Why we're pivoting our Clay agency from outbound to CRM enrichment

What would you do if your entire business stopped working overnight?

For years, I built my career—and my clients' success—on cold outreach. Then in July 2024, everything started changing.

Email deliverability began declining sharply, campaign performance dropped, and results became increasingly unpredictable. While outbound isn't "dead," the landscape has fundamentally shifted, forcing agencies like mine to adapt or risk becoming obsolete.

At first, I thought it was a temporary technical challenge. But as I dug deeper, I uncovered a more fundamental problem that affects sales teams everywhere—one that led to an entirely new direction for my Claygency, Sculpted.

In this article, I'll share how that pivotal moment led us to focus on CRM enrichment rather than mass outreach, and how Clay helped turn what could have been a crisis into an opportunity for transformation.

The beginning of the shift: Email deliverability challenges

For nearly a decade, I built my career around cold outbound:

• At 16, I used cold outreach to build backlinks for an affiliate website so I could quit my job washing dishes.
• In college, I scaled outreach campaigns for an SEO agency, hitting 80-90% open rates and generating a steady flow of leads.
• At Experiment 27, I became the top-performing sales rep, closing $1 million in revenue self-sourced through cold email.
• At Rep.ai, I built a repeatable outbound motion that generated our first customers and recurring revenue.
• As the founder of Sculpted, I've helped dozens of B2B sales teams scale outbound using Clay.

Then in July 2024, we started seeing concerning trends.

I logged into SmartLead to check on one of our top-performing clients who had consistently generated 1-2 leads daily. This time? Thousands of emails sent. Zero opens. Zero replies. I refreshed the page in disbelief.

A call to the client confirmed it: leads had dried up completely.

At first, we scrambled to find quick fixes: new sender domains, new inbox warmup techniques, new domain providers. Nothing provided consistent results.

Over the following weeks, other clients started experiencing similar performance drops. While outbound still works, it's becoming increasingly challenging to maintain reliable results. Email providers like Google and Microsoft have strengthened their algorithms, making it harder for even well-crafted campaigns to reach their intended recipients.

But deliverability wasn't the only issue—when emails did get through, conversion rates were declining too. That's when I started investigating our clients' CRMs—and what I found changed my perspective on the entire outbound landscape.

The underlying challenge: CRM data quality

When we launched Sculpted, our mission was straightforward: help businesses generate more meetings and close more deals with fewer people.

Initially, we tackled this through automated outreach campaigns powered by Clay. We offered a comprehensive service that handled everything from inbox setup to prospecting to message personalization and copywriting. While this approach drove millions in pipeline for clients like Sendoso, it became increasingly difficult to sustain as email providers evolved.

We tried everything to adapt. Navigating email deliverability issues felt like trying to fix a car without knowing what's broken. The challenges centered around four key issues:

1. Delayed feedback loops: Changes to improve deliverability (like warmups) take weeks, making it hard to diagnose what actually works.
2. Guesswork over science: Without reliable diagnostics, we were stuck trying random fixes, hoping something would stick.
3. Resource drain: Constantly buying new domains, inboxes, and tools to bypass spam filters became costly and inefficient.
4. External factors: Email providers evolve faster than outreach strategies. Their algorithms detect and block mass outreach more effectively, often beyond our control.

No matter how much we tried, deliverability remained inconsistent.

But during this process, we discovered something crucial: most CRMs are filled with outdated, duplicate, or incomplete records. This doesn't just affect deliverability—it impacts your entire go-to-market strategy.

Rather than endlessly patching a struggling system, we realized we could help clients improve the CRM data that fuels their GTM. While mass outreach still has its place, we saw an opportunity to help reps with better 1:1 outreach by fixing the foundation first. We can still achieve the goal of "do more with less", but we're attacking the problem from a different angle.

Sales reps waste time with poor data. Marketing sends campaigns to incorrect contacts. And it's impossible to get an accurate read on your real ICP because your customer data is unreliable.

Simply put: messy CRM data isn't just annoying, it impacts your entire GTM engine.

The lightbulb moment: All in on CRM enrichment

The more we investigated, the clearer it became: garbage CRM data plagues every organization in the world.

Have you ever heard someone say, "We love our CRM data"? Me neither.

Despite substantial investments in CRM platforms, many companies find their databases riddled with inaccuracies, duplicates, and outdated information. The result? "Dirty data" undermines the effectiveness of sales efforts and erodes trust in the CRM as a reliable tool.

I spoke to tons of companies over the past year who had massive CRM databases. They all confirmed: none of them were able to surface the right accounts in their CRM due to poor data hygiene.

In the words of one of my clients:

"I had no trust in the data that we were collecting. We needed to overhaul the data and find an accurate, trustworthy way of doing that."

Bad CRM data isn't just an inconvenience; it's a silent killer of resources and revenue:

1. Outdated or incomplete information. Contacts change jobs, companies pivot, and industries evolve, making CRM data obsolete overnight. Missing or inaccurate details like phone numbers, email addresses, or job titles prevent reps from qualifying leads or personalizing outreach effectively.
2. Duplicate records. Multiple entries for the same contact clutter the CRM, creating inefficiencies and confusion. Reaching out to the same prospect multiple times annoys potential customers and damages your brand's reputation.
3. Wasted time and missed opportunities. Reps spend hours verifying data and fixing records instead of selling. Inaccurate or incomplete data hides the best-fit accounts and causes reps to miss high-value opportunities.
4. Reduced productivity and credibility. Time spent on administrative tasks leads to missed quotas and lower morale. Reaching out with incorrect or irrelevant information can harm your company's credibility and trust with prospects.

‍

With clean, accurate data, your CRM becomes more than just a repository; it becomes the lynchpin of your sales team's success:

• More trust: When reps trust CRM data, they're more likely to fully engage with it. This leads to better data input, more accurate forecasting, and improved collaboration.
• Better targeting: Accurate data enables more precise segmentation and personalization. Sales and marketing can better tailor their messaging to the specific needs and pain points of each prospect, increasing engagement rates.
• More revenue: Better data leads to more meaningful conversations. When sales reps have the right information at their fingertips, they can build stronger relationships with prospects, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Recognizing this pervasive issue, we saw an opportunity to pivot our services toward data enrichment and CRM hygiene. What started as a crisis grew into an opportunity to build something better: a service that helps sales teams find better prospects, close more deals, and grow more sustainably by fixing the root cause, not the symptoms.

Reimagining the service: Clay + CRM enrichment

At Rep.ai (formerly ServiceBell), our SDRs struggled to find qualified leads for a niche target market: B2B SaaS companies who used HubSpot, along with additional criteria.

Traditional tools like Lusha and Sales Navigator couldn't surface the accounts we needed, leading to wasted time and unproductive meetings. To solve this, we decided to build our own list, scraping 80,000 websites with HubSpot script tags. But raw URLs weren't enough—we needed detailed, enriched data to make the list usable.

That's when I found Clay. Clay's ability to automate account enrichment and combine multiple data sources turned our messy list into the most accurate, qualified target list I'd ever built.

The results were immediate: more meetings, better-fit accounts, and faster sales cycles.

It became clear that Clay wasn't just a tool—it was the foundation for transforming CRM data and enabling our pivot to enrichment services.

Here's how one of my CRM enrichment clients described Clay for this use case:

"Clay's control and customization are incredibly valuable. You've got enrichment waterfalls and aren't locked into one vendor who might be strong in the US but weak in EMEA. The flexibility Clay offers lets you tailor enrichment and CRM cleansing to your specific business needs. I see it as a tool for building a clean, responsive, and trustworthy CRM, which is critical for addressing data trust issues. I'm really bullish on Clay—once this is fully unlocked, everyone will jump on it. As outbound becomes more challenging, I want to stay ahead of the curve and be a pioneer."

So when faced with the challenge of reimagining our service, we made Clay the cornerstone of three new service tiers, all focused on data enrichment:

‍

Each tier is designed to offer scalable solutions that meet you where you are in your data enrichment journey.

We'd like CRM enrichment to become our primary service, but we're still helping clients with the first two tiers for the time being. However, CRM enrichment is where I'm placing my bet in the near future.

I wanted to share this information publicly to contribute to the Clay community, and shed some light on why I'm making these decisions. I hope it helps other Clay agency owners adjust their offerings as well to better align with evolving market needs.

Let's break down each service.

Tier 1: Basic Data Enrichment with CSVs

Sales teams, particularly in smaller organizations, often struggle to handle incomplete or unverified data from events, webinars, or purchased lists efficiently. For example, a mid-sized tech company preparing for a major industry conference found they lacked the resources to manually process and qualify the attendee list.

The result? Sales reps typically spend hours:

• Manually extracting attendee information from event portals, LinkedIn, or tools like ZoomInfo.
• Verifying critical contact details such as emails and phone numbers.
• Attempting to qualify leads based on limited or unreliable data.

This labor-intensive process delays outreach, hinders productivity, and risks missing key opportunities to engage high-value prospects.

Our basic data enrichment service eliminates these inefficiencies by automating the most time-consuming tasks. For instance, in the case of the tech company, we:

1. Extracted the full attendee list from the event portal, including hidden data fields.
2. Enriched the data using Clay, adding verified emails, phone numbers, and detailed company information tailored to their ideal customer profile.
3. Delivered a ready-to-use, qualified lead list that allowed their sales reps to focus immediately on outreach and engagement.

By automating the data extraction, enrichment, and lead qualification process, our service ensures that sales teams have actionable, high-quality lead lists without the time drain of manual research.

Tier 2: Advanced Enrichment with Webhooks and APIs

Organizations with high inbound lead volumes often struggle with inefficiencies related to real-time lead qualification and routing. For example, one company received a large influx of inbound leads but faced issues such as incomplete data, bad records clogging their CRM, and delayed response times. These inefficiencies resulted in missed opportunities and lower inbound conversion rates.

Our advanced enrichment service solves these problems by integrating seamlessly with your existing systems to provide real-time lead qualification and routing. For example, we implemented a solution that transformed their inbound process by:

1. Real-time enrichment: Automatically enriching leads as they entered their CRM using Clay's 100+ data providers, and AI-powered account/contact research agents.
2. API and webhook integration: Connecting enrichment workflows directly to their CRM and marketing automation tools to ensure continuous and automated data updates.
3. Automated lead scoring and routing: Applying custom criteria to prioritize and assign leads accurately, preventing bad data from entering the CRM.

As a result, the company significantly reduced inbound response times, improved lead qualification and routing accuracy, and enabled their sales team to focus on high-value opportunities, increasing inbound conversion rates.

Tier 3: Comprehensive CRM Enrichment and Ongoing Maintenance

Large enterprises often face challenges managing massive CRM systems filled with outdated, duplicate, or incorrect data. For instance, one of our clients struggled to accurately identify their target market. For example's sake, let's say they specialized in selling to Managed IT Service Providers (MSPs), but their CRM was cluttered with irrelevant and incomplete data.

This led to:

• Low CRM Adoption: Sales reps didn't trust the data and were reluctant to rely on the CRM.
• Inefficient Sales Processes: Reps wasted time manually verifying company details and following dead-end leads.
• Strategic Blind Spots: Reporting and decision-making were hampered by inaccurate data, preventing them from targeting the right accounts.

The issue was exacerbated by legacy industry filters that lumped SaaS companies, software agencies, and MSPs into one broad "IT industry" category, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint the right targets.

Here's how we address those challenges:

1. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Definition: Define nuanced characteristics that distinguish their target customer (MSPs), such as specific services, website terminology, and other unique identifiers.
2. CRM Property Mapping: We align these ICP characteristics with CRM fields, ensuring seamless integration with the CRM.
3. Custom Web Scraping: Using tailored web scrapers, we scan company websites for MSP-specific keywords, services, and descriptions.
4. AI-Powered Industry Segmentation: Custom GPT prompts analyze website content to differentiate MSPs from other IT companies, interpreting nuanced language that standard filters missed.
5. Contact Data Enrichment: For identified MSPs, we provide enriched contact profiles, including:
   
   • Verified Email Data: Use manual verification tools to ensure accuracy, even for catch-all domains.
   • Verified Mobile Data: Leverage SureConnect to deliver mobile numbers, which boosts cold-call connect rates by 2–3x.
6. Ongoing Maintenance: Through Clay's Headless API, we continuously update and enrich the CRM data to keep it accurate and actionable.

By cleaning up their CRM, aligning it with their ICP, and automating enrichment, we drastically reduced manual efforts, increased sales team efficiency, and improved their ability to target high-value accounts.

The road to now: Our progress so far

When we started taking on CRM enrichment clients, the results were immediate. The deals were larger than outbound automation projects and much easier to deliver.

Instead of selling leads (which are difficult to guarantee), we scoped clearly defined deliverables—like enriching a specific number of accounts with key data points by a set timeline.

Unlike pure outbound automation, CRM enrichment offers more predictable outcomes. While we still help clients optimize their outreach strategies, we're now focused on building the strong data foundation that makes all go-to-market activities more effective. I map my client's ICP, enrich their CRM data, and execute—all factors that are within my control.

The feedback has been stellar, and every client has renewed their contract.

For example, one of our clients, a leader in operations at a hyper-growth SaaS company, approached us with a major challenge: their CRM was cluttered with outdated, duplicate, and incomplete data, making it difficult to trust and use effectively. They needed a solution to clean, enrich, and maintain their CRM data while adapting to their unique business logic.

Using Clay, we built a tailored enrichment workflow to validate every record, enrich data with custom business rules, and ensure that only clean, accurate information entered their CRM. One of the key wins was Clay's flexibility, allowing for enrichment waterfalls and avoiding reliance on a single vendor—critical for a company operating globally.

This approach resulted in a trustworthy, up-to-date CRM that streamlined their operations and eliminated inefficiencies caused by bad data. The client was thrilled with the results, calling it a game-changer for their team. "I'm really bullish on this approach—it's exactly what we needed to stay ahead."

Our shift to CRM enrichment didn't just simplify our services, it also addressed two major challenges that plagued outbound automation: the overwhelming complexity of delivering consistent results at scale and the inherent limitations of working with clients who lack product-market fit.

First, we've dramatically reduced the complexity of our offer, which makes it more scalable, more achievable, and more profitable.

While outbound remains valuable, effective outreach involves multiple moving parts:

• Strategic Planning: Identifying target markets and ideal customer profiles (ICPs)
• Data Acquisition: Building target lists and finding accurate contact information for prospects
• Message Crafting: Writing compelling copy that resonates with different audience segments
• Technical Setup: Configuring email systems, domains, and sequences
• Compliance Management: Ensuring adherence to regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM
• Performance Tracking: Monitoring open rates, response rates, and conversion metrics
• Continuous Optimization: Iterating on strategies based on data-driven insights

For an internal sales team, dedicating full-time resources to manage these tasks is challenging enough.

As an agency serving multiple clients, the complexity multiplies exponentially. Each client has unique needs, markets, and products, requiring tailored strategies and constant attention. This made it increasingly difficult to deliver consistent, high-quality results across the board.

Second, on top of deliverability challenges, there's a more fundamental issue with offering automated outbound services: no matter how well-crafted an outreach campaign is, it can't compensate for a product or service that doesn't meet market needs.

Many early-stage companies are still searching for product-market fit, and their offers may not resonate with the audience. After our pivot to CRM enrichment, we're better positioned to help clients build a strong foundation first, whether they're using it for outbound, inbound, or account-based approaches.

Wrapping up: The future is bright

The sales landscape is evolving rapidly. While traditional mass outreach methods aren't disappearing, their effectiveness is increasingly dependent on the quality of your underlying data and targeting.

Our pivot to data enrichment and CRM hygiene isn't just a business decision—it's a response to the fundamental needs of modern sales organizations. By focusing on the foundation of good data, we can help clients succeed across all their go-to-market activities, whether that's targeted outbound, efficient inbound, or strategic account-based selling.

We're excited about this new direction and the opportunities it presents for our clients and the broader sales community.

We believe that by harnessing the power of data enrichment, organizations can unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency and success in their sales operations—regardless of which channels they choose to pursue.

Now, I'm focused on making Sculpted the go-to service for fixing and maintaining CRM data, powered by Clay at its core.

Let's Start the Conversation

If any of these challenges resonate with you, or if you're curious about how data enrichment can transform your sales operations, we'd love to connect.

You can visit our website at sculpted.agency and connect with me on LinkedIn. I regularly share insights on sales efficiency, data enrichment, and industry trends.