Jacob TuwinerEvery RevOps leader has felt the pain of unreliable headcount data—acquired brands still floating in the CRM, duplicate records with mismatched domains, and reps wondering why “SMB” accounts have 15,000 employees.
Nooks was no different. Their SDR & marketing teams route deals by employee count, but parent‑child confusion was flooding Enterprise reps with tiny prospects and forcing mid‑cycle re‑assignments.
Traditional enrichment methods—manual LinkedIn checks or blunt data vendors—couldn’t untangle mergers & acquisitions or verify live headcounts fast enough.
That’s when Peter Mullins, VP Marketing at Nooks, tapped Sculpted + Clay to bring order (and trust) back to their CRM.
“We needed to validate the exact employee counts and whether there was a parent‑child relationship—otherwise our team was chasing the wrong accounts.” — Peter Mullins
TL;DR
Challenges | Solutions |
❌ M&A Chaos – Acquired brands borrowing parent headcount ruined routing rules. | ✅ Automated M&A detection isolates acquiring vs. acquired and fixes domain/name mismatches. |
❌ Headcount Inaccuracy – Wrong employee numbers sent reps to the wrong segment. | ✅ 3‑layer enrichment (LinkedIn ➜ ClayGPT search ➜ Apify scrape) delivers >95 % accuracy. |
❌ DIY Clay Attempts – Internal tests couldn’t separate active vs. absorbed subsidiaries. | ✅ Modular Clay workflow flags brands as active or inactive before pushing to HubSpot. |
❌ Lost Productivity – Reps spent time fixing data instead of prospecting. | ✅ Clean, trusted headcounts let SDRs focus on selling, not data entry. |
The Challenge: Parent‑Child Pandemonium
Nooks’ target‑account list was littered with brands like Clearbit.com (acquired by HubSpot) still showing a 10 k+ employee count pulled from the parent. SDRs were wasting touches on the wrong segment, and marketing campaigns were mistargeted.
“A small company acquired by a larger one would inherit a huge headcount—obviously inaccurate, and it disrupted outbound.” — Peter Mullins
Internal Clay experiments helped—but separating true subsidiaries from dissolved brands proved too brittle and credit‑intensive.
The Sculpted + Clay Solution
Why Clay?
- Coverage & accuracy: 100+ native data providers including live LinkedIn data, custom API calls, and ChatGPT prompts in one place
- Flexibility: Easy to build the custom workflow Nooks needed to validate a company’s status as independent, acquired, etc., enrich with accurate headcount data and push back to HubSpot with the proper parent/child relationship associations.
Workflow Highlights
- Intake & Normalize – Clean name + domain, manual Run controls to avoid credit storms.
- B2B SaaS Gate – Triple research prompts (description, product, pricing) ➜ AI decision on B2B + SaaS fit.
- M&A Detection – AI identifies acquiring vs. acquired entities, corrects names & domains.
- Brand‑Status Check – 301/404 website URL status code check w/ custom API + AI homepage research analysis → marks acquired brand active (still operating as their own business unit Nooks can sell to) or inactive (fully absorbed by parent).
- Headcount Enrichment – LinkedIn data → fallback to ClayGPT LinkedIn URL search → fallback to Apify scrape.
- HubSpot Push & Association – Upsert clean records and auto‑associate parent/child companies.
Results
Metric | Before | After |
Employee‑count accuracy | ~70 % | 95 %+ |
Time to process 40 k accounts | Weeks | < 2 hours |
Deal‑routing errors | Frequent re‑assignments | Near‑zero |
Rep confidence in data | Low | High – reps chase the right accounts first time |
“A very sophisticated solution that let us find the correct employee counts across a very large set of target accounts.” — Peter Mullins
Customer Sentiment
Trust: “We significantly increased confidence in our CRM data—especially around acquired relationships.”Speed: “Sculpted executed very quickly, and we could validate the data ahead of time.”
Partnership: “Great communication, quality output—I’d absolutely recommend the Sculpted team.”
Overall sentiment: ★★★★★