1
Define the ad-active ICP and outreach boundaries
60-90 min
60-90 min
Define the company size, industry, geography, offer fit, advertising channel, minimum ad activity, founder or owner role, and exclusions for the prospecting system. Set outreach jurisdiction rules, consent or legitimate-interest requirements, suppression sources, volume caps, and sender ownership. List prohibited personalization such as sensitive attributes or inferred financial distress. Require a human-approved target definition before collection begins. Record the operation against stable identifiers such as prospect_id, company_domain, ad_source_url, ad_observed_at, ad_summary, preserve the raw source reference and capture time, and write any transformation or decision into the system’s change history rather than replacing the prior value. Before the step is marked complete, a human approves the outreach hypothesis and message before activation while n8n revalidates source freshness, contact eligibility, and idempotency; if that check fails, hold stale ads, unverifiable founder matches, prohibited contacts, weak service relevance, unsupported personalization, and any record that fails pre-send revalidation; before completion, the accountable operator must perform and record a QA review against the approved field rules and evidence, and any failed check must be held as an assigned exception.
Output
An approved ad-active ICP and outreach policy.
Clay
Pro tip
Running ads is a timing signal, not proof of need or budget quality. Keep it as one evidence field rather than the entire qualification model.
2
Create the prospect and evidence schema
2-3 hours
2-3 hours
Build the Clay prospect table tables for Companies, Ad Observations, People, Contact Points, Research, Outreach Angles, Channel Decisions, Executions, Replies, Suppressions, and Outcomes. Use company domain, source ad URL or library ID, observation date, ad status, ad theme, founder ID, contact provenance, activity evidence, confidence, jurisdiction, and owner. Preserve the exact source and retrieval date for every personalization fact. Keep inferred fields separate from observed data. Record the operation against stable identifiers such as company_domain, ad_source_url, ad_observed_at, ad_summary, founder_id, preserve the raw source reference and capture time, and write any transformation or decision into the system’s change history rather than replacing the prior value. Before the step is marked complete, a human approves the outreach hypothesis and message before activation while n8n revalidates source freshness, contact eligibility, and idempotency; if that check fails, hold stale ads, unverifiable founder matches, prohibited contacts, weak service relevance, unsupported personalization, and any record that fails pre-send revalidation; before completion, the accountable operator must perform and record a QA review against the approved field rules and evidence, and any failed check must be held as an assigned exception.
Output
A prospecting system that retains ad, founder, contact, and outreach provenance.
Clay
Pro tip
The evidence record protects the sender. They can verify the live ad and founder context before approving any message.