“Do you trust what’s in your CRM?”
That’s the question that stops enterprise sales conversations cold- because everyone wants the AI-agent workflow, but almost nobody wants to answer that one first. Michael Vitak, one of four founding members of Clay’s partnerships team, has spent the last 18 months rebuilding that motion from the ground up- into 150+ partners and a big part of Clay’s run from $7M to $100M in three years.
For this episode of TechTalk by Ciente, Suruchi Bhargava, CMO at Ciente, sits down with Michael on the parts of that growth people don’t see- why partner tiers need two different playbooks, not one, why “activation” beats partner count every time, and why he starts every AI conversation with data hygiene before anyone gets near orchestration or agents.
They also get into why personalization at scale still fails when it’s surface-level and what it looks like when it isn’t.
Save this for your next partner planning meeting!
About the Guest:
Michael Vitak is one of four founding members of Clay’s Partnerships team, where he owns Partner Activation, the systems and programs that get partners from onboarding to productive co-sell faster. He’s helped rebuild Clay’s SI/Agency Partner Program from two legacy motions into a single scalable program with 150+ partners, focused on driving partner-sourced pipeline and NRR.
Before Clay, Michael spent over three years at Mutiny, most recently leading Customer Experience and Education, where he worked with enterprise SaaS teams like Autodesk, Segment, Qualtrics, and Hootsuite on data-driven growth strategy. He’s also taught Analytics & Metrics in Digital Marketing as an adjunct instructor at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, bringing a builder’s mindset to everything from partner enablement to the classroom.
