How to Identify Prospects Facing Low Reply Rates, Personalization, and Deliverability Challenges in Outbound Outreach | Clay

Aaron J.
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Those are common outbound issues, almost everyone doing outbound will be solving for them in some way, and still struggling with them in others. Potentially looking for companies actively hiring cold-calling AEs or SDRs (job search enrichments) will help identify those that are willing to spend money on more/better Outbound.
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Md R.
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Deliverability is the easiest of the three to detect from outside. Public DNS lookups show everything. SPF over 10 lookups, DMARC at p=none with no reporting endpoint, missing DKIM alignment across their sending tools - all visible from a Kitterman or MXToolbox check. A company running outbound from a domain with broken DMARC is your textbook ICP.
Slava M.
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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:
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Job Posting Specifics: Don’t just look for "SDR." Look for companies hiring SDRs with "experience in deliverability" or "domain management." If those keywords appear in the job description, it's a clear signal they’ve recently been hit by spam filters or are struggling to scale their infrastructure.
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The "Ghosting" Signal: If a company is actively hiring for sales but their headcount growth in sales is stagnant or negative over the last 6 months (LinkedIn Headcount data), it often means their current outbound engine is broken, and they are trying to "hire their way out" of a low-reply-rate problem.
Slava M.
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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.
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