Clay Can Tell You Who to Reach. It Can't Tell You Why They'd Care.

I use data enrichment tools like Clay and Apollo to go from an ICP and buyer persona to highly specific company lists for LinkedIn targeting. I use AI agents to do account prospecting that would have taken a human days.

A few years ago, mapping your full TAM with firmographic and behavioral data before spending a single euro was impossible. Now it's Tuesday morning.

I love this stuff. But there's a narrative building around it that worries me: the idea that finding anyone's contact details plus the ability to automate outreach equals marketing solved. That it was always about "getting leads through a form" and now that you can skip the form, the problem is done.

It's not. The form was never the hard part. Knowing what makes your buyer care was.

Your buyer persona is not a spreadsheet row

Your buyer persona is not a row with a name, title, company size, and LinkedIn URL.

It's knowing that your buyer secretly thinks their current tool is held together with duct tape but can't say that in a meeting. It's knowing they've been burned by a vendor migration before and are terrified of doing it again. It's knowing they don't actually care about your feature list because they just need something that makes them look competent in front of their VP next quarter.

That's infinitely more valuable than their email address. And no amount of data enrichment gets you there.

The email address is a delivery mechanism. The message is the product. And if your message doesn't hit what they actually care about, you're just delivering the wrong pitch faster.

Everyone has the same stack. Use it anyway.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: your competitors have the same tools.

Data enrichment platforms, contact databases, sales intelligence tools, intent data providers... these are products anyone can buy with a credit card. The intent signals you're watching? Your competitors are watching the same ones. The job-change triggers you set up? Every company targeting your ICP has the same automation running.

Does that mean you shouldn't use them? No. You should. You're at a disadvantage without them.

Having a well-built automation stack, solid enrichment, and good prospecting workflows is table stakes. Not having it means you're slower and less informed than your competitors.

But it's not what sets you apart. If everyone has the same reach, the same data, and the same ability to hit "send," the differentiator is everything that happens before and around the outreach.

And that's where the real work starts.

The person who activates the need wins the deal

Here's what I think the GTM Engineering narrative misses most: it treats the prospect's problem as a given. As if they're sitting there with a clearly defined need, and the only question is who reaches them first.

That's rarely how it works.

Most prospects don't wake up thinking "I need to buy software today." They have a vague frustration. Something that isn't working well but isn't painful enough to act on yet. Their problem exists, but it hasn't been activated.

The company that helps them see the problem clearly, that gives it a name, that articulates it better than they could themselves... that company doesn't just get the deal. They become the obvious choice to solve it.

Because if you're the one who made me realize I have this problem, I trust you to understand it better than anyone else.

That's demand generation at its core. Not generating leads. Generating the need itself.

From affinity to pipeline

I've seen this work up close.

Content that's hyper-specific to a niche buyer persona. Not product pitches. Memes, observations, takes that make people in that role think "they really understand my job." That content builds affinity. It builds trust. And it creates engagement you can actually use.

The people who interact with that content become the audience for deeper campaigns about your product and how it solves their specific problem. Engagement becomes signal. Signal becomes targeting. Targeting becomes pipeline.

That's a full-funnel engine. And yes, it's heavily automated and orchestrated. Sequencing, retargeting, nurture flows... automation plays a massive role in this. But it's automation in service of a story that resonates. Not automation that replaces the need to have one.

And here's the bonus: this kind of engine generates first-party signals that are far more valuable than any third-party intent feed. Someone engaging with your content is a signal only you have. Someone visiting your website is a signal only you have. Those are infinitely more useful than a shared intent report that triggers the same outreach from every competitor in your space.

Same outreach, completely different outcome

Imagine two scenarios.

Scenario A: A prospect gets your cold email. They've never heard of you. They Google your company, skim your website for 20 seconds, and move on. Your email gets archived.

Scenario B: A prospect has been seeing your content for months. They've engaged with posts that spoke directly to their daily frustrations. They attended a webinar you hosted. Their colleague shared one of your articles. They've visited your website twice.

Then they get a well-timed, relevant email from you that speaks to the exact problem they're dealing with. They reply within the hour.

Same prospect. Same email tool. Same automation. The difference is everything that happened before the email.

Content, events, community, brand. Touchpoints that made them feel like you're everywhere, so that when outreach arrives, it feels like a natural next step instead of a cold interruption.

What I'd actually recommend

Use the GTM Engineering stack for what it's great at: intelligence. Go deep on who you're targeting. Use enrichment tools to build company lists that are actually specific. Use AI prospecting to research accounts in a way that's tailored to your product. Understand job titles, company structures, and pain points at a segment level. That's the transformative part.

Then build the engine that creates demand. Content that's specific enough to make your buyer persona feel understood. Campaigns that start with engagement and affinity, then go deeper on your product. Events and touchpoints that put you in the room before they start researching.

Use the engagement from that engine as your targeting signal. Then let your automation do what it does best: reach the right person at the right time with a message they're already primed to care about.

AI is making software cheaper to build every month. More products in every category. More noise. More competition for the same buyers. The companies that win won't be the ones with the best automation stack. They'll be the ones that prospects already trust when they start researching.

The stack is an amplifier. It makes good marketing louder. But if there's nothing worth amplifying, all you're doing is spending over €1,000 a month to send emails that sound like everyone else's.

Build something worth amplifying first.