Automating Signal-Driven B2B Campaigns with Clay, HubSpot, Smartlead and Trigify

How we’re using AI to identify, qualify, and engage leads with the kind of precision and speed no traditional marketing team could manage

Let’s face it: marketing teams can’t do it all. Even the sharpest team can’t monitor thousands of companies in real time, pick up on key buying signals, evaluate their tech stack, find the decision-makers, and fire off a personalised message before the window of opportunity closes.

So that’s what we trained the robots to do.

Working with several clients, we’ve built an AI-assisted, signal-driven lead qualification engine using a combination of Clay, HubSpot, Smartlead, and Trigify — with a bit of Airtable magic to keep things sane. It watches for buying signals, enriches data in real time, scores leads, personalises messages, and drops them into the right sequences. And yes, it’s fully GDPR-compliant.

The Objective: Smarter Campaigns That Start Themselves

Traditional marketing workflows are linear. You build a list, write some copy, launch a campaign, and hope something lands. This approach flips that on its head.

Instead of starting with a campaign, we start with a signal.

“A prospect just posted about digital transformation.”

“A company has hired five L&D staff and recently implemented Workday.”

These moments become triggers — opening a narrow window when interest, budget, and urgency may align. Using AI, we can spot these signals across thousands of companies, enrich them with relevant context, qualify them automatically, and engage in real time with messages that are relevant, respectful, and human.

Why Use Airtable Before HubSpot?

Your CRM should be your source of truth — not your source of noise.

We use Airtable as a staging ground, a pre-CRM database that allows operations teams to:

• Review enriched leads before pushing to HubSpot

• Tag them by campaign, persona, or region

• Maintain a clean and focused marketable database in HubSpot

• Reduce licensing costs by keeping non-engaged leads out until they’re warm

Once a lead hits the qualification threshold (e.g. Signal Score > 75), it’s synced to HubSpot, where all future engagement is tracked, attributed, and visible to Sales.

High-Level Modules in the Stack

This may seem complex at first glance, but there’s a very logical arrangement of tools used in this stack. Better still, it’s easy to adapt and connect to other systems as you bring them on board.

Here’s a high-level view of how the stack looks like (for now at least)…

How It Works: Summary Flow

Now you can see the stack, here’s a short summary of how each step ties to the next. Not so confusing now, is it? 

Clay identifies enriched, signal-ranked leads
↓
Make filters & syncs to HubSpot
↓
HubSpot tags & workflows (score, notify, assign)
↓
Smartlead sends campaign with personalised context
↓
Trigify watches social signals → feeds Make
↓
Make updates CRM or reactivates lead flow
↓
Slack/email alerts for real-time activation

Where Should You Store Contact Data?

It’s sometimes hard convincing traditional marketing teams that HubSpot, Salesforce or other CRM isn’t the only place to store contacts. But, to keep things clean and lean, your CRM should only be used to store contacts you already have some level of engagement with.

Airtable isn’t strictly required — but it can be a lifesaver if you want visibility, manual checks, or to reduce CRM noise. It also makes cross-functional collaboration (Marketing, Ops, Sales) much easier.

The JSON Blueprint: Your Starting Point

To make this repeatable, we’ve created a downloadable Make.com scenario with all the core components.  Feel free to download this, switch out the placeholders and have a go yourself. Or get in touch and see how we can refine it for your specific needs.

Component parts include:

• Webhook trigger for Clay output

• Signal Score filter

• HubSpot contact sync (with a few custom fields: signal_score, campaign_name, persona, signal_source)

• Add to list / trigger workflow in HubSpot

• Smartlead campaign sync with custom variables

• Trigify webhook trigger

• HubSpot update for real-time social signals

• Slack alert for SDRs

Download the JSON: signal_based_lead_activation_flow.json

Once imported, you’ll just need to:

• Replace YOUR_LIST_ID_OR_WORKFLOW_ID with your actual list or workflow in HubSpot

• Insert your Smartlead API key and campaign ID

• Plug in your Slack webhook URL

• Create the custom fields in HubSpot if they don’t exist yet (signal_score, campaign_name, persona, signal_source)

Beyond Human: AI-Driven Campaigning With Purpose

The goal here isn’t to spam faster. It’s to listen better.

We’re using AI to understand when and why someone might be open to a conversation — and then delivering messages that actually add value. It’s about being relevant, timely, and respectful.

By combining Clay, HubSpot, Airtable, Smartlead, and Trigify, we’re building marketing systems that don’t just scale — they think.

And best of all? They work while you sleep.