Clay isn’t the answer if your ICP is “anyone with an email address”

Last month, I sent 247 personalized emails to German CMOs in one hour. Not a single reply. That same week, I sent 18 emails in Slovenia. I got 6 replies and 3 meetings. The difference wasn’t the tool, the copy, or the level of personalization. The difference was that in Slovenia, I exist. In Germany, I don’t. 

After a recent column in which I described how HubSpot’s prospecting agent found my first customer, I’ve been getting a lot of questions: “Can we do this in our company as well? Can you set up a similar outreach system for us?” …along with requests to compare HubSpot’s prospecting agent, Clay, Apollo, Instantly – what’s better, what’s worth the money, what I’d recommend for B2B. 

The answer is simple: when your strategy is weak, all of these tools behave in exactly the same way. They very efficiently scale a flawed assumption. The problem isn’t the tool. The problem is what you’re scaling.  

1. “We just need more contacts” = admitting you don’t have a strategy

When someone says they “just need more contacts”, in practice it usually means: 

• we don’t have a clear ICP (ideal customer profile) 
• we don’t have a clear prioritization of targets (who is “must have”, who is “nice to have”) 
• we don’t have a story this target group can genuinely see themselves in 

Clay solves an operational problem: how to find, enrich, and reach people faster. It does not solve the strategic problem: who you should be relevant to in the first place – and with what. If your ICP is “all companies from 10 to 500 employees that do something in B2B”, Clay will just fill your list of wrong targets faster. Nicely formatted spam is still spam. 

2. Email won’t fix an unattractive offer

Clay can: 

• find CMOs in growing manufacturing companies 
• add data about their tech stack
• personalize the first line of the email 

What it can’t do is: 

• sharpen your value proposition for you 
• translate your “we provide end-to-end solutions” into a concrete outcome (for example “–18% churn in 9 months”) 
• decide whether your message is worth 30 minutes of time for someone who owns a P&L

 A large share of B2B outreach campaigns is basically this: a generic pitch, no clear “why now”, no specific business metric you’re helping to move. If the offer is vague, Clay will only increase the number of people who see that it’s vague. 

3. A B2B purchase isn’t “a click on a link” – it’s a political process with a window of opportunity

This is where most outreach campaigns fall apart. Typical scenario: you find a CMO in a company that’s growing 30% year over year. Clay gives you the contact. You send a beautifully personalized email. The CMO responds positively – “Interesting, let’s talk next week.” 

And then you find out: 

• the budget for this year is already closed 
• the IT team has a backlog for the next 18 months 
• the last similar project died because of internal politics

Clay can help you identify the buying committee and personalize your message by role. 
What it can’t tell you is: 

• when the company realistically has an open budget for your type of project 
• who inside the company is blocking the decision and why
• whether your champion is actually strong enough to push the project through

 Outreach without a proper account plan just spins your wheels even faster. Clay gives you the contacts. It doesn’t give you the map of power, money, and timing inside the account. 

4. GDPR and reputation: no, Clay finding an email doesn’t mean you can automatically use it

Clay doesn’t give you consent. Clay gives you data. The real issue isn’t only whether you are formally GDPR-compliant. The real issue is what you’re doing to the market’s trust: 

• if companies hear from you for the first time via a generic automated email, that’s your first impression 
• if you ignore opt-out signals, you’re destroying deliverability and your domain reputation
• every bad email from you makes life harder for anyone who will try to build a normal relationship after you

 The mental model “if the contact is reachable, it’s legitimate to bombard them” destroys more value in the long run than it creates. 

Why the same outreach doesn’t work in every market: a real-world lesson 

At FrodX, we have very tangible proof that outreach isn’t a copy-paste play. 

In Slovenia, outbound works great for us. We’ve been on the market for a long time, the brand is recognizable, and a lot of people know me as “that guy for CX, retention, and loyalty programs”. When someone in Slovenia gets an email from me or from FrodX, it’s often not their first contact with us. They’ve already seen a webinar, attended a conference, listened to a podcast, read a column, or know someone who knows us. Outreach there mostly just triggers a conversation that’s already been in the air for a while. 

In Croatia, where we’ve been present for roughly half as long, the same approach performs significantly worse. Same segments, same personas, same value proposition, localized language. The difference? Less history, fewer references, less social proof. We need more touchpoints, more combination with events and partnerships before outbound starts behaving similarly to what we see at home. 

In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, our outreach attempts have been almost completely unsuccessful. Same market segments, same personas, same messaging, same USP, a solid translation into the local language – and a completely different reality. There, FrodX and my name don’t carry any weight. No mental shortcut, no “Oh, they’re the ones who work with X and Y.” Even the fact that we hired a German agency didn’t magically create context we simply don’t have there yet. 

 Three lessons from the DACH experiment 

1. Outreach always runs on the fuel provided by your brand, references, and market context.

When someone in Slovenia gets an email from “Robert Šinkovec at FrodX”, what rings in their head is: “Oh, FrodX. CX. Loyalty programs.” When someone in Munich gets the same email, what rings is: “Who?” In Slovenia, outbound is often the last touch. In DACH, it’s the first – and the first touch from an unknown company converts much worse. 

2. What looks like a “brilliant Clay workflow” at home is often just another foreign spam abroad.

In Slovenia I can write: “I noticed your team is working on X; at FrodX we’ve solved that for companies like Y and Z.” In Germany, someone reads: an unknown foreign company is mentioning our companies and our tech stack. The instinct is more defensive than curious. 

3. Tools can’t import the trust you’ve spent ten years building at home.

You can use Clay to scrape LinkedIn, enrich data, and create ultra-personalized emails. What you can’t scrape is: “I know someone who knows someone from FrodX” or “I watched their webinar.” Without those layers of context, outreach isn’t a “scaled-up winning strategy”; it’s cold prospecting in a vacuum. If you ignore this context, it starts to feel like the problem is in the tool or in the copy. In reality, the problem is that in some markets you still don’t have anything that outbound could meaningfully amplify. 

Tools treat symptoms, not the diagnosis 

When a company is behind on results, the easiest answer is: “We need more leads.” That sounds rational until you go through a few simple questions: 

• how many existing opportunities do you actually take to the finish line? 
• how many existing customers grow with you every year?
• where in the sales process do you lose the most money – at the top of the funnel or in the middle?

Very often, the problem isn’t volume, but: 

• qualification (too many “tourists”, too few “serious buyers”) 
• sales competencies (poor discovery, no real business conversation) 
• the post-sales part (CX, onboarding, adoption, upsell)

 Clay and similar tools are excellent once your diagnosis is clear. If it isn’t, you’re just buying yourself time instead of facing what’s actually broken. 

What you should do before Clay (or in parallel with it) 

If you’re a B2B company and you’re seriously betting on outbound, the order should roughly look like this: 

1. Sharpen your ICP and your “why now”

Describe 10–50 companies that are truly a “perfect fit”. Not just the industry, but the situation: growth, pains, projects, triggers. Bad ICP: “SaaS companies from 50 to 500 people in the DACH region.” Good ICP: “SaaS companies in DACH that have raised a Series B in the last 6 months (€10–50 million), have churn above 7%, a hiring freeze, and have publicly mentioned they need to improve retention. Contact: VP Customer Success or CMO who has been in the role for less than 12 months.” Clay won’t define that profile for you. You have to do it. Clay will then help you find it and scale it. 

2. Test your value proposition in 10–20 manual conversations

Before you automate the message, test it in ten manually run conversations. Not over email – over a call, a video meeting, or a LinkedIn DM. If you can’t book 10 meetings with manual work, automation won’t help. It will just multiply zero. 

3. Build a basic account-based approach

What does the strategy for one account look like? Who are the stakeholders, which hypotheses are you testing? This is not an email sequence. This is an account plan where you know who has power, who has veto, and who can be your champion. Clay helps with the research; it doesn’t write the strategy for you. 

4. Align marketing and sales

Outreach without content (case studies, webinars, articles, proof) is like a sales pitch without proof. If the sales team complains that “people don’t know them”, the question for marketing is: what have you done so people could know them? 

5. Understand the market context

At home, where people know you, outbound can skip a few steps. In a new market, you first have to build those steps – with local partners, events, PR, and references. Our lesson from DACH: before you push hard on outreach, make sure you have at least a few local references, local content, and some early touchpoints that aren’t a cold email. 

6. Only then should you aggressively automate

Clay, sequences, enrichment, scoring – all of that makes sense only when you know: 

• what you’re scaling (which ICP, which value prop) 
• in which market you have enough of a foundation to make scaling worth it 

Self-check: are you ready for Clay? 

Five questions before you invest in outreach tools: 

1. Could you describe your ICP in three sentences in a way that 80% of your best customers would recognize themselves in that description?
2. Do you have at least some references and content that your target personas actually know about or consume? 
3. Do you know which part of your current sales process is leaking the most money today? 
4. Do you have a person (or a team) who can run complex B2B conversations, not just send emails? 
5. Would you be OK if someone publicly posted your current outbound on LinkedIn together with your company’s name? 

If your answer to most of these questions is “no” or “I’m not sure”, investing in Clay is probably too early. 
Fix the engine first, then add the turbo. 

Conclusion: Clay is the turbocharger, not the engine 

If you take only one sentence from this column, let it be this one: Clay and similar tools are the turbocharger – not the engine – of your sales. The engine is: 

• a clear ICP and clear priorities 
• a strong value proposition
• a sales team that can run complex B2B conversations
• an organization that knows how to grow existing customers, not just chase new ones
• a brand and market context that give your outreach any real weight

 If you feel that your internal logic isn’t quite there yet, but the outside world is already convincing you that “you just need Clay”, this might be the right moment for a conversation. 

Send me a message and, using a concrete example, I’ll show you which part of your sales story would make the most sense to fix first – before you press “import contacts”. 

 igor.pauletic@frodx.com 

P.S.  

In this column, “Clay” is just shorthand for any outreach / outbound tool. I’d be saying the same things if it said Apollo, Instantly, HubSpot’s Prospecting Agent or any similar platform.