The Kiln Review 2025: GTM Agency for Helping Growth Teams Scale Automated Outreach

The Kiln Review 2025: GTM Agency for Helping Growth Teams Scale Automated Outreach

The Kiln is a specialized go-to-market (GTM) consulting agency focused on automating B2B sales and marketing workflows. The Kiln is a team of GTM experts, data scientists, and former Clay employees that help the world's leading RevOps, as well as growth teams, scale their most creative ideas. Founded by former Clay engineers, its team of GTM experts and data scientists creates custom systems to help high-growth teams scale quickly. The Kiln provides all-in-one GTM services that grow with clients, featuring key offerings such as advanced automation, research, and AI-driven functionalities as essential features that support go-to-market strategies and enhance prospect engagement. The agency combines automation, data science, and strategy to transform tedious tasks (like researching leads, copywriting, or writing outreach emails) into efficient, integrated processes. In early 2026 The Kiln was acquired by 2X (a global marketing-as-a-service firm), but it continues to operate under the Kiln brand as a “top-performing Clay partner” for GTM engineering. The Kiln has been recognized with the honor of being named a Clay Elite Studio in their 2025 Solutions Program. In practice, The Kiln is not a software tool but a hands-on services firm: they create and manage custom outbound and inbound systems (often using platforms like Clay, HubSpot, and Salesforce) that can scale a company’s lead generation and RevOps capabilities.

What Is The Kiln and How It Operates

The Kiln is marketed as “a team of GTM experts, data scientists, and former Clay employees” dedicated to building scalable sales and marketing systems. In other words, it operates more like a boutique agency of engineers than a self-serve tool. The team immerses itself in a client’s GTM stack, integrating and recommending the right tools and automations to maximize effectiveness. The Kiln helps create sales enablement processes that give sales teams more time to close deals. Typical engagements involve automating outbound cold email and LinkedIn campaigns, enriching and scoring inbound leads, and overhauling CRM/RevOps workflows. Because The Kiln was founded by early Clay (now Clay AI) developers, they often leverage Clay as a core platform, pulling company and contact data into “Clay tables” and using it to craft highly personalized outreach.

The Kiln often works in focused sprints, such as a dedicated week spent embedding with a client's team to rapidly implement and optimize GTM systems.

Rather than selling subscriptions, The Kiln assigns seasoned engineers to only a few clients at a time to deeply understand each business. They custom-build email sequences, lead scoring logic, and data pipelines so that growth teams spend less time on manual prep and more time selling. As one Kiln client testified, “We’re spending so much more time selling now, instead of actively preparing to sell” after automating research and outreach. In practice, The Kiln’s staff embeds with your team, advising on messaging and iterating campaigns as if they were internal GTM engineers.

Key Services & Features: AI Agents

The Kiln offers end-to-end services that span the entire sales funnel. Their sales/GTM automation services can handle everything from outbound cold email campaigns to multi-channel outreach. They set up personalized sequences that can send tens of thousands of emails – “60,000 emails per month per client” in some case studies – with automated follow-ups and inbox management. On the inbound side, The Kiln builds lead enrichment and qualification systems (e.g. routing web form leads into data workflows) to capture buyer intent, and enables clients to access large quantities of contacts and data for outreach and enrichment. They also specialize in RevOps/CRM automation, cleaning and normalizing contact data and automating CRM updates so your data stays actionable.

Key features include:

• Outbound Campaign Automation: Craft and send highly personalized cold emails and LinkedIn sequences at scale. The Kiln builds the logic to automate follow-ups and pause sequences when prospects reply.
• Inbound Lead Enrichment: Automatically enrich incoming leads with firmographic and technographic data. The Kiln can aggregate leads from ads, webinars, or website visitors and then trigger smart campaigns or SDR alerts.
• RevOps System Development: Architect CRM workflows that keep data clean and processes connected. For example, they will automate lead scoring, assignment, and campaign tagging in tools like HubSpot or Salesforce.
• Data Enrichment & AI Agents: Use custom AI agents and scripts to scrape hard-to-find information (social profiles, funding data, etc.) and append it to your CRM. This means almost any signal or insight can be turned into a database field for targeting. Some data sourcing and enrichment can be done for free, making it a cost-effective way to scale your lead generation and enrichment efforts.
• Tool Integrations: Connect your entire GTM tech stack. The Kiln routinely integrates platforms like Clay, HubSpot, Salesforce, Apollo, and more into one unified system, eliminating data silos and improving GTM operations.
• GTM Strategy Consulting: Beyond tech, they provide high-level guidance. The founders and engineers help define ideal customer profiles, messaging frameworks, and sequences before building the automation, effectively teaching teams to “think with Clay” and data.

In short, The Kiln functions as an outsourced GTM engineering team. Instead of selling software licenses, they deliver packaged services (often under fixed-scope contracts) that install advanced outreach capabilities for clients. The result is a set of integrated, AI-powered sales flows that keep your team focused on closing deals rather than wrestling with spreadsheets and email.

What Makes The Kiln Special?

Several factors set The Kiln apart from traditional agencies or tools. First and foremost is their Clay expertise. The team includes multiple former Clay employees who helped build the platform. This gives The Kiln an “unmatched understanding” of Clay’s flexibility. Clients often call them the “Clay agency” because they routinely push Clay far beyond simple templates. For example, they build complex multi-step Clay tables that automatically prospect and sequence together – a capability few agencies can match. One Kiln engineer even created a multi-agent AI workflow (dubbed “Playbook AI”) to auto-generate talk tracks and email sequences for any account. This blend of technical mastery and creativity means The Kiln can automate highly sophisticated outreach patterns (like conditional branching sequences or AI-written emails) that make campaigns feel much more personalized. The Kiln also helps growth teams scale their most creative ideas, supporting innovative strategies that drive results.

Another differentiator is The Kiln’s engagement model. They explicitly limit the number of active projects so each client gets deep attention. Their tagline says they bring “clarity and momentum” to GTM processes, which is reflected in their hands-on approach. As one case study notes, The Kiln’s engineers collaborate with sales and marketing teams to identify intent signals and key metrics before automating the system. This is different from agencies that push out templated email blasts – The Kiln first focuses on strategy (audience, messaging, key signals), then engineers the automation. They even document the workflows (e.g. detailed SOPs) so clients can learn the system afterwards.

Moreover, The Kiln emphasizes deep integration of AI and data. They don’t just connect tools; they build custom AI agents when needed. On their site they boast of creating “custom AI agents that scrape unstructured data with shocking accuracy”. In practice, this might mean writing scripts to crawl competitors’ websites or social media, then feeding that data into your CRM. Their AI tools can generate tailored software ideas for clients, facilitating creative brainstorming and content generation. The Kiln also focuses on the design of these custom AI agents and workflows, ensuring visually engaging and user-friendly solutions that enhance the overall experience. This technical edge – using AI and code to serve GTM – is a core part of their offering, not an afterthought. Many smaller agencies lack the data science talent to do this, which is why clients praise The Kiln for being “fast, creative, and deeply knowledgeable” in sales automation and workflows. The Kiln's approach to GTM engineering emphasizes the importance of signal aggregation and testing, ensuring that strategies are data-driven and continuously optimized.

Finally, The Kiln’s track record spans a wide range of industries (from AI to fintech to professional services). They’ve earned trust at both startups and large companies. Clients mention that The Kiln doesn’t just fix one part of the funnel; it can overhaul an entire RevOps engine and then monitor performance. In short, The Kiln is special because it behaves more like an engineering partner than a marketing vendor. They engineer bespoke outreach engines, rather than provide off-the-shelf campaigns.

Pricing

The Kiln's services are custom-priced, and they do not publish a fixed rate card. According to the Salesforge agency directory, you must “Contact for pricing details”. In practice this means The Kiln works on larger projects (often mid-market and enterprise budgets). Expect to engage them on a retainer or project contract that covers many hours of engineering work. For smaller companies or simple campaigns, this investment may be prohibitive. The lack of transparent pricing is a common trade-off with specialized agencies: you pay for bespoke expertise rather than a one-size-fits-all tool. (If you're just looking for a DIY cold email platform or something inexpensive, The Kiln might not be the quickest solution.)

User Reviews & Testimonials

Real client feedback on The Kiln’s site is overwhelmingly positive. Multiple testimonials highlight the quality and speed of their work. For example, Luiz Cent (GTM at Terraboost) says, “The Kiln crushed it. We hired them to scale campaigns… They automated everything… it was magical to see”. Another client, Harrison Cuker (Head of Sales at Antimetal), praises their results: “They took my whole TAM, put them into a Clay table and used AI to write 50,000 emails that people actually answer! Worth every dime.”. Clients often mention how much they enjoy working with The Kiln and find the process rewarding. In short, clients report that The Kiln dramatically sped up their outreach process and boosted lead engagement. The time and resources spent by The Kiln on each client project are frequently noted as a key factor in delivering such strong results. When clients feel stuck with outreach or workflow challenges, The Kiln helps them get unstuck and move forward efficiently.

Third-party reviews echo this sentiment. On Reddit and forums discussing Clay agencies, The Kiln is often mentioned as an example of a team that handles the “copy first then build the Clay table” workflow. (While these discussions are more about Clay methodology than The Kiln specifically, they reinforce that agencies like The Kiln follow a data-driven, creative approach.) The Salesforge summary of client reviews also notes that customers consistently find The Kiln “fast, creative, and deeply knowledgeable,” especially in automating processes that were previously manual. Overall, while The Kiln isn’t rated on public SaaS review sites (since it’s a service firm, not a product), the available testimonials and client case studies strongly suggest high satisfaction among its users.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Deep Technical Expertise: The Kiln’s staff includes seasoned GTM engineers and data scientists (including former Clay employees). They can handle complex automations and integrations that most agencies cannot.
• Kiln Team Replaces Manual Tasks: The kiln team specializes in replacing manual sales development tasks with automated, AI-driven processes. This allows clients to scale campaigns efficiently and focus on higher-value activities.
• Fully Customized Automation: They build bespoke workflows tailored to your business. Clients benefit from end-to-end systems (outbound, inbound, RevOps) rather than piecemeal solutions. Many praise how The Kiln automated their entire outreach engine in days instead of weeks.
• Creative, Data-Driven Approach: With an emphasis on data enrichment and AI agents, The Kiln often produces innovative ideas (as their tagline promises “creative ideas”). Their campaigns are highly personalized, which tends to improve response rates.
• Strong Track Record: Client testimonials consistently highlight the speed, quality, and impact of The Kiln’s work. The company has proven itself across industries and company sizes, from scrappy startups to large enterprises.

Cons:

• High Cost & Enterprise Focus: Because they provide premium, custom engineering, The Kiln’s services come at a premium. There is no public pricing (the site simply says “contact for pricing”). Expect that their minimum engagement will be larger (often tens of thousands of dollars). This may be impractical for small startups or one-off campaigns.
• Agency Model (Not DIY): The Kiln is not a self-serve tool or SaaS platform. You can’t just plug in and use it on-demand; you must work through an engagement with their team. If you need instant self-service (like turning on an email campaign this afternoon), an agency isn’t as quick as an app.
• Clay-Centric: Their approach heavily leverages Clay, so if your team is not using Clay for data/workflows, some of The Kiln’s edge may be less relevant. They can still integrate other CRMs, but much of their methodology revolves around Clay tables.
• Lead Time: Building fully custom GTM systems takes time. While The Kiln prides itself on speed, deep automation projects still require significant upfront planning. In other words, you trade setup time for long-term efficiency.
• Automation Can't Replace the Rest: While automation and AI can replace many manual SDR tasks, the rest of the SDR’s work remains essential and cannot be fully replaced by technology.

Conclusion

The Kiln stands out as a powerful, engineer-driven agency for companies ready to invest in an automated GTM engine. As a recognized Clay Elite Studio, The Kiln combines Clay expertise, AI-driven enrichment, and hands-on engineering to turn a sales team into an outbound powerhouse. Patrick, an expert at The Kiln, provides valuable insights and demonstrations that showcase the studio's achievements and capabilities within the industry. However, their specialized model may be overkill for smaller teams or those seeking quick, low-cost solutions.

If you're evaluating agencies or tools to boost your B2B outreach, you may also want to explore the Forge Experts network. Unlike a single-agency model, Forge Experts is a curated marketplace of specialized lead-gen and outreach agencies. Each Forge expert typically focuses on a niche, whether that's cold email, LinkedIn lead gen, ABM, or a specific industry (fintech, healthcare, etc.). This means you can find someone who already knows your vertical and has the right sales stack and channel expertise for your needs.

For example, if your target market responds better to highly personalized LinkedIn campaigns or content marketing, a Forge Expert that specializes in those channels can tailor your outreach to fit. If cold email deliverability is your biggest challenge, you could pick an expert known for email infrastructure and warm-up strategies. In other words, Forge Experts offers a diversity of talent and specializations that a single, generalist agency might not provide.

By leveraging Forge Experts, you gain access to agencies with deep domain knowledge and proven track records in your space. These partners work with you to “zoom in” on your exact goals and ICP. They're able to customize templates, messaging, and follow-up cadences for your product and market, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all system.

Ready to scale your outreach? Check them out!

‍

Personalized Outbound Strategy

Get The Right Outbound Strategy In Minutes

Enter your email to get a custom plan & stack recommendation for your business

Generate my personalized plan

It's being carefully crafted by AI

Please check your mailbox in 5 minutes