The GTM Engineer Podcast

In today's episode, I chat with Nicolas Goehler, who leads GTM and ops at MPM Labs, about breaking out of email and LinkedIn entirely and building outreach around Telegram for the web3 and blockchain space. We get into why MPM Labs focuses on connecting crypto-native startups (prediction markets, perp DEXs, trading platforms) with the right users and partners, and why Telegram now outperforms LinkedIn for reply rates in that world. Nicolas walks through the flow he built over the past three months to pull Telegram and Twitter usernames for LinkedIn prospects, so cold outreach can move to the channel busy executives actually check. We also trace his path from building "Duolingo for crypto" as a teenager, to working b2b sales in commercial real estate finance on Wall Street, to landing in GTM engineering by merging tech, sales, and content skills. He shares why he thinks GTM engineering is one of the few roles AI won't shrink over the next five to ten years, why fractional GTM work is a smart path for young professionals, and his advice: don't limit yourself to what seems possible, keep pushing Claude Code with follow-up questions, and build your own playbook instead of copying what you see online. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to The GTM Engineer Podcast (0:21) What MPM Labs Does: full-circle web3 consultancy for prediction markets, perp DEXs, and trading platforms (1:50) MPM's Internal Campaign: shifting from LinkedIn to Telegram for crypto outreach (3:00) The Flow: pulling Telegram and Twitter usernames from LinkedIn prospects (4:50) Choosing Channels: WhatsApp in India vs. Telegram in web3, and why unsaturated channels win (6:59) Nicolas's Journey: from teenage crypto trader to "Duolingo for crypto" founder (8:31) Pivot to B2B Sales: Wall Street commercial real estate finance (9:36) Becoming a GTM Engineer: merging tech, sales, and content skills (12:01) Predictions: why GTM engineering will grow, not shrink, over the next 5-10 years (12:52) Fractional GTM Work: why it's a strong path for young professionals (16:02) Advice: don't limit yourself, keep pushing Claude Code, and build your own playbook🔗 CONNECT WITH NICOLAS 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to The GTM Engineer Podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with CheeTung Leong, founder at The GTM Architects, about helping mid-size B2B software and services companies build genuinely AI-native go-to-market systems—not just bolting AI onto the same old ZoomInfo and Outreach pipeline. The campaigns he walks through are real problem-solving exercises: finding car washes and narrowing a massive TAM down by digging into public records for how much each one actually spends on water, and building first-party signal systems for a 100K-user client by pulling together HubSpot, Postgres, and product analytics to define custom lead states and the next best action for each one. CheeTung's background is 10 years as a tech founder—enterprise consulting selling to Fortune 500s, a venture-funded startup raised to Series A and $3M ARR with a 14-person GTM team, a bootstrapped SaaS attempt, and eventually building The GTM Architects after deciding not to push a dying edtech business uphill. He's now running 70% of his work through Claude Code, building a skill that pulls from nine or ten sources—DKIM/DMARC settings, website HTML stack detection, social posts—into an Opus-strategist agent that outputs full pre-call research documents, and he's publishing fully-sourced 3,700-word blog teardowns weekly using the same system, work that used to take a month per article. His prediction: the bleeding-edge GTM engineers will burn out as starving artists while tools like Clay move upmarket toward enterprises who'd rather hire average operators than chase geniuses—but the fundamentals of people-to-people selling won't change, just the speed at which the tooling evolves. His advice: take on early clients for free to build proof, then charge, and remember the build itself is commoditized now—your own thinking is the only thing that isn't. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to The GTM Engineer Podcast (0:27) What The GTM Architects Does: AI-Native GTM Systems for Mid-Size B2B Companies (2:06) The Car Wash Campaign: Narrowing TAM by Digging Into Public Water Spend Records (3:05) First-Party Signal Systems: Combining HubSpot, Postgres, and Product Analytics for 100K Users (7:08) CheeTung's Journey: Enterprise Consulting, a Series A Startup, and Shutting Down to Build GTM Architects (9:06) Running 70% of Work Through Claude Code: The Pre-Call Research Skill Across 10 Sources (11:46) Publishing Fully-Sourced 3,700-Word GTM Teardowns Weekly With Fable 5 (14:03) Predictions: The Starving Artist GTME, Clay Moving Upmarket, and Why the Fundamentals Won't Change (19:22) Advice: Take Early Clients for Free, Then Charge—The Build Is Commoditized, Your Thinking Isn't🔗 CONNECT WITH CHEETUNG 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to The GTM Engineer Podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Sashank, GTM engineer at Interact, about what it looks like to run 15 simultaneous demand-generation engines for a category-creation product—where the job isn't capturing existing demand but making people care about a problem they don't yet know they have. The standout campaign is a segmentation approach that buckets prospects by how urgently the product solves their specific problem, reconstructing their HubSpot in the background from LinkedIn data to simulate their customer base—producing 35-40% reply rates and cutting average sales cycles from 45-50 days down to 18-20. Alongside email and LinkedIn, Sashank is running gifting campaigns, field marketing with Hallmark cards that link directly to the AI agent they're selling, and a "show don't tell" philosophy where every campaign ends with the prospect actually talking to the product. His path is one of the wildest on the show: professional musician, artist manager at 17 with an eight-figure exit he donated, keyframe animation studio founder, pre-sales engineer, SDR, CSM at Factors where he built 200+ automations in 14 months, and now sitting on $1.6M in pipeline solo at Interact within one month. His prediction: the "I'll build it myself" wave will die when people discover the maintenance reality—software ages like fish, not frozen meat. His advice: GTM engineering is an evolution, not an escape from sales—understand GTM deeply before touching the engineering side. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to The GTM Engineer Podcast (0:21) What Sashank Does: 15 Demand-Gen Engines for a Category-Creation Product at Interact (1:40) The Psychological Bucketing Campaign: Simulating Prospect HubSpots, 35-40% Reply Rates (4:39) Show Don't Tell: Every Campaign Ends With the Prospect Talking to the Agent (6:43) Field Marketing, Gifting, and Hallmark Cards That Link Directly to the Product (7:51) Sashank's Journey: Musician to Animation Studio to SDR to CSM to GTM Engineer (12:00) 1,500 Applications, 392 Interviews, 18 Offers—and $1.6M in Pipeline in One Month (15:49) Predictions: The Build-It-Yourself Wave Will Die When Maintenance Reality Hits (19:27) Advice: GTM Engineering Is an Evolution, Not an Escape—Understand GTM Before the Engineering🔗 CONNECT WITH SASHANK 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to The GTM Engineer Podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Tom Dingwall, AI Growth Manager at Passionfruit, about why the future of GTM engineering is human connection enabled by AI — not AI replacing humans. Passionfruit is a freelance marketplace helping companies flexibly resource their teams, with an AI tool (PIP AI) built on top to help marketers free up time from repetitive work and focus on real relationships. Tom's role sits somewhere between SDR and AE — he runs outbound, takes calls, and works deals through to close — and he walks through what that looks like day to day, including how Passionfruit's cold calling unit of four optimizes not just on list quality but on what they're saying in the first few seconds and when they're calling. He makes a strong case for AI as a calendar-clearing tool rather than a headcount-cutting one: use it to find the right companies, research why they're a fit, and then show up to the call with nothing to do but actually connect. We also get into his path — PPE at uni, six months in recruitment, then a co-founder at Passionfruit reached out — and why he ended up in sales specifically because of how human the job is. His predictions for the next few years are clear: companies will split into those that overshoot on AI and lose the human side, those that ignore it and fall behind, and the ones that get the balance right and compound hard. He closes with two pieces of advice: if you don't genuinely enjoy talking to people all day, GTM isn't for you — and if you do, go deep on AI tools, because the people who combine both will be world-class.Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to The GTM Engineer Podcast (0:21) Tom's Role as AI Growth Manager at Passionfruit: SDR, AE, and Everything Between (1:29) Creative Campaigns and Cold Calling Optimization at Passionfruit (3:59) How Tom Uses AI to Build Lists — and When He Steps Away From It (5:18) Why Teams Enabling SDRs With AI Beat Teams Replacing Them (7:31) Tom's Journey: PPE, Recruitment, and Landing at Passionfruit (9:49) Predictions: The Three Types of Sales Teams That Will Emerge in the AI Era (13:35) Advice for Aspiring GTM Engineers: Grit, People Skills, and AI Literacy🔗 CONNECT WITH TOM 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to The GTM Engineer Podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with David, founder at Nerdy Joe, about running a sales development agency that blends old school deal-making with engineering—cold calling, door knocking, Clay tables, and workflow automations all under one roof, with a team based in Serbia and a client concentration in B2B manufacturing and business brokerage. The campaigns he's most proud of aren't the flashiest: a long-term client texting unprompted to say his account manager Teodora is awesome, and a recent acquisition of an agency called CreateUp that brought engineering talent, SOPs, and an official Apollo.io partnership—which is now generating joint marketing, GTM meetups in Toronto and Serbia, and inbound leads from Apollo itself. David's backstory is one of the more colourful on the show: built an SEO content agency from age 20 into a multimillion dollar business, watched ChatGPT nuke it, spent 12 months trying to acquire five different businesses including a $5M ad agency in Boston and a $4M government contracts agency in Tampa—both walked away at the one yard line—before landing on Nerdy Joe, which he bought for next to nothing and has been rebuilding ever since. He also ran 5,000 Twitter accounts 10 years ago doing follow-unfollow cold acquisition and generating 200 leads a month before Twitter caught on and torched all the accounts. His prediction: predicting the next 12-24 months is a fool's errand, but not using AI right now is the equivalent of refusing to use a computer—and he backs it up with a story about running 2,000 Red Cross survey responses through Claude for $13 in credits, work that would have cost $30,000 in junior researcher hours 20 years ago. His advice: get obsessed with sales, stay on the phone, and if you're not steeped in AI every single day, you're already falling behind. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to The GTM Engineer Podcast (0:22) What Nerdy Joe Does: Old School Sales Dev Meets Engineering (2:51) Client Focus: B2B Manufacturing and Business Brokers—Why the Fertile Ground Is There (9:13) The CreateUp Acquisition and Apollo.io Partnership (13:14) David's Journey: SEO Empire, ChatGPT Nukes It, Five Failed Acquisitions, Landing on Nerdy Joe (14:24) 5,000 Twitter Accounts, 200 Leads a Month, and Getting Torched by the Algorithm (20:54) Predictions: Predicting the Next 24 Months Is a Fool's Errand—But Not Using AI Is Inexcusable (25:05) The Red Cross Story: $13 in Claude Credits Does $30,000 Worth of Market Research Work (29:00) Where Is All of This Going? A Science Fiction Answer and a Mainstream One🔗 CONNECT WITH DAVID 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to The GTM Engineer Podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Gunveen, founder at Growzle, about building an offshore marketing team for bootstrapped London startups who need agency-quality GTM work at half the cost—and helping Indian startups expand into the US, UK, and Europe. The campaign story is a great one: a client handed over a list of 4,000 UK companies and said "go get us calls." Gunveen's team filtered it down to 900 by tracking two signals—whether companies were already using a competitor tool (longer conversion cycle, skip them) and whether they were actively hiring (fast growth means expense management chaos, which is exactly the pain the product solves). Those 900 got personalized emails built from LinkedIn research on leadership posts fed into Clay via the Claude extension, and the open rate came in at 61% against an industry standard of 30-35%. Gunveen's path runs through a B2B SaaS agency in India that analyzed content tonality, a master's in marketing and strategy in London, freelance GTM work with lean startups, and eventually the realization that she kept being the first marketing person on these teams and could build a whole business around that gap. Her prediction: GTM engineering will blow up because it's now easier to build a product than to market it—most companies are just LLM wrappers, and the ones worth billions got there through positioning, not technology. Her advice: understand biopsychology before you touch the tools, research signals properly for each ICP, and build your automation with the mindset of a smart salesperson—the goal is to get someone on a call, not just to send emails. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:21) What Growzle Does: Offshore Marketing for London Startups, GTM Expansion for Indian Companies (2:54) The 4,000-to-900 Campaign: Competitor Tech Stack and Hiring Signals, 61% Open Rate (7:52) Why Fast Hiring Is a Proxy for Expense Management Chaos—and Why That Matters for Deal Quality (9:06) Gunveen's Journey: India to London, Master's in Marketing, Freelance GTM, Starting Growzle (11:35) Predictions: GTM Engineering Will Blow Up, Marketing Value Is Rising, Positioning Beats Product (15:33) Advice: Learn Biopsychology, Research Signals First, Build Automation Like a Smart Salesperson🔗 CONNECT WITH GUNVEEN 👥 LinkedIn   🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Nick, founder at Revo GTM, about what cold email looks like when you're sending 20 million emails a month and targeting 100 million by end of year. At that scale, the thinking flips entirely—instead of taking a client and figuring out how to scale them, Nick starts from the infrastructure and asks which markets are actually worth pointing it at. The answer has been super mass-market B2B: alternative financing, franchising, real estate wholesale, pay-per-call—offers that tens of millions of people immediately understand without any education, where a positive reply already tells you exactly what's going on in their business. The campaigns that work all share the same characteristic: simplicity and a massive TAM. Nick's been using Claude Code to enrich and qualify at a scale that would be impossible manually, running datasets of 10-50 million records headlessly. His path started in e-commerce, moved into direct response copywriting and funnel building when he needed to exit, and landed on cold email when he realized he needed clients—at which point the puzzle pieces clicked. His prediction: headless tech stacks will turn 10-person teams into three-person teams, and the top 1% will pull further ahead because their input now produces 10x the output. His advice: get your hands dirty every single day—be in the WhatsApp groups, the Slack communities, on Twitter, because things move fast enough that just being present and implementing what you see gives you a real edge. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:21) What Revo GTM Does: Mass Market B2B at 20 Million Emails a Month (1:38) Thinking Top-Down: Picking Markets That Fit the Infrastructure, Not the Other Way Around (4:04) What Every Winning Campaign Has in Common: Simplicity, Massive TAM, No Education Required (6:33) Nick's Journey: E-Commerce to Copywriting to Cold Email Agency Owner (8:16) Why E-Com People Have a GTM Edge: Full Funnel Thinking, Abandoned Cart Logic in B2B (10:44) Predictions: Headless Tech Stacks, Services as the New SaaS, Top 1% Pulls Further Ahead (13:00) Lead Magnets as a Growth Engine: 3.3M Organic LinkedIn Impressions From Five Employee Accounts (14:17) Advice: Get in the Trenches, Stay in the Right Rooms, Implement Fast🔗 CONNECT WITH NICK 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Carly, GTM engineer at Mako Professionals, about building outbound systems for recruitment agencies—first for Evolution Group in the Netherlands placing financial staff, now for Mako Professionals in the US sourcing SAP and Oracle architects. The standout workflow is a Clay-based candidate scoring table that scrapes job posts and candidate profiles, runs an AI match score, and only pushes the best-fit candidates into outreach sequences—with recruiters signing off on the results and being genuinely happy with the quality. From there, leads flow into a Lemlist sequence combining emails, LinkedIn, phone calls, and voice notes. Carly's path in is one of the more unexpected ones: operations assistant at a financial immigration company, got a cold LinkedIn message from an agency called Blueprints, everyone told her it was a scam, she followed her gut anyway, met Rayyan Khan who trained her, and hasn't looked back since. Her prediction: email is getting harder, LinkedIn is where the opportunity is growing, and automation through tools like Make is going to be the real differentiator as CRM and ATS integrations get smarter. Her advice cuts in two directions—for aspiring GTM engineers, don't get lost in the jargon, focus on building the workflow and saving time for your team, and use the free education that's already out there; for founders and CEOs, trust your GTM engineer and give them the space to work. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards(0:21) What Mako Professionals Does: GTM and Outbound for Recruitment Agencies(1:33) The Clay Candidate Scoring Table: AI Match Scoring Before Pushing Into Campaigns(2:43) The Lemlist Sequence: Emails, LinkedIn, Calls, and Voice Notes(6:06) Carly's Journey: Operations Assistant to GTM Engineer via a LinkedIn Cold Message Everyone Said Was a Scam(8:04) Predictions: Email Getting Harder, LinkedIn Growing, Automation Through Make Is the Opportunity(10:55) Advice for GTM Engineers: Focus on the Workflow, Not the Jargon—Education Is Free(12:13) Advice for Founders: Trust Your GTM Engineer and Give Them Space🔗 CONNECT WITH CARLY👥 LinkedIn 💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEWIf you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCHYou can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Omar, GTM engineer at Saltfish, an early-stage SaaS company in Sweden building interactive demos for other SaaS products. Omar joined as their first GTM hire with a mandate to take them from selling only in Sweden to conquering Europe, the US, and the MENA region—owning the full process from ICP definition to booked meetings. The campaign he walks through is a great one: Saltfish had a case study with Fathom showing that an AI avatar on a pricing page improved conversion by 13%, so Omar built a Clay list of SaaS companies, then ran each through an AI agent that validated three things—do they have a pricing page, is the product self-serve, and what's the pricing page length—and used that last variable as a personalized line in the cold email. 40 interested leads and 15 booked meetings in 20 days. His background runs through one of the first GTM-focused agencies in the Arab region, where he joined a friend's operation as employee number one, spent two years managing 15-20 client accounts, became head of GTM, and helped grow the agency from a small office with no clients to 30 active clients, 100+ total, and $50K MRR before going independent. His prediction and advice land in the same place: the GTM engineers who only know how to execute workflows will get replaced by AI, and the ones who survive will be the ones who can think like marketers, generate creative campaign ideas, and understand offers deeply—read $100M Offers before you open Clay University. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:36) What Saltfish Does: Interactive Demos With AI Avatars for SaaS Products (2:06) The Fathom Case Study Campaign: Pricing Page Validation, AI Enrichment, 15 Meetings in 20 Days (5:25) How to Take It Further: Traffic Data, Dollar Value, MRR Impact in the Email (7:23) Omar's Journey: First Employee at an Arab Region GTM Agency, Head of GTM, $50K MRR (9:56) Predictions: Execution-Only GTM Engineers Will Be Replaced, Creativity Is the Moat (12:36) Advice: You're a GTM Engineer, Not Just an Engineer—Mindset and Offers First, Tools Second🔗 CONNECT WITH OMAR 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Nelson and Juan from Tennis One, a tennis coaching academy in Auckland, New Zealand, that's building itself into a lifestyle brand rather than just a service. The GTM story here is unlike anything else on the show: Juan runs an influencer outreach operation entirely on Instagram DMs, targeting micro to macro influencers between 5K and 50K followers whose content naturally aligns with the Tennis One lifestyle, offering them free coaching in exchange for content creation. The reply rate is 60-80%, and the first seven months produced nothing—then one influencer said yes, and the snowball effect took over. Mission Bay Tennis Club just won the 2025 New Zealand Tennis Club of the Year award, and inbound brand partnerships now come to them rather than the other way around. Juan's background runs from waiter in a Colombian restaurant in Takapuna—where he consistently outsold every other staff member on the monthly special—through an IT degree he pivoted away from, into tech sales startups, and eventually into GTM engineering at Tennis One. Nelson's take as the business owner is straightforward: one specialized person who can contact influencers effectively and build the system around it is worth more than a full marketing team running ads. Their advice: always lead with value, think in systems, show employers outcomes not effort, and persevere long enough to find the trigger—because once it clicks, it compounds fast. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:26) What Tennis One Does: Coaching Academy Turned Lifestyle Brand in Auckland (2:17) The Instagram Influencer Outreach Playbook: 60-80% Reply Rate, Free Coaching for Content (5:29) Seven Months of Nothing, Then One Yes, Then a Snowball—and a National Club Award (7:45) Juan's Journey: Top Waiter to IT Student to Tech Sales to GTM Engineer (9:46) Predictions: GTM and RevOps Are the Careers of the Future, SDRs Are Being Replaced (12:49) Advice: Lead With Value, Think in Systems, Show Outcomes Not Effort, and Persevere🔗 CONNECT WITH JUAN 👥 LinkedIn 📸 Instagram 💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Enzo Carasso, founder at C17 Lab, about why he's actively steering away from B2B SaaS clients and going deep on professional services, manufacturers, and logistics—industries that represent 80% of US GDP but get ignored by most outbound agencies chasing the same SaaS slice. The campaign story is one of the best on the show: a client getting 500 leads a month but converting at 5% because their prospects—traditional business owners—were responding to emails at 6-7am from their phones, then disappearing into the field all day. The fix wasn't better copy. It was switching device: email replies triggered an SMS prompt that moved the conversation to the SDR's phone, where these owners were already comfortable. The result was a dramatically higher show rate. Enzo has since built SMS and iMessage directly into the post-reply funnel and is pulling heavily from B2C info product playbooks—abandoned cart logic, newsletters for anyone who replies regardless of outcome, multi-channel nurture sequences—and applying them to B2B. His background is corporate outbound at Booking.com and Square, where he was leading acquisition records quarter over quarter before deciding at 29 he wasn't going to be working for someone else at 30. His prediction: the mid-tier agency charging $4-7k is going to get squeezed out—what survives is either the high-volume factory model or the genuinely high-ticket strategic partner, with software-like fulfillment on both ends. His advice is the most contrarian on the show: don't become a GTM engineer. The tools are becoming commoditized fast, and what actually matters now is the strategic thinking that connects them to ROI—study other industries, find alpha, and think like a business owner first. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:20) What C17 Lab Does: Full Funnel Revenue Engineering From Lead to Booked Call (1:09) Why Enzo Is Running Away From B2B SaaS—And the GDP Argument Behind It (4:00) The Device-Switching Campaign: 500 Leads a Month, 5% Conversion, and the SMS Fix (7:15) Building SMS and iMessage Into the Post-Reply Funnel (9:20) What B2B Can Learn From B2C: Abandoned Cart Logic, Newsletter Retargeting, Multi-Channel Nurture (10:43) Enzo's Journey: Booking.com, Square, Crushing Acquisition Records, Going Solo at 30 (12:25) Predictions: The Mid-Tier Agency Dies, Two Models Survive—Factory or High-Ticket Strategic Partner (16:56) Advice: Don't Become a GTM Engineer—Become Someone Who Thinks Strategically About ROI🔗 CONNECT WITH ENZO 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with James, founder at Litehouse, about why offer, volume, and deliverability are still the three pillars that actually move the needle—and why most of the fancy workflows people post about on LinkedIn are more performance than necessity. The standout campaign is a competitor-ranking angle for a local SEO client: find what keyword the prospect wants to rank for, scrape who's outranking them, pull that competitor name into the copy, and pitch an asset breaking down exactly why the competitor is winning. Simple, personal, and it works because the prospect already knows and wants to beat that competitor. James also walks through an automated audit workflow where a positive reply triggers Clay to pull context, Claude generates a bespoke doc, and it gets sent back as a PDF—fast turnaround, high perceived value. His take on the market is worth paying attention to: 18 months ago he was sending 20-30 emails per inbox per day comfortably; now it's a max of 5 new contacts, inboxes burn out in months, and $4-5k a month is the new floor to run cold email properly. Volume is the underrated lever right now—doubling sends will often outperform spending hundreds of hours optimizing copy. His path started with a web design agency, using cold email to generate their own meetings, realizing lead gen was the only thing reliably working, and deciding to sell that as the service itself. His advice: don't chase shiny objects, listen to your own data over LinkedIn noise, and stick with things long enough to actually get good at them. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:21) What Litehouse Does: Cold Email at Scale, Clay Automations, LinkedIn (1:22) Competitor Ranking Angle: Scraping Who Outranks Your Prospect and Using It in Copy (2:01) Automated Audit Workflow: Positive Reply Triggers Clay, Claude Builds the Doc, PDF Sent Back (2:57) The Three Pillars: Offer, Volume, Deliverability (6:29) James' Journey: Web Design Agency to Cold Email as the Actual Product (9:35) Predictions: Volume Is Underrated, Clay Pricing Is a Big Deal, Inbox Burn Rate Has Exploded (13:08) Cold Email Is Harder But Still Working—A Client Closed $22K in One Day (15:36) Advice: Ignore Shiny Objects, Trust Your Data, Stick With It Long Enough to Get Good🔗 CONNECT WITH JAMES 👥 LinkedIn 💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Swagatam, GTM engineer at oneaway, about collapsing 12 Clay tables into one and routing leads into 12 campaigns from a single source of truth—a restructure that produced 223 interested replies at a 7.12% interest rate in 30 days for a major data provider client. The campaign had five angles: showing US founders that the tool already had their colleagues' phone numbers as a proof-of-data move, a competitor angle using BuiltWith to reference what tools they were already running, and three more cuts based on sales team size pulled from AIR.com—a database worth knowing for its 30-day data refresh. Swagatam's path here is one of the more unusual ones on the show: skipped campus placements after graduating in 2022 because he was already deep into cold email, joined a Netherlands-based agency, then spent two years at Instantly handling 90-100 support tickets a day and building the AI support agent that now handles the majority of their inbound queries before escalating to a human. Two years of watching exactly where people break down at scale turned out to be a better GTM education than most get deliberately. His prediction: saturation keeps climbing because volume is still the default, and Claude Code will increasingly replace Clay for enrichment as pricing rises. His advice: before building workflows, go into Slack communities, find real problems people are stuck on, solve them, and post what you learn on LinkedIn two or three times a week—you never know who's watching even when the likes are low. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:21) What oneaway Does: Cold Email and LinkedIn Outbound for High-Growth B2B SaaS (1:08) The 12-Tables-to-1 Restructure: 223 Interested Replies and a 7.12% Interest Rate (3:01) Campaign Breakdown: Phone Number Angle, Competitor Angle, and Sales Team Size Segmentation (5:25) AIR.com: The Underrated Database With 30-Day Data Refresh (6:20) Swagatam's Journey: Skipping Campus Placements, Netherlands Agency, Joining Instantly in 2023 (8:52) Two Years of 90-100 Support Tickets a Day and Building Instantly's AI Support Agent (10:15) Predictions: Saturation Gets Worse, Claude Code Replaces Clay Enrichment, Homework Wins (12:39) Advice: Solve Real Problems From Slack Communities, Post on LinkedIn, Let the Work Get You Noticed🔗 CONNECT WITH SWAGATAM 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Tiffany, founder at RevEnvy, about why leading with content before outreach changes the entire dynamic of that first sales call—instead of fighting for credibility from zero, the prospect already knows you, trusts you, and has been getting value from you before you ever asked for their time. RevEnvy runs LinkedIn outreach, email, and SDR calling like most lead gen agencies, but the layer on top is content-led outreach paired with lead magnets that are genuinely good enough that people say they would have paid for them—a cybersecurity client's lead magnet is getting exactly that response right now. The fitness instructor example is a good illustration of how the approach works in practice: full workout plans as lead magnets, prospects using them and realizing they actually want a real coach, and the conversation following naturally from there. Tiffany's journey into this is the kind that a lot of people in lead gen will relate to—decade-plus in enterprise sales, a layoff landing on the exact day she and her family closed on the sale of their house in Kentucky while in the middle of moving five states to Florida, taking the first contract VP of Sales role available just to stabilize, spending three months doing go-to-market work for one company, realizing at the end of it that a difficult boss was actually the best thing that could have happened because it made walking away easy, and asking herself why she was doing all of this for one company when she could do it for many. RevEnvy was born from that question. Her prediction: AI SDRs will get there on LinkedIn and email, probably within a few years, and the people who lean in now will have a real advantage over those who wait—but cold calling stays human both because the skill ceiling is genuinely high and because the regulatory environment around AI voice calls is a hard wall. The more interesting near-term development she points to is live AI coaching for SDRs on calls in real time, which compresses ramp time and changes the economics of building a sales team entirely. Her advice: don't go cold turkey the way she did if you can avoid it—keep the day job while you build, find a mentor who has already made the mistakes you're about to make, and don't recreate the wheel when the tools are already out there. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:22) What RevEnvy Does: Content-Led Outreach Plus LinkedIn, Email, and SDR Calling (1:04) Why Content Before Outreach Changes the First Call Entirely (2:36) Client Focus: B2B Tech, SaaS, Cybersecurity, Coaches and Consultants (3:10) Lead Magnets That People Would Actually Pay For: Fitness, Cybersecurity, and the Bar to Clear (6:00) Tiffany's Journey: Enterprise Sales, Layoff on Moving Day, Contract Role, and Starting RevEnvy (8:00) Why a Difficult Boss Was the Best Thing That Could Have Happened (9:28) Predictions: AI SDRs Are Coming, Cold Calling Stays Human, Live AI Coaching Changes Ramp Time (13:29) Advice: Keep the Day Job While You Build, Find a Mentor, Don't Recreate the Wheel🔗 CONNECT WITH TIFFANY 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Marc, GTM Director for LATAM at Eleven Labs, about what it actually takes to open a brand new region for a company that already has strong penetration in the US and Europe—building a hub in Mexico City, covering the entire Latin American market except Brazil, and going after enterprise tech and consumer companies that can use Eleven Labs' voice AI to automate customer success or sales processes internally. The story here is less about a single campaign and more about the outbound culture Eleven Labs has built from the ground up: SDRs carry a target of 50 conversations per week—not just prospects, actual conversations—and that expectation extends to AEs and directors too, because the bet the company has made is that outbound, when the product is genuinely working, is the highest-margin growth motion available. 30% of all Eleven Labs revenue comes from outbound despite the strength of the brand and inbound, and over 80% of the GTM team is hitting targets consistently. Marc's path into this role is a good one—started at 17 helping his brother build one of Spain's leading food delivery companies, founded a rental marketplace called Renty that was ahead of its time, sold it to a Barcelona company called Cipro, went into B2B SaaS at TravelPerk learning enterprise sales, moved to London for a company called 11Next that was building sales agents on top of Eleven Labs voices, realized that wasn't defensible, reached out directly to a Eleven Labs leader who happened to also be Catalan, got in, and within weeks was asked to relocate to Mexico City to own the LATAM opportunity. His prediction cuts against a lot of the current noise: selling will not get automated away because trust between people is what closes deals, customer support will shrink, but anyone who thinks AI replaces the human in a complex enterprise sale is underestimating what's actually happening in those conversations. His advice for anyone starting out in GTM: attitude over tools, passion over process—tools are a commodity, what isn't is the competitive drive to get into accounts before your competitors do and the genuine enthusiasm that makes someone on the other end of a call actually want to listen. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:20) Marc's Role: GTM Director LATAM at Eleven Labs, Building the Mexico City Hub (1:23) Outbound Culture at Eleven Labs: 50 Conversations Per Week, Every Level of the Team (3:53) 30% of Revenue From Outbound Despite a Strong Brand and Inbound Motion (4:43) Marc's Journey: Food Delivery in Spain at 17, Founding Renty, TravelPerk, 11Next, Eleven Labs (7:41) Relocating From Barcelona to London to Mexico City in the Space of Weeks (8:00) Advice: Attitude Over Tools, Passion Over Process, Get Into Accounts First (9:54) Predictions: Selling Is About People, Tools Will Be a Commodity, Trust Doesn't Get Automated🔗 CONNECT WITH MARC 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Leo, founder at Ascend AI, about building AI automation infrastructure with ROI as the actual design constraint—not just shipping chatbots and email sequences, but end-to-end workflows that automate judgment, not just tasks. He walks through two campaigns in detail: a B2B SaaS client selling to VP Engineering at mid-market tech companies, where the team built a Clay waterfall using GitHub activity signals—open source dependency issues, legacy migration hiring—to score companies from zero to a hundred on signal density, generate a pain hypothesis for each lead, and show up in the inbox with messaging that referenced what was actually breaking in their engineering stack rather than a generic title-based pitch; and a D2C skincare brand on Shopify struggling with repeat purchase rates, where Leo's team built a post-purchase automation using Make and an AI orchestration layer on GPT-4 to predict next likely purchase, segment customers into education, replenishment, and cross-sell tracks, and trigger personalized emails, UGC sequences, and SMS offers in sequence—pushing repeat purchase rate from 20% to 34% within 40 days, email and SMS revenue per recipient up 62%, and support tickets down 41%. The throughline across both is the same: find the friction point, put intelligence into it, close the loop. Leo's path here is one of the more winding ones—laser engineering degree, left the country, taught himself digital marketing and SEO while freelancing abroad, met a product manager at a cafe in Azerbaijan and fell in love with the discipline on the spot, spent two years in PM working with startups until a growth roadmap he built got featured on Reforge, transitioned into GTM engineering when Clay started gaining traction, and eventually pivoted into AI automation when no-code tools made it possible to bridge the two without a developer background. His prediction: GTM stacks will eventually AB test their own logic autonomously, the GTM engineer role will morph into a hybrid of PM, data engineer, growth marketer, and DevOps, and the most interesting near-term development is models like Claude Opus acting as GTM architects that plan and delegate to other models and human devs underneath. His advice: think from the business owner perspective, not the tool perspective—ask what decision or task is stuck, not what you can build with a given tool—pick one vertical, master one or two tools in it, share your work in public as you go, and fix high-friction points end to end before adding more nodes on top. Enjoy 🙂(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (0:32) What Ascend AI Does: End-to-End AI Automation Infrastructure With ROI in Mind (2:25) B2B Campaign: GitHub Signal Scoring, Tech Debt Hypothesis, Waterfall Enrichment for VP Engineering Outreach (6:10) Why Signal Work Only Matters If It Shows Up in the Actual Email (8:15) D2C Campaign: Shopify Skincare Brand, Post-Purchase AI Layer, Repeat Purchase Rate From 20% to 34% (11:22) Automating Judgment, Not Just Tasks: The Core Philosophy Behind the Agency (12:34) Leo's Journey: Laser Engineering to Freelance SEO to PM to GTM Engineer to AI Agency Founder (18:05) Predictions: Self-Optimizing GTM Stacks, Hybrid Roles, and Claude Opus as GTM Architect (21:41) Advice: Fix What's Stuck, Pick One Vertical, Master One Stack, Share in Public🔗 CONNECT WITH LEO 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 Email - [email protected]🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.