The New Age of B2B Lead Sourcing

Marcos Barcelos
6 de out.
2 min de leitura

B2B Lead Sourcing

Outbound is back, not because ads stopped working, but because their price did the math for us.

With CACs skyrocketing, outbound isn’t just an alternative channel anymore. It’s an operational necessity. But scraping lists from software and praying for replies doesn’t work in 2025. You need intelligence before outreach. That’s where I used Clay for B2B Lead Sourcing.

Step 1 -> Define the Real ICP

Before touching Clay, you need to ask Marketing, Sales, and CS into separate conversations: “What is a great-fit account and what’s actually a waste of SDR time?”

You will get three different answers.

The job of RevOps / GTM Engineering is to reconcile those perspectives and turn them into logic. In my case, the key differentiator was expansion readiness.”Is the company already operating globally, or just starting that process?”

That single insight became the enrichment lever.

Step 2 -> Prototype the Enrichment Logic in ChatGPT (Before Automating)

You can enrich the prompt using clay tools, but remember to test that in ChatGPT:

“Given a company description, determine if they are… YES = Operating globally / NO = Local only / STARTING = Beginning expansion.”

Once the classification logic was consistent with inputs, outputs, and definitions, I moved it to Clay as an AI column.

*Here, for example, you have to understand if it's necessary to define what is global company is and what is starting the process

Step 3: Enrich → Export

I structured the enrichment output into three clear labels: YES / NO / STARTING. Making routing dead simple. Clay integrates directly with the CRM, but you need to export the results manually at this stage, not because of limitations, but because all of this costs money, so it's interesting for a person to generate the list. After that, it's only necessary to click to export to HubSpot (that are already integrated with Clay).

Step 4: Export → Route by Stage of Awareness or Education/Selection

I pushed the enriched list into HubSpot and split the nurturing based on the AI classification. If you follow the Bowtie Funnel from Winning by Design, you know the three core stages of pre-purchase intent: Awareness → Education → Selection. (https://winningbydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The-Bowtie-A-Proposed-Standard.pdf)

“Yes” accounts were already showing signals of Education or Selection, so they received direct, solution-focused outreach.
“Starting the process” accounts were still in Awareness, so they moved into a content-led nurture track instead of a hard pitch.

Each path ran across email, SMS, and WhatsApp, but with completely different messaging logic. Same channels, different psychology.

Step 5: Multi-Channel Execution

Using Make/Zapier + Respondio, I centralized Facebook and Instagram DMs, SMS, and WhatsApp into a single engagement flow (see this project). HubSpot workflows sent the content, but pass all the information to respondio, because if the lead sends a message, you can create a different process for outbound leads.

The Result? A cleaner, intelligence-led outbound engine. Not “more leads”, only better-qualified conversations.

Clay isn’t just a scraping tool. It’s a thinking layer for outbound, if you treat it like RevOps infrastructure, not a list factory.