Is GTM Engineering 🧰 the way to scalable growth?

+ A FREE Outbound course inside

💡 In this Substack post, you will learn: 

1. That outbound is not dead (if you do it right) - data from my proprietary survey.

2. Exclusive FREE online course: Patrick Spychalski, Head of Content at Clay and Founder of Kiln agency, recorded 2 hours of hands-on materials that will guide you to your first successful outbound campaign.

3. What is GTM Engineering - Alex Lindahl has been a part of 7 Series A early GTM teams (3x 🦄). What does he do as a GTM Engineer and how can you and I learn GTM Engineering?

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Dear GTM Strategist 

Working on executing the GTM strategy can be daunting. 

There are so many pieces of content to produce, emails to send, and data to find. 

Who has time to do it all? 💀

Since you have 3-6 months to make or break it, you probably don't. 

Work smarter, not harder. 

Outbound is not dead. It works if you do it right. 

Gang, I have a confession to make - I do outbound. 

Ultimately, there are two ways how customers learn about new products: 

• They see it on the platforms where their attention already is …. Or …. Wait for it … 

• You proactively tell them that you exist and pitch what problems you can solve for them. 

On average, I reach 200,000 people organically on LinkedIn every week. 

Out of that, I get 3-5 leads a day- approximately 30 leads a week. 

80% of those leads are not my ICP, so I end up with 6 good leads weekly. 

Do I sit around, attend intro meetings, and maintain the status quo while the LinkedIn algorithm changes? 

Imagine if I could proactively put together a target list of my ICPs, craft a message about what value I can deliver to them, prove that I can do it, and provide value for them immediately.

That is called outbound. 📬

And apparently, I am not the only one doing it. 

We did a quick survey in July on LinkedIn. 198 kind community members pitched in. When I asked Which GTM Motions work the best for you right now? Here is what you said: 

*The % does not add up to 100% because it was a multiple-choice question

If you are wondering where on earth this comes from, here is the company structure so you can make a better sense of these results:

I wonder what Other is … Any government officials here? 

Next time we run such a survey, I will make sure that the sample is much larger so we can properly segment the data, but yes, many businesses see great results from outbound. 

But here is where it gets REALLY REALLY interesting. I also asked the respondents an open-ended question: What challenges do you have regarding outbound? I analyzed the data. ChatGPT is still good for that 🤠

We have and CAN do better than this. 

I forwarded these results to the content manager at Clay Patrick Spychalski…

…and asked him to provide some guidance for our community.  

He massively over-delivered 🙌 so instead of an email course, we present:

🥁🥁🥁

Clay x GTM Strategist Outbound Email Crash Course

🔮 Is GTM Engineering the future of GTM? 

During our podcast recording, product leader Aakash Gupta asked me, “Where do you see the future of GTM?” My top-of-mind answer was “GTM Engineering.” Here is why … 

OG article: https://foundationcapital.com/ai-service-as-software/ 

You know how much I like the idea of AI and automation handling daunting tasks so my team and I can focus on exciting things that make a massive impact. 

Up to 70% of business development and sales work are supremely BORING CRM tasks, admin work, finding data, and following up … 🤢 not for me … 

How about you?  

So, I went on a mission to discover how you and I can become GTM Engineers.

Alex Lindahl caught my attention 👀

Alex Lindahl has been a part of 7 Series A early GTM teams. Three have become unicorns and maybe Clay will be the fourth. He writes about all things GTM engineering, automating workflows with Clay, prompt engineering, and the future of GTM on his substack, Claymation: www.clayautomation.com.

So I invited him to answer a couple of questions for you and me to understand what GTM engineering is all about and how we can use it to craft winning GTM strategies. Hear it from Alex:

What is GTM Engineering?

Most sales motions today include an Account Executive (AE) and Solution Engineer (SE). AE manages the business relationship and overall sales process, and the SE manages everything technical (demo, technical questions, running a POC).

Clay decided to combine the two roles into what we call a GTM Engineer. (Hat tip to Co-Founder, Varun Anand, and GTM Engineers, Andrew Malacrea and George Dilthey who developed this vision & title.)

But, what do we do?

At its foundation - we help customers engineer new types of GTM solutions with Clay. Similar to software engineering, GTM engineering takes a systematic approach to designing, developing, testing, and maintaining GTM systems. This could be designing automations, workflows, or data orchestration between different components of the GTM tech stack. This includes custom data sourcing & enrichment, AI prompt engineering, automating manual processes, building workflows between disparate tooling, and using SynthAI and GenAI to automate manual research (for sales reps) & content at scale (such as personalized emails).

Think of a website - it has multiple components; videos, content, web forms, interactive content, and so on that all work together for a cohesive experience. Now think of the GTM stack. It’s gotten overly convoluted, clunky, bloated, and not much is talking to each other to create a similar experience for users.. 

Our ultimate objective is to help companies run on better data intelligence, automate away unnecessary tasks, and improve overall GTM team efficiency to increase productivity and revenue. 

To accomplish this - we work with customers to understand their unique ICP data needs, what parts of the tech stack need to be integrated, what databases (from within our data marketplace) to source this information, write custom AI prompts to automate manual research at scale with our AI agent, connect tooling with APIs, and orchestrate all of these workflows.

Here’s an example in the context of an AI language translation company. 

Their objective is to figure out 1) what accounts are the best to go after (have the most pain, likely to convert at high ACV), 2) gather intelligence to score the accounts & create positioning, 3) find the right people, 4) arm the reps with the data in a concise, usable form.

For those that aren’t familiar with 10-Ks - they are annual reports that public companies publish once a year on the state of the business. This includes a treasure trove of information such as key priorities, where they are investing, what metrics they need to improve, key risks to the business and much more. Top enterprise reps use this information to form a hypothesis on business needs and to position their solution from initial conversation to proposal. 

1. Build a list of Fortune 1000 companies

2. Find all of their 10-K reports

3. Analyze those 10-K reports to figure out

   1. Where are they expanding?

   2. How many countries do they operate in?

   3. Are they launching new products?

4. Now analyze the company’s website

   1. How many languages is the site translated into?

   2. Does the website have a training portal?

   3. What’s the name of the training program?

5. Find recent news on the company related to country expansion

6. Use AI to analyze whether they have a gap in the number of countries they operate in, the number of languages their website is translated into, and how many countries are non-English speaking and would need additional translated website copy or training materials.

7. Figure out how big the Learning & Development  team is

8. Score the accounts

9. Lookup the record in Salesforce if they have existing contacts

10. If not, find new contacts at the account

11. Create a research report on the company for the rep

12. Send all of the data on the company into Salesforce, the research report to the AE via a Slack notification, and the personalized emails into an email cadence.

There could be many more steps too. Such as looking up data in niche databases they may have a subscription to, or sending data into a video creation tool to create personalized videos at scale.

This is all GTM engineering. Thinking through the requirements, connecting APIs, AI prompt engineering, and bringing this all together into a custom solution that is automated. Finally, sprinkling in creative thinking so that you can help the customer think differently about their GTM approach, campaigns, or new ways applying AI and automation.

This is what we do as GTM Engineers inside Clay. However, we’re quickly seeing this role emerge within organizations themselves. I’ve even come across a pre-IPO security company that has a “GTM Engineering” org. The title is also starting to pop up. I truly believe this trend will continue and become mainstream within GTM.

Can you share examples with results? 

Some SDRs spend 1-2.5 days per week on list building and research. It’s very common for us to be able to automate away 90-100% of this work so they can spend more time prospecting.

Same thing with RevOps and Sales, we’re often saving 1000s of hours of manual work.

In other areas, we’re increasing speed to lead so that enrichment + personalized email response is within minutes.

We’re really just at the beginning here and we’ll be publishing more case studies.

Is it a fancy word to say that we should automate and use AI? 

It’s more than just automation and AI. This is thinking about systems and processes more holistically. Not only how everything works together, but also how the engineer system fits into GTM team members’ daily workflows & habits. 

We’re seeing a move from Software-as-a-Service to Service-as-Software. You can think of GTM Engineering as helping engineer the system that provides the service. Or, at least at Clay, we’re providing both Software and building the Services that are delivered through the Software.

Our vision is to be the ultimate creative platform for GTM teams. 

What personally led you to identify as a GTM engineer? 

I’ve always found myself drawn to understanding the technical aspects of what I sell. So, being able to get more technical, apply those skills, and build solutions for customers was really appealing. Plus, I was craving more creativity in my professional career. I needed something different from your typical AE role. I’ve never had so much fun in a role helping customers and building what I always wanted to have as a seller.

Where can companies apply GTM engineering? 

GTM Engineering to functional areas outside outbound 

• Customer Success - you can use signals/research to learn earlier in the customer lifecycle if the account is at risk.

• Venture Capital - some firms are building “Clay-as-a-Service”, or think “Intelligence-as-a-Service” to their portfolio companies. Other use cases, are tracking their networks (when an Exec leaves to start a company), or tracking their portfolio company.

• Angel Investing - I’ve used Clay to source investment opportunities.

• Recruiting - I came across a pretty interesting use case the other day that used Clay to analyze growth trends of companies and where their competitors were placing reps.

Does any other company have GTM engineers?

We are starting to see Clay as a requirement in job postings. This trend is gaining momentum and 100% foresee the GTM Engineer title becoming more prevalent, too.

How can you learn GTM Engineering?  

There’s a ton of resources to learn Clay. Learn Clay, get creative, and as a result you learn GTM Engineering. I’d also recommend learning how to do prompt engineering. The basics are rather straightforward, but it does take a while to be proficient with the nuances and to get really good outputs. 

Here are a few places to get started:

• Clay University - learn the building blocks.

• Clay Cohorts - two week program with a curriculum.

• Clay Community - Clay’s slack for community support & everything Clay

• OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide - to learn prompting

• Perplexity.ai - great for synthesizing best practices on prompting & asking follow-up questions

• Anthropic Prompt Generator - use AI to write better prompts

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Thanks so much for an excellent collaboration, Alex and Clayers! 

You are AMAZING to support the GTM community like this. 

GTM Strategists, let’s step up our outbound game. 

1. If you are a beginner - start here for free. 2000 FREE credits are waiting for you, which is more than enough to get your first campaign up and running. 

2. For the outbound pros - check out Alex’s work. It is world-class. 

I hope you enjoyed this one, and see you next week where we will explore the wonderful world of partnerships with Nelson Wang (head of partnerships at Airtable - prev. Miro, Box, etc.) and PartnerStack, leading B2B partnership software. 

Make sure you are subscribed and hit a ❤️ or drop me a comment if you enjoyed this Substack so I will know that you are interested in learning more about this topic. 

Let’s go to market! 🚀
Maja

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