The Company

A subscription-based creative platform where businesses pay a flat monthly rate for unlimited design requests: logos, ad creatives, social media assets, packaging. Over 500 companies rely on it as their external design department.

Growth had always come from one place: paid media. Google, Meta, LinkedIn sponsorships. When ad budgets were healthy, the pipeline moved. When they were not, the sales floor went quiet.

Their AE team averaged less than 50% calendar fill on any given week. Most reps had open slots by Wednesday.

Where Things Were Stuck

The team had invested in outbound tooling months earlier: Clay for enrichment, Apollo for sequencing, HubSpot as the CRM. But none of it was connected, and nobody on the growth team had built outbound systems before.

Clay was being used to store contacts. Apollo had a few draft sequences nobody had launched. HubSpot had no integration with either tool.

The deeper issue was strategic. They had been targeting early-stage startups through paid ads, the same audience everyone targets. Their closed-won data told a different story: the best customers were mid-market marketing teams (200-500 employees) outsourcing overflow design work. But the growth team had never built campaigns around that insight.

How Corela Approached It

Days 1-10: Rebuilding the foundation. We started in HubSpot. Analyzed 18 months of closed-won deals and mapped the real ICP: marketing teams at mid-market SaaS and e-commerce companies, typically with 200-500 employees, already working with agencies or using tools like Canva and Figma internally.

We rebuilt their Clay workspace around this profile. Every lead entering the system got enriched with technographic signals (current design tools, agency relationships) and hiring data (open roles for designers or creative directors, a signal they need capacity).

Days 10-20: Infrastructure from zero. Six dedicated sending domains. Full DNS authentication. A three-week warm-up protocol running in parallel with campaign development.

We wired Clay directly into Apollo so enriched contacts flowed into sequences automatically. No CSV exports, no manual uploads. We also activated Vector on their website to identify anonymous visitors and feed high-intent traffic back into Clay for outreach.

Days 20-30: Live campaigns and rapid iteration. Launched targeting marketing directors at mid-market companies. Tested three different messaging approaches simultaneously:

• Approach A: "Replace your agency relationship with something faster"

• Approach B: "Add design capacity without adding headcount"

• Approach C: "Get assets back in hours, not weeks"

Approach C (turnaround speed) outperformed by 2x. We shifted all volume to that angle and began daily copy iterations based on reply sentiment analysis.

The Outcome

The 78 demos in 14 days forced them to expand the sales team. Cost per demo dropped substantially compared to paid channels because every prospect had been pre-qualified through Clay’s enrichment logic before entering a sequence.

Why It Worked

Visitor identification through Vector converted existing website traffic into outbound targets: people who had already shown interest but never converted. Enrichment-based filtering meant AEs only spoke with prospects matching the real ICP. And connecting tools that had been sitting idle eliminated the manual friction that killed every previous attempt.