.
• The Home feed updates will also show up on the associated person’s card so that information is easily accessible when assembling briefings or drafting messages or emails.

The Home view will also populate with the day’s alerts every morning, providing an overview of upcoming calendar events and reminders. Think of Home as a daily brief of your client's upcoming meetings and interactions.

By clicking on the cards associated with those people, you can contextualize your client’s relationship with them, write notes so they don’t forget important facts, comments, or action points, and set reminders on when to follow up. You and your client can change what events show up in Home under Settings.

For example, if they don’t want notifications for recurring meetings or for people that they’re closest to (the Starred group) to nurture developing relationships, toggle the settings to only see new meetings and interactions in Home.

Viewing a Card from Home and Editing Contact Info

1. Hover over an entry and click on the name that appears in the right sidebar to view their card. This is where that data that Clay automatically pulls in via your client’s connected accounts and the person’s social media lives — any notes you take or reminders you set, along with their bio, social accounts, history of organization and education experiences, and the groups you’ve added them to are easily accessible here.
2. Clay tries to find the correct social profiles and websites for your people but errs on the side of caution so as to not pull in incorrect data. If this area of the page looks sparse or is missing a social platform, you can edit the card (three lines at the top then the pencil icon), go to Social, and paste in links to prompt Clay to pull more data in.
3. Clay currently pulls the most data in from Twitter and LinkedIn, so if you’re adding socials to cards, it may be helpful to prioritize those links first. Please note that you don’t need a Twitter account to get Twitter data, as long as the account that you’re linking to is public, Clay can use it to update cards and show changes in Home.
4. You can easily see when the first and last time your client interacted with someone under Moments (in the right sidebar).
5. You can also find all their contact information in the right sidebar, under Sources.
6. The icons next to each name represent why each person is being surfaced.
   • The green calendar icon denotes a meeting and lists everyone invited to that meeting.
   • The purple email icon is used to represent people you’ve responded to at least twice over email.
   • The blue Twitter icon is used to notify you of people you’ve interacted with or followed on Twitter.
   • In Review, the yellow lightning bolt denotes a reminder that was set for that day

Notes

To take a note (useful to contextualize any reminders you set or create a record of what you talked about- which you can search against), you can hit N or the note button at the top.

• Notes support markdown formatting- use multiple hashtags in a row (# for heading 1, ## for heading 2, and so on) to create headings of different sizes.
• To emphasize text, surround it with * to make it bold or ** on either side to create italics
• Bullet points can be created with a bullet followed by a space(* , - , or, + ), and numbered lists can be created by typing 1.
• You can type @ and then someone’s name to relate people to each other, where they’ll appear on the right sidebar. This is helpful for noting down warm introductions or people you think should meet.

Groups

Many Clay members find that categorizing the people they know into groups is beneficial. This can be useful if your client wants to group everyone that they met at an event together, if they’ll be traveling soon and want a list of everyone they should see, or if they’d like to keep their book club members’ contact info easily accessible. Groups can also be useful to make a list of potential clients, or for recruiting. Here are a few tips for using Groups:

• If you’re scheduling with groups of people, one option is to copy the email addresses of everyone in a group by opening the group (left sidebar) and clicking the 3-dot menu icon. You can then BCC everyone or create a group calendar invite.
• You can use search and multi-select to easily add people to groups by hitting the checkmark next to each person’s name and then the 3-dot menu icon or by clicking off the search bar and typing X while hovering over each person’s name (indicated by the blue highlight).
• You can also add people to groups directly from their card (faces icon) or by typing L.
• Groups are easiest to edit from the group’s view. Click on the group’s name in the left sidebar and type A to add people or use multi-select and the 3-dot menu icon to remove them. You can also change the color and name of the group from here.

Pro-Tips

• In cases where Clay is unable to find a name for someone, you’ll see their Twitter handle, phone number, or email. In the edit screen (pencil icon), you can add their name, location or address, and birthday.
• On the topic of addresses, it can be really helpful to use them in tandem with notes (e.g. jot down interactions life if you’ve sent someone a gift such as a bottle of wine) or groups (e.g start a running list of who to send holiday cards to).

Get the most out of Clay

• Routinely check Clay to make sure the right relationships are there. Add/edit details as necessary to be a source of truth for your client’s relationships.
• You or your client should check Home at the beginning and end of each day to contextualize the meetings of the day, add notes after meetings conclude, and keep up to date on any reminders or big life changes.
• You or your client should add people to relevant groups as you think of it, and create new groups when needed. A great time to do this is after you perform a search using parameters you think you might search again soon, like engineers in NYC.
• Based on your integrations, Clay creates a Starred group of important people that show up higher in search and more frequently in reconnect reminders, among other things. Keeping this up to date will help you strengthen your bonds with the people you’ve prioritized.