start with intent, finish with alignment

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Most B2B companies still behave like it’s 2016.

They staff designers, writers, social managers, engagement specialists, and hope that more posts equal more pipeline. The dashboards look good. The pipeline does not.

In 2026, that model quietly breaks for three reasons:

• Your buyers are drowning in content, but their actions (comments, reactions, site visits, job posts, funding) are now easy to track in real time.

• Tools like Clay and Lemlist can already enrich those signals, qualify them against your ICP, and trigger human outreach automatically.​

• Prospecting agents can run 24/7, watching public content and your own properties, then routing only the highest‑intent people to your team.

So the frontier is simple to describe and hard to ignore:

Stop paying to create demand in the feed. Start catching demand that’s already visible—and route it directly to a human.

The rest of your GTM should serve that one job.

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Why “prospecting is dead” (and what replaces it)

“Prospecting is dead” doesn’t mean “outbound is over.” It means manual list‑building and cold guessing are no longer the most efficient way to fill a pipeline.

Here’s the new model Rising Tides is leaning into with Clay, n8n, and Lemlist:

1. Turn creator engagement into free intent data

   • Track posts from competitors, creators, founders, media, and industry pages in your niche.

   • Pull every comment and like into a unified watchlist. Clay can enrich profiles (role, company, tech stack, funding) and push them into your CRM.

   • Use n8n to orchestrate the flow: API → enrichment → filtering → routing.

2. Most teams stop at “nice engagement.” You treat it as a lead source.

3. Filter ruthlessly to ICP

   • Keep only accounts that match your best customers and can pay your rates: market, industry, role, region, headcount, revenue, stack, and problem profile.

   • Drop “thirsty creators,” students, and non‑buyers from your lists. A smaller, tighter list is a feature, not a bug.

4. Broke is chasing every signal. Healthy is chasing the right few.

5. Contact = research first, pipeline second

   • Calls, DMs, or emails focus on three questions: how they run the thing you help with today, what is not working, why they care about fixing it now.

   • No pitch slap. Treat every outreach as live market research that might become an opportunity.

The outcome is predictable: conversations with people who already understand the problem, already sit inside your ICP, and already showed interest in your category. Not random followers.

For B2B companies, running this 30 minutes a day can rival or surpass a few thousand dollars a month in social ad spend.

Clay + n8n + Lemlist: how Rising Tides wires the system

Let’s make this concrete for a founder or sales leader who wants to plug this into their stack.

Here’s a simple, opinionated architecture we’re using with B2B clients.

1. Capture: build your “radar”

You’re not building community. You’re building freeway exits for people who are already driving past your category.

Rising Tides sets up three primary capture layers:

• Social signals

  • Clay agents monitor posts from: industry creators, competitor founders, media accounts, and coaches that your buyers follow.

  • Every like, comment, repost, or reply that touches relevant topics (e.g., “billing chaos,” “churn,” “onboarding issues”) is pulled into a watchlist via APIs and n8n flows.

• Web signals

  • Lemlist “signals” and product analytics track visits to pricing, integration pages, competitor comparison pages, critical docs, and resource downloads.

  • Clay enriches those accounts with company, role, tech, and funding to decide if they’re worth a rep’s time.

• Business signals

  • n8n watches for hiring activity in sales/ops, funding announcements, leadership changes, and new locations via public sources.

  • These events act as “scale” or “fresh start” moments—prime times to talk about new systems or tools.

In Lemlist, intent is not a guess. It is a trigger that kicks off a sequence or task.

2. Qualify: apply hard filters in real time

Signals without filters waste your team’s energy.

Rising Tides typically layers:

• Market and industry

• Role and seniority

• Company size by headcount and revenue

• Tech stack or data environment

• Exclusion lists (partners, competitors, creators, non‑ICP segments)

Clay and n8n do the enrichment and filtering; Lemlist becomes the control tower: who gets a DM, who gets an email, who goes to SDRs, who should sit in nurture.

In practice, this gives clients:

• A small watchlist of 50–200 high‑intent accounts instead of thousands of random followers

• Two focused hours per week of outreach that can rival the MQL volume of 5k–10k per month in social ad spend for many B2B teams.

3. Route: send signals straight to humans

This is where Clay + n8n + Lemlist feel like a new category of GTM infrastructure.

A typical Rising Tides routing map looks like this:

• Hot web intent (pricing / demo / comparison pages in the last 0–3 days)

  • Lemlist triggers: short, direct offer sequence.

  • n8n opens a same‑day call task for an SDR or AE.

  • Example move: quick FAQ or case study tied to the exact page they viewed.

• Warm research intent (solution content, blogs, videos in the last 4–14 days)

  • Lemlist: education + comparison + social proof sequence.

  • Clay pulls relevant case studies or proof assets based on industry and stage.

  • Goal is purely engagement and learning, not immediate close.

• Social intent (LinkedIn / Meta interactions on problems you solve)

  • Lemlist sends a DM or email that continues the public conversation rather than resets.

  • Example: “Saw your comment on [creator] about [problem]. Curious how you’re handling X today?”

• Strategic business events (new leadership, funding, hiring)

  • Clay enriches accounts and roles; n8n assigns sequences in Lemlist and tasks in the CRM.

  • The message is: “Here is a short plan / workflow for the exact situation you’re now in,” not “Want a demo?”​

At this point, reps are not “doing outbound.” They are acting like Google Ads: only bidding when intent is hot.

Turning signals into Customer Focused conversations

The mechanics are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.

You still win or lose on how your team talks once the signal hits their queue. This is where Challenger‑style communication layers neatly on top of Rising Tides’ workflows.

Here’s a simple communication model mapped to common intent patterns:

1. Pricing / comparison visits (0–3 days)

Goal: reframe their mental model, not push a discount.

• Teach: Surface a counterintuitive insight about how similar buyers misjudge pricing or feature sets.

• Tailor: Use Clay data (industry, size, tool stack) to show how peers in their context made the decision.

• Take control: Offer a short, structured call: “10 minutes to walk how teams like yours avoid [specific mistake].”

Sequence structure in Lemlist:

1. Short note referencing the exact page they viewed and what that usually means.

2. Case study or stat tied to their market.

3. Simple yes/no ask to continue, not a multi‑option CTA.

2. Social engagement on a pain­‑focused post

Goal: validate the pain and introduce a better path, not pitch features.

• Teach: Share a simple framework (e.g., “freeway exit” model for capturing demand) that explains why their current approach stalls.

• Tailor: Point to one specific area where their role/team usually gets stuck.

• Take control: Suggest a diagnostic, not a demo: “Happy to send a quick teardown of your current flow.”

Sequence structure:

1. DM continuing the comment thread, asking how they handle the issue today.

2. Follow‑up with a small asset: loom teardown, 1‑page playbook, or relevant workflow screenshot.

3. Offer a call only after they engage.

3. Scale or “fresh start” moments (hiring, funding, leadership changes)

Goal: Guide the new direction with a point of view.

• Teach: Explain the most common failure mode for companies at their new stage.

• Tailor: Show how their specific type of org (PLG, enterprise, sales‑led) typically misallocates resources.

• Take control: Propose a concrete next step—“Here’s a 30‑day signal‑capture plan for new heads of RevOps at your stage.”

These models shift reps from scripts to structured insight. They’re no longer “following up on your interest.” They’re leading with a stronger map of the terrain.

Why this beats paid ads (for the right teams)

If you spend 50k+ per month on ads, you’re basically renting access to intent.

What Rising Tides is building with Clay, n8n, and Lemlist lets you:

• Detect the same signals (keywords, browsing behavior, research patterns) without paying Meta or Google’s tax.

• Replace a portion of feed ads with direct, owned conversations that are anchored in real activity, not lookalike guesses.

• Reinvest spend and headcount from “awareness for awareness’ sake” into systems that directly expose buying timing, stakeholders, and urgency.

Two focused hours per week, run consistently, can mirror the qualified pipeline that many teams currently buy from 5k–10k in monthly social ad spend.

That’s the financial asymmetry you actually want from GTM: every dollar or hour you invest returns more dollars than the last cycle, not less.

A simple lens: audience, intent, message, execution

If you can’t explain your GTM on one page, you don’t have a system—you have noise.

Rising Tides tends to boil it down like this:

• Audience: who you sell to in detail (roles, industries, markets, company sizes, qualifiers like stack, willingness to invest, urgency drivers).

• Intent: the problems you solve, the value you deliver, and the signals that someone is currently searching, asking, or deciding.]​

• Message: how you make it easy to say yes in any format—video, ad copy, case study, outbound note—with one clear offer and path.

• Execution: the part Clay, n8n, and Lemlist make repeatable—target signals, qualify audience in real time, send fast‑response messages that convert.

When that waterfall is clear, your “tech stack” stops being a random pile of tools and becomes a flywheel:

• Prospecting, SDRs, content, and ad spend exist to pull out intent.

• Signals route to humans who know exactly how to talk to buyers at that moment.

• Feedback from those conversations updates your watchlists and filters.

Signal in, revenue out.

Where to take this next (your turn)

If you’re a founder or sales leader, you don’t need a 6‑month transformation to start. You need one wedge:

• Pick a single source of signals (e.g., pricing page visits + LinkedIn comments).

• Define a clear ICP filter.

• Build one Clay → n8n → Lemlist workflow that routes these to your team with a Challenger‑style script.

Run it for a quarter before you decide whether to increase content spend, paid spend, or system investment.

I’m considering a few follow‑ups for Weekly Invoice readers on this:

• A practical guide: wiring Clay, n8n, and Lemlist into LinkedIn/Meta/Google so every signal becomes an email, DM, or task.

• Plug‑and‑play prompts: the exact prompts we use to research accounts and generate first‑touch messages off public activity.

• Simple Challenger‑based models: ready‑to‑use frameworks for pricing visits, social comments, hiring/funding signals, and returning‑visitor heat tiers.

Hit reply and tell me which one you’d actually use in the next 30 days.

Looking forward to building this new GTM frontier with you.

-Grady