How we used Claude, Attio's MCP connector, and Apollo.io's API to build a fully enriched outreach pipeline with zero paid integrations.
The Background We're a cybersecurity-focused managed service provider based in Oakville, Ontario. We help professional services firms secure their Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments through transparent, month-to-month managed IT and security services. At the time of this project, we were early-stage. One client. Twelve managed seats. Roughly six months of runway. We had built our initial business through referrals and a handful of warm introductions, but growth had plateaued and the pipeline was thinning. The Challenge Our inbound approach had produced one anchor client, and nothing was replacing the momentum. Three proposals had gone cold in a row. We knew outbound prospecting was the answer, but the typical sales tooling stack presented its own problem. A conventional outbound setup, combining a tool like ZoomInfo for contact enrichment, Outreach for email sequencing, and a CRM with paid integration layers, would run $300 or more per month. For a company managing twelve seats, that kind of overhead doesn't pencil out. Even assembling a lighter stack would mean weeks of evaluating vendors, configuring integrations, mapping data fields between systems, and debugging broken webhooks. All of that before a single prospect gets contacted. We needed to build a functional outbound pipeline on a near-zero budget, without spending weeks on setup. The Solution We built an end-to-end prospecting workflow using three tools: Claude Pro ($100/month), Attio CRM (free tier), and Apollo.io (free tier with API access). LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which we already had, provided the initial prospect identification. The critical piece was Attio's MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector. MCP is an open standard that lets AI assistants interact directly with external tools. In practice, it meant Claude could create CRM records, update contact fields, and manage pipeline stages inside Attio through natural conversation. No middleware. No manual data entry. No CSV imports. The entire