Slava M.

I'd suggest Zapmail + Mailivery + Bouncer. We’ve moved away from one-tool solutions to avoid a single point of failure; decoupling infra (Zapmail) from reputation (Mailivery) and hygiene (Bouncer) is much more stable at scale. Plus, Bouncer allows for objective deliverability testing on mailboxes outside the warmup cycle, so you get an honest look at placement without the 'echo chamber' effect of internal warmup reports.

The narrowness is actually the point!.. I’d rather spend 80% of my time on the 20% of the market that is clearly 'bleeding.' It’s about effort management. If the 'Smoking Gun' list feels too small to keep the engine humming, you just look one step upstream. Instead of only targeting the teams that are already broken (high churn/flat headcount), you look for the ones about to break. A company hiring their first 3-5 SDRs or a new VP of Sales is an 'effort' signal. They aren't in a death spiral yet, but they’re at the exact moment where they’re deciding between building a generic spam machine or something that actually scales. I treat the 'broken' teams as 1:1 manual priority and the 'scaling' teams as signal-based automation. That way, you aren't sacrificing meaningful audience size, you’re just making sure your manual effort isn't wasted on companies that are 'doing just fine' with their current setup. Have you found that narrowing the criteria actually killed your volume, or did it just make the manual research feel too heavy?

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That's perfect advice, Vincent. There can only be one problem - if Olga needs to prove a certain tool, not the budget as a whole, it will be a mess in jumping from one tool to another (like today we use on LLM, tomorrow another). So it is safer for her to stay with CLAY on its own. This doesn't mean 'no need to optimize the process'.

For the last one, combine LinkedIn Sales Headcount growth (to see if the team is actually expanding) with a tool like PredictLeads (via Clay enrichment) to check job posting history. If the data shows they've had 5+ open SDR roles for 180 days, but their Sales headcount is flat or down — that’s the 'Smoking Gun.' It means their churn is high because their outbound engine isn't providing enough pipeline for the reps to hit quota. That's your entry point.

Riaz makes a great point about DNS technicalities, but there's a catch: detecting the "real" outbound domains is the bottleneck. Clay will give you the primary company.com, but experienced teams run outbound from dozens of look-alike domains. You won't see their SPF/DMARC issues because you don't know their secondary domains. My advice for finding "struggling" prospects: Look for "Tech Stack Decay" and "Hiring Friction" signals:

Hi Olga K.. As we're talking about Clay, the move is definitely about scaling your Revenue Engineering rather than just buying more data. 1. Pipeline Velocity & Throughput: To convince leadership, calculate the time it takes an SDR to manually find a signal (e.g., a LinkedIn post or a new job opening) and write a personalized email. If the Growth plan allows you to automate this for 10x more leads with the same headcount, you are increasing your Pipeline Velocity without increasing payroll. Show the difference in the price of 1 lead processed now vs then. That’s the real math they need to see. 2. Infrastructure & Warm-up: If you're planning to use these credits for high-volume outbound, remember the "technical debt." You’ll need a month to warm up new domains and calculate the daily load before you can even utilize the extra 10k credits. Don't upgrade today if your email infrastructure isn't ready to handle the volume — use the next 4 weeks to prep, then pull the trigger. 3. The 90-Day Pilot: Don't promise results in week 1. Propose a 3-month trial focused on Qualified Appointments.

If the upgrade costs an extra $600 over the quarter, it only takes one decent deal in the pipe to justify the entire year's spend. P.S: HubSpot is great as a "System of Record," but for the "Automated Outbound" part, you’ll likely want to push Clay data into something like Instantly or Smartlead for the actual sending to protect your primary domain. And have more options with an easier UI.