LinkedIn outreach used to be simple: fire off 100 connection requests, book a few meetings, call it a day.
Not anymore.
Connection limits are tighter. Prospects have seen every “quick question” under the sun. And thanks to AI, inboxes are now a graveyard of generic emails.
So no, you don’t need more leads. You need better-qualified ones.
And we mean niche, effective scoring, not just enrichment that tells you job titles and company location. We’re talking signal-rich, timing-sensitive, ready-to-talk prospects who are worth your 1:1 time.
How do you find them?
For this guide, we teamed up with the experts at The Playbook Agency, your AI Sales Development partner, to show you how to build a high-performance outreach system using Clay + Salesflow.
Why Spray-and-Pray Is Dead
Every connection request you send is now valuable real estate. This means lead selection is now as important as messaging.
The game has completely changed in the last few years:
- LinkedIn now limits connection requests to approximately 100-200 per week
- 81% of sales teams are using AI tools. This means more and more AI outreach (which isn’t always bad, of course)
- Reply rates for cold outreach stalls at around the 8.5% mark.
So as a rule of thumb, before you drop leads into Salesflow or start AI-spinning your first touch, ask yourself: “Is this person even worth reaching out to?”
If you hesitate, that’s your answer.
How to Score Leads in Clay and Run Automated LinkedIn Outreach
Here’s a 4-step framework you can steal to start scoring and segmenting better:
Step 1: Define Your ICP
Okay, this is pretty obvious, but let's start with the basics.
Step 1 to good outreach is finding the right people/accounts to contact.
A solid ICP includes:
- Industry (e.g., SaaS, fintech, HR tech)
- Company size or stage (e.g., Series A, 100–500 employees)
- Geography (LATAM, NA, EU)
- Tech stack (especially if you integrate or replace it)
- Pain points or growth goals
- Triggers that show buying intent (e.g., just hired SDRs, raised a round, launched a new product)
Essentially, insider info on your customers, why, what, who, and how.
But you’re not just selling to one person. Because when deal sizes and complexity go up, so does the number of decision-makers.
Key players you need to think about:
- Champion / day-to-day user: feels the pain (e.g., SDR Manager, RevOps)
- Influencer: might help back you (e.g., marketing, CRO)
- Blocker: most likely person to block the deal (e.g, IT or legal)
- Decision-maker: signs off (e.g, VP Sales, Founder)
- $$$ Controller: controls the budget (e.g, CRO, CFO)
Here’s a quick cheatsheet you can use to map your ICP. Alternatively, you can keep it simple and create a note as follows:
Step 2: Define What a “High-Quality Lead” Looks Like
This is your equation, so feel free to mix and match. Here’s an example table:
Start by reverse-engineering past closed-won deals. What do your best customers have in common? That’s what gets weighted heavily.
You can also create a note for this instead of a table, as follows (example of a finance software company):
Step 3: Pull Rich, Reliable Data
You can't score what you can't see. So here’s your tech stack for scraping signal:
- Clay: pulls, enriches, and calculates scores from multiple sources
- Apollo/ZoomInfo: fills in missing contact data
- Sales Navigator: filters by job changes, recent activity, and team growth
- News monitoring (e.g., Prowly, Feedly, Crunchbase): surfaces trigger events and news
- CRM or past campaign data: for relationship history
Our suggestion: Instead of collecting data from various sources, collect it from one source (like Sales Nav), and then add that list to Clay for further analysis and enrichment.
The end goal is one clean row per lead, with enough depth to confidently say “yes” or “no.”
In Clay, to import data, you can click on “Import from CSV” or “other sources”:
To enrich, click “Enrich Company” and pick the fields you’d like to add. For the fields you want to see, use the toggle to turn them on. For fields that are not important to you, turn off the toggle.
Based on the data you have chosen to enrich/not enrich, your table will look like this:
Step 4: Score + Segment in Clay
Here’s where it comes together.
Inside Clay:
- Enrich leads: Pull in LinkedIn, company, funding, and hiring data. (shown above)
- Apply logic: “IF job title CONTAINS ‘Head of Sales’ = +10,” etc.
- Score: Add a scoring column that tallies up each lead’s total.
- Segment: Bucket leads into:
- High priority (score 10+)
- Mid priority (5-10)
- Low priority (<5)
Video - see it in action:
How do you do all this in real life? Great question.
Here’s a quick overview that will help you understand how lead scoring can be set up in Clay:
We’ve also created a template on Clay for you to follow the same process we outlined in the video above.
Here’s a mind map for better visualization:
If you’re a Clay or RevOps beginner, all this might feel overwhelming. If you want to start from scratch, our 60+ pages LinkedIn outreach guide is a great resource.
Step 5: Automate Outreach (Based on Score)
Now plug your top-tier leads into Salesflow using the HTTPI feature to direct Tier 1 leads into a dedicated Salesflow campaign and watch the magic unfold.
- High scorers? Go personal. Use job-change or funding triggers in your opener. Write like a human (with AI). Grab our AI prompts guide for plug-and-play prompts.
- Mid-tier? Test templated sequences, but tweak by segment (i.e. by industry or title).
- Low scorers? Don’t waste time. Nurture slowly, or dump them entirely.
Salesflow on your mind? Try giving it a spin here.
TL;DR: Lead Scoring > More Leads
If you’ve read through the entire thing, you now know why lead scoring matters and how to do it right.
By using Clay to score and segment your leads and Salesflow to automate outreach, you can make sure only high-value prospects get your attention.
This workflow, designed by The Playbook Agency, your fractional Go-To-Market engineering team, helps you cut through the noise.
And for all your outreach automation needs, there’s always Salesflow.
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