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Cort Williams
SVP, Global Product and Strategy at Vertical Management Systems (VMS)
Professional Background
Cort Williams is a distinguished commercial leader with vast expertise at the convergence of industry content, cutting-edge technology, and sophisticated analytics. With a proven track record of transforming and optimizing high-performing teams, Cort stands out as a collaborative leader, astute communicator, and strategic thinker. His career is marked by impressive accomplishments in innovative product development and driving significant organizational change throughout various sectors. Cort's remarkable ability to forge and grow mutually beneficial customer and partner relationships has resulted in industry-leading customer retention rates, a testament to his adeptness in fostering loyalty and satisfaction in his professional endeavors.
Throughout his career, Cort has consistently demonstrated a strong focus on driving growth and profitability. His effective execution strategy is characterized by a keen emphasis on process optimization and diligent monitoring of key performance metrics. Known for his versatility and forward-thinking, he has excelled in leading sales and strategy teams, opening new markets and channels, as well as implementing successful content monetization strategies.
In addition, Cort's proficiency extends to developing strategic partnerships, M&A strategy, integration processes, and spearheading new product innovations that meet the evolving demands of the market. His strategic mindset enables him to identify opportunities and avenues for expansion while ensuring that his teams are equipped to meet organizational objectives.
Education and Achievements
Cort Williams is an accomplished graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree from Bowling Green State University, where he laid the academic foundation for his thriving career in commercial leadership. This educational background enabled him to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of business principles, management strategies, and the analytical skills that would later define his professional journey.
Cort's extensive career has included pivotal leadership roles across several esteemed organizations, showcasing his ability to adapt and thrive in diverse environments. As Senior Vice President of Global Product and Strategy at Vertical Management Systems (VMS), he is at the forefront of guiding product innovation and strategic initiatives that propel the company forward in a competitive landscape. Previously, Cort held influential positions at Informa, where he served as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Commercial Director for the Americas, solidifying his reputation as a key driver of business growth.
Additionally, his role as Managing Principal at Pinestone Advisors LLC allowed Cort to harness his expertise in providing clients with tailored solutions that maximize their potential for success. His tenure at SIX Financial Information USA, Inc. further underscores his capabilities, where he excelled as Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. Here, Cort was instrumental in creating value-driven strategies that enhanced customer engagement and expanded the company's market reach.
Furthermore, Cort made significant contributions to Interactive Data Corporation, where he held multiple roles, including Senior Vice President for Major Accounts and Business Development, and Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. In these capacities, he played a critical role in shaping the company's strategic vision, enabling it to maintain competitive edges. His influence extended to Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data Inc. as President of Institutional Sales and a board member, where he continued to push the boundaries of testing new markets and product offerings.
Notable Organizations and Contributions
Cort Williams's professional journey is characterized by his impactful contributions to various notable organizations:
- Vertical Management Systems (VMS): As SVP of Global Product and Strategy, Cort leads efforts to innovate product offerings while aligning them with market needs and business strategies. His visionary leadership ensures that VMS remains competitive in the evolving landscape of data management and analytics.
- Informa: Serving as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Commercial Director for the Americas, Cort established valuable partnerships and facilitated strategic market expansions that significantly enhanced Informa's position within the industry.
- Pinestone Advisors LLC: In his role as Managing Principal, Cort provided strategic guidance and insights that helped organizations optimize their overall performance and achieve sustainable growth.
- SIX Financial Information USA, Inc.: As EVP of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development, Cort was pivotal in driving revenue growth and enhancing customer relationships through targeted marketing strategies and sales initiatives.
- Interactive Data Corporation: Cort's contributions as Senior Vice President and Vice President of various divisions underline his impact on formulating strategies that enhanced market penetration and customer satisfaction.
Industry Expertise
Cort Williams has cultivated a wealth of expertise in various industries, enabling him to navigate complex business landscapes with ease. His professional interests and specializations include:
- Financial Technology: A rapidly evolving sector where Cort's strategic vision fosters innovation and enhances efficiency.
- Business Intelligence: His analytical skills enable him to interpret data and glean actionable insights that drive business decisions.
- Capital Markets: Cort's understanding of this complex arena allows him to implement strategies that resonate with market needs.
- Wealth Management: With a focus on optimizing client portfolios, Cort develops solutions that address unique client requirements.
- Risk & Compliance: His proficiency in compliance ensures that organizations operate within regulatory frameworks, reducing potential risks.
- Enterprise Data Management: Cort's ability to manage and analyze vast amounts of data ensures organizations leverage critical information effectively.
- Market Data & SaaS Solutions: His experience in these domains equips him with the insights necessary for successful product offerings and customer satisfaction.
- Data Analytics: Utilizing cutting-edge analytics tools, Cort excels in making data-driven decisions that enhance business processes.
With an unparalleled combination of strategic acumen, industry expertise, and a passion for innovation, Cort Williams continues to be a leading figure in commercial leadership. His journey reflects dedication to excellence, commitment to fostering growth, and relentless pursuit of success across various business dimensions.
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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
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- 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.