node.energy Generates 5x More Demos in Three Months Through Targeted Outbound With Clay Integrated Into HubSpot

Situation

• Company: node.energy, founded eight years ago in Frankfurt, Germany
• Industry: A SaaS platform for a climate-friendly energy economy
• Starting point:
  
  • Strong success on the generation side—wind and photovoltaic systems and asset management.
  • Expansion to the consumption side—industry, commerce, and the mid-market.
  • Product: Direct power purchase agreements between industrial companies and generators → lower-cost, carbon-neutral, and ESG-compliant.
  • Content marketing through webinars, white papers, and SEO worked, but outreach to buyers was inefficient.

Pain

• A very broad target market of 12,000 companies with no industry-specific restriction.
• Low response through conventional outbound channels such as LinkedIn, email, and ads.
• SDRs were not used to their full potential because the outreach foundation was not sufficiently reliable:
  
  • Risk of exhausting the market through poorly qualified outreach.
  • Wrong contacts and missing phone numbers.
  • Extensive research effort.
• A scaling problem despite product-market fit.

For these reasons, node.energy specifically wanted to solve the following challenge:

• Scaling outbound
• When SDRs call without preparation, the process is inefficient and frustrating, increasing the risk of churn within the sales team.
• Without a working outbound channel, node.energy would depend on expensive paid ads through LinkedIn, Google, and Meta.

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Impact

• Introduced Clay for signal-based outbound and company-data enrichment.
• Segmented the ICP into clusters:
  
  • Non-professional buyers—management or general procurement
  • Professional buyers
  • Semi-professional buyers
• Enabled a call-first culture by providing direct phone numbers with the right trigger at the right time
• Combined this with initial outreach through LinkedIn and email for integrated marketing.

Quantitative Results

• 5–6x more demos generated, increasing from an average of 5–6 per month to 30–35 per month.
• Efficiency boost: SDRs receive hundreds of qualified leads with contacts and phone numbers “at the press of a button.”
• Higher conversion: Outbound demos achieve a higher win rate than inbound demos

Five Reasons SalesPlaybook Was Chosen Initially—and Continues to Be

1. Build go-to-market as a core capability rather than outsourcing it.
2. Partner with an agency offering deep Clay, HubSpot, and B2B software expertise.
3. Use a signal-based outbound approach instead of mass outreach to avoid exhausting the market.
4. Do not replace SDRs entirely; enable them to become highly successful so they stay longer.
5. Establish signal-based outbound as a defensible growth channel with little reliance on paid ads in a market where LinkedIn, Meta, and Google ads continue to become more expensive.

node.energy demonstrates how targeted, signal-based outbound combined with content can work highly effectively in the mid-market to bring a complex product to market efficiently.

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