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Carol Malakasis
De-risking sales | GTM strategy | Coached 100+ YC founders and sales teams to their first $1M ARR and Series A | 2 exits
Professional Background
Carol Malakasis is a seasoned sales expert with an impressive 15-year track record in the startup landscape, particularly in scaling revenue for Seed to Series A companies. Her journey began quite unconventionally with a sales role focused on selling goat cheese door to door, where she first encountered the world of sales without any prior knowledge of what "revenue" meant. However, through determination and passion, she rapidly evolved into a skilled professional in the realm of B2B sales, particularly in technology startups.
After her initial venture in sales, Carol co-founded a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand that specialized in handmade Horchata, successfully acquiring a niche market through sales to local grocery stores and high-profile retailers like Whole Foods. This entrepreneurial experience laid the groundwork for her subsequent pivot into tech in 2012, where she discovered her true vocation—building small and medium-sized business (SMB) startups.
Throughout her career, Carol has been instrumental as a key member of various founding go-to-market (GTM) teams in three noteworthy high-growth startups, where two of her ventures culminated in successful exits. Her expertise is underscored by her impressive metrics, having made over half a million cold calls, trained numerous sales teams, onboarded hundreds of sales representatives, and generated over $2 million in revenue.
Since 2020, Carol has transitioned to a consultancy role, focusing on B2B SaaS companies as a GTM consultant, trainer, and coach, leveraging her wealth of experience to empower startups. She has successfully guided over 100 companies from Y Combinator to achieve their first $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and beyond.
Education and Achievements
Carol's academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in French Language and Literature, as well as Italian Language and Literature from the University of Kansas. She furthered her studies in French Language and Literature at the Université catholique de l'Ouest, which equipped her with a unique perspective and cultural insights that she applies in her professional approach.
In addition to her educational qualifications, Carol has held numerous prestigious positions throughout her career. She served as the Managing Partner at The Forward Studio, where she played a crucial role in guiding startup initiatives. Moreover, she has contributed her expertise as a Startup Mentor at various esteemed organizations, including Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Starta VC, Techstars, and WeWork, where her mentorship has been pivotal in nurturing budding entrepreneurs.
Her previous roles have also included positions such as Senior Key Accounts Associate and Senior Account Executive at Seated, as well as a Sales Consultant at Trendy Pal. Carol's leadership experience includes roles like Director of Account Management at Munch Ado and Account Manager at Wix.com, as well as a significant tenure at Main Street Hub, where she served as both a Senior Account Executive and Team Lead before the company was acquired by GoDaddy.
Achievements
Carol Malakasis’s professional journey is characterized by a series of significant achievements that highlight her impact in the sales and startup ecosystem. Notably, she has demonstrated a remarkable ability to de-risk common startup challenges such as poor sales execution, lack of product-market fit, and inefficient team dynamics, which are among the leading causes of startup failure.
Her approach is multidimensional; she crafts tailored GTM strategies that not only help startups secure their initial traction but also prepare them for future scaling opportunities. Through her consulting services, Carol emphasizes the importance of establishing a repeatable sales process, making informed decisions on pricing models, and transitioning effectively from inbound to outbound sales approaches.
Clients who have worked with Carol report achieving their first million dollars in annual recurring revenue in a predictable and scalable manner, thanks to the systems they collaboratively build under her guidance. Carol's directness, unwavering dedication, and straightforward communication style have made her highly sought-after by startups looking to refine their sales processes.
In her role as a GTM consultant, she focuses on understanding the specific needs of her clients, ensuring that they not only reach their financial milestones but also build foundational processes that sustain growth throughout their business lifecycle. By auditing existing sales processes, implementing dynamic training for sales teams, and collaborating with founders on strategic selling, Carol has had a profound impact on the success trajectories of numerous startups.
Career Highlights
- Expert at Scaling Revenue for Startups: Specializes in helping Seed and Series A startups achieve predictable growth.
- Proven Track Record: Over 500,000 cold calls made, $2 million+ in revenue generated, and 100+ startups guided to $1 million ARR.
- Sales Team Development: Trained and onboarded hundreds of sales reps, ensuring organizations have the right talent to drive sales success.
- Mentorship Contributions: Actively involved in mentoring upcoming entrepreneurs through esteemed startup accelerators.
Conclusion
Whether you are a startup founder requiring strategic insight or a business aiming to refine your sales processes, collaborating with Carol Malakasis offers a unique opportunity to leverage her extensive background, proven methodologies, and unrelenting focus on growth. With a commitment to driving measurable results, Carol integrates herself into your team as a true partner in success. If you seek to navigate the complexities of startup sales and are ready to achieve tangible outcomes, connect with Carol today!
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Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Clay's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.