---
name: hiring-spike-outbound
description: "Outbound When ICP Companies Hire AEs or SDRs. Use when competitors and category peers hiring sellers is a timing signal that budgets and territory plans are expanding, but most teams notice weeks late."
---

# Outbound When ICP Companies Hire AEs or SDRs

Competitors and category peers hiring sellers is a timing signal that budgets and territory plans are expanding, but most teams notice weeks late.

## When to use this skill

- The user wants to set up or run this workflow: "Outbound When ICP Companies Hire AEs or SDRs".
- The user describes this problem: Competitors and category peers hiring sellers is a timing signal that budgets and territory plans are expanding, but most teams notice weeks late.

## At a glance

- Category: Outbound
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Time saved: 5 hours per week. This figure is an estimate, not a measured result.

## Tools

Options separated by "or" are alternatives; use whichever the user already has.

- Clay
- Apify or job-board source
- HubSpot or Salesforce
- Instantly or Outreach

## Steps

1. Build your ICP account list in Clay from your CRM or a Clay company search, with domains and LinkedIn company URLs
2. Pull open roles weekly with a Clay jobs source or an Apify job-board actor, filtered to titles containing Account Executive, SDR, BDR, or RevOps (check the source terms of service before scraping)
3. Normalize titles, deduplicate postings by company domain, and flag a hiring spike when an account posts two or more new sales roles in 30 days or its first SDR role
4. Look up each flagged account in HubSpot or Salesforce and exclude customers, open opportunities, and accounts contacted in the last 90 days
5. Find the VP Sales, CRO, or Head of RevOps with a Clay waterfall and verify emails
6. Draft a short opener with a Clay AI column that refers to sales team growth in general terms, and review the first batch by hand before sending
7. Push contacts to an Instantly or Outreach sequence and set a "Hiring spike" company property in the CRM with the date and roles found

## Template outline

Field names, thresholds, and message text are starting points to adapt.

~~~text
Clay Table (scheduled weekly):
1. Input: ICP accounts (domain, LinkedIn company URL, CRM ID)
2. Jobs source: Clay jobs enrichment or Apify job-board actor
   - Title filter: "Account Executive", "SDR", "BDR", "Sales Development", "RevOps"
   - Posted within: last 30 days
3. Formula: sales_roles_30d = count of matching postings per domain
4. Filter: sales_roles_30d >= 2 OR first SDR posting found
5. CRM lookup: skip customers, open deals, and last_contacted within 90 days
6. Find people: VP Sales, CRO, Head of RevOps (waterfall email + verification)
7. AI opener prompt: "Write one sentence for a {{title}} whose company is growing its sales team. Do not quote the job post or name the role."
8. Instantly or Outreach API: add to sequence
9. CRM update: "Hiring spike" = {{date}}, "Roles found" = {{sales_roles_30d}}
Output: a weekly list of ICP accounts with new sales hiring, enrolled in a sequence and tagged in the CRM
~~~

## Guardrails

- Work only in the user's own accounts and workspaces, with their credentials.
- Confirm with the user before any step that writes to a CRM, sends email or messages, spends credits, or moves money.
- Treat every hours, cost, and threshold figure as a starting assumption and replace it with the user's numbers.
- Do not invent data, prices, or results. If a vendor price matters, check the vendor's current pricing page.

## Source

https://gtmplaybooks.io/playbooks/hiring-spike-outbound/