E2: "It's an orchestra": How to conduct GTM systems that drive revenue | Bobby Offterdinger

All right, what's up? Go to Market Builders. It's Jared and Mateo. And today we are really happy to welcome to Go to Market Engineer School podcast Bobby Aufterdinger, CEO of Tam2Target. In these podcasts, we interview top GTM engineers to uncover principles, workflows, tools, tips, tricks of this emerging discipline. So Bobby is the CEO, like I said, of TAM to Target. This is a full fledged outbound agency offering fractional SDR and go to market services across multiple B2B verticals. Before founding TAM to market, Bobby covered multiple tech sales roles, especially in the education sector, and currently advises top tier go to market tech startups like our friends over at Octave. So we're super excited to have you on the pod, Bobby, welcome.

Thanks. Yeah, this is fun. I'm having a good time already and thanks for having me.

Yeah. So we're going to kick it off asking you to kind of define go to Market engineering in your own words.

It's so funny because it's so new, right. But it's changed monthly, I feel like, right as. As the. As the discipline has. Has kind of kept on. But somebody asked me this recently, actually, Jared and I, I kind of, I go backwards a little bit to thinking about. So a lot of people know this, but I was a teacher in the past and one of the things I did is I got my. Got my degree as a reading specialist and I taught kids how to read for years. And one of my professors back then talked about how teaching reading is like an orchestra. So it's like a conductor in an orchestra. And so I think about go to market engineering in the same way it's an orchestration is the word that we use. And so you think about a tool like clay, like it's the go to market orchestration tool. Right. And so go to Market engineering for me is the orchestration of systems, processes, and most importantly and often forgotten strategy and creative that drives pipeline and revenue.

And so to conduct an orchestra, you got to know a little bit about all the different instruments, right?

Boom. Look at you go. Yeah, I love it. Got this analogy down.

Yeah. And that's what makes this role interesting and why I think people are drawn to it, but also why there's not a ton of us yet. So do you remember life before go to Market Engineering? What was it like back then and what's been the biggest differences since?

Yeah, I remember it, but it's a hazy memory. I think some people are tempted to say that before go to Market engineering became kind of prolific, that there wasn't really signal based outbound and things like that. But I don't totally think that's true. I think it's mostly that we have just so much more access to data and the tools that can access that data. And my dad actually asked me recently what Go to market engineering was. I'm hiring for a go to market engineer right now. He's like, what the hell is that? And so we were, we were talking about it and he told me an interesting story about how when his, when my grandfather in the 60s, he was a an insurance salesperson and what he would do every week is he would go buy a listing of all the people that just bought new homes and he'd go drop insurance pamphlets into the their mailboxes. And the reason he would do that is because he found that people that buy a home all of a sudden are like, ah, I need insurance because what if something happens to me? Like how, how's my family going to pay this mortgage and stuff? Right. And it was genius. But it was all signal based. Right. So it was the same exact stuff that we're doing now. It's just now we're using tools to do it at scale and do it in a, in a real like smart orchestrated fashion right across many industries and.

Remotely without the need to go down the road to the same.

Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. Right. We're on the smart lead path instead of the highway.

Right. Fantastic. Thanks.

Love it. All right, Bobby, now that we set the stage on some fundamentals, I'd love to switch gears and have a little of a bit of an icebreaking lightning round with you.

So.

So like I'm just going to ask you very rapid fire questions and in as much as a little time as possible, you give me your answers and why. Sounds good.

Okay. Yeah, let's go.

All right, so when it comes to CRM, what do you prefer? HubSpot Salesforce or Atio?

HubSpot. Right now we're a low barrier to entry. Awesome marketplace, lots of integrations, easy to get, rocking with.

Love it. LLMs Claude versus Chatgpt.

Gravitating towards Claude. I spent a lot of time building agents in GPT so I'm a little embed there, but really impressed with like a lot of the deep research stuff that's coming out of Claude. Love it.

I need to check that out actually. Top enrichment tool.

Enrichment specific. We're. I could tell you from a monthly spend where we can either put clay up there or lead magic. Definitely some that I couldn't, couldn't live without awesome.

And top GTM engineering tool.

Octave done. Full stop.

Love it. And most underrated GTM engineering tool.

This might not make total sense, but I would say the actual go to market engineer as a tool and I don't think about my staff as a tool or anything like that, but there's so many tech tools that are out there right now and to say that some of them are over or underrated, like, yeah, you could say that. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of people that can put these things together, but there's not a lot of people that can be really creative and strategic. And that's where a true go to market engineer comes in. And so the most underrated part of this whole piece is the human being behind all the tools.

Going back to the Orchestrator. Right.

It's hard to find those ones. Right? Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. It has been, it has been challenging.

I'm sure it is. And hopefully with this podcast and with the community that we're building, also thanks to you, we're making this a little less difficult, but we're taking one step in that direction.

That's correct.

Yeah. I would love to just take some time understanding system design principles from your end. When you build these systems for your clients. There is a clear, as we talked about just a few minutes ago, some building blocks or core modules of the stack I'd love for you to walk us through. What are those modules look like and how do you approach again, putting them together or designing in general the stack?

Absolutely. Yeah, I've got, I mean, honestly guys, I could talk through some stuff. I've got, I've got some things I can share, like screen share if you want. Like you, you tell me, like from a delivery standpoint, Floor is yours, sir. Yeah. Okay, cool. So in general, I think what we're seeing a lot of right now is this. I've said it a few times and it always makes me laugh when I say it. But like anybody living in their mom's basement with a laptop can go buy smart lead and now they're a lead gen agency. And that's, I don't mean to like be negative, but there is a proliferation of people with an outbound skill set. And what I think is important in go to market engineering is for us not to be short sighted in thinking that the path to pipeline is signal identified, send email, book meeting and profit. Right. There's, there's more to it because nowadays in 2025, it's a buyer led market. Because if I send you an email and you're moderately interested, what are you gonna do? You're gonna come to my website and then you're gonna do your research and then you'll make a decision if you book or not. So what we have to do, and I'll show you what this looks like, is when we work with, with our clients. And what I think a true go to market engineering is, is it's when we take our outbound motion, we drive people inbound and we recapture them using different go to market elements to help retarget and do different activities based on different engagement, essentially. So anybody can say that. But let me show you what we do. I'll, I'll share my screen here. Here's my, my ClickUp doc, which is silly, but it's all kind of internal stuff. But whatever. So the kind of three like motions of it. There's the first is the idea of just how are we going to identify a lead and then score them and then how are we going to actually do some outbound and then what's going to happen next? So I'll walk through this now. What you're seeing in these yellow, these are all agents that we build in Octave. Okay, so let's take an example. So we identify a signal, let's say it's a simple one, like a hiring signal. So for us at TAM to target if a company is hiring an sdr, it's typically a good time for us to reach out to them to make sure that that SDR is going to be well equipped with a go to market motion. Okay, so we'll use that one signal. Prospect comes in and we run them against an agent. And now that's built into Octave. You could use OpenAI, you could make a cloud agent, whatever. But what Octave does is so fantastic, is that Octave knows everything about my agency or my client and it does research on that person as well and it's going to give them a score. So what this does is, might be kind of counterintuitive, but our job as go to market engineers is, is to reduce the addressable market that we're reaching out to. And that again, like some people don't really understand that, but like you don't want to reach out to 10,000 people if you could reach out to only a thousand best fit ones. All right, like we, we don't want to be part of the spam problem. We only want to reach out to the people that are, are most like the best fit ones. And that also is really important when we start thinking about channels. So email is a really easy channel. You can email as many people as you want with the right infrastructure. But when you start thinking about multichannel with calling and LinkedIn, suddenly you have a little bit of a bottleneck if you're trying to reach out to 10,000 people. So it's really important to score your leads. And there's a lot of great tools that do that. You know, Panda, Match and Ocean can help you find the right ones. And then from there you can ICP fit them and stuff like that. From there, making sure that you're using proper agents to come up with copy. Not just email, but also cold call, copy, LinkedIn messages, all of this. That's like super relevant, right? And there's tools out there in clay and octave like we've talked about in the go to market engineering course on how to do that, right? You push them to outbound and then come in full circle. What ends up happening is all this is like synced in the CRM. And what you want to do is you set up the ability for your CRM to detect website visitors, people that are engaging with your content. So all these people that are getting your emails and your phone calls, they come inbound, they reply to your email, maybe they write you back on LinkedIn. Then what we do is we send it. Every single time activity happens on a lead, we rescore them. There's an engagement score that gets updated in HubSpot and if they reach a certain threshold that SDR is on the phones immediately versus like hey SDR, dial these a hundred people, it's hey SDR. These 12 people are really hot leads because their engagement score went up. And every time an activity happens, it kind of recycles back in and the engagement score gets switched. So before all of this, people would use things like Marketo and stuff like that years ago to do all this. And it cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to get it set up. And it would take them months. And now you can do it with like a few AI agents and like three weeks of just real deep build time. And you have a really sophisticated, what we call like an operating system, like a go to market operating system is kind of how we, how we frame it. So it's, that's not just like one workflow, that's a few. But for us, like true go to market engineering is not just an email campaign. It's setting up a system that's going to be scalable for your organization's like revenue engine. Love it.

Thanks so much for sharing. And just to double click on this, I mean like because like from what I've seen, you know, like if I have to play back or like isolate the key components of what you just showed us, I can see you know like signals being really like key important pillar. Right. Then you have which is basically again like in and on itself, you know, like data inputs of what prospects is doing as to and. Or who they are. Right. And so like bits and pieces of information. Then you have the agent part which is really intelligence layer that understands connects the dots between these bits and pieces of the ICP and then adds logic as to is this a good time to reach out to them? Are they you know, like just a good fit to. To reach out to. Is it worth it? And let's understand what actually. What to actually say that to them in a way that it prompts a reply. Right. If provided there are a good fit. And then the last piece is the channel, right. Which is basically again personalized or like the in function of like the agent's messaging basically.

Yeah, it's a great way to put.

It and I love it. And like, and just to double click on this because I think this is also like. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. What are some like the biggest trade offs that you see or like constraints in building this, building up the systems.

You know, for, for us as we're building it out. It's been really easy for us to build it out at TAM to target internally because we're doing it ourselves. We know everything about this. We know our company. Right. The biggest constraint typically is almost a paradigm shift and like a mentality shift for organizations to. To bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Because if you notice like I didn't have sales's job, marketing's job, anything like that on this diagram. It's. But there are marketing functions in there. Like a form fill is typically owned by marketing or content engagement is like marketing content and social and stuff like that. Right. So one of the things that naturally happens if you do it right is that go to market engineering almost like RevOps was supposed to do can be the bridge between marketing and sales. And so that's one of the biggest constraints is if there is change management that has to happen internally at your company, it can provide roadblocks to being successful with this. That's almost just more of a business function issue versus a technical one. Because in a perfect world you can wave the magic AI wand and set all this kind of stuff up but if not everybody's on board, you're going to potentially piss some people off and, and, and people get worried about their jobs and all this stuff and as opposed to just hey, let's, let's build this together, let's build it so it's custom for us and all work towards the same end goal which is to build pipeline and drive revenue which is both marketing and sales as jobs if they were to put their heads together.

On it big time. And I can definitely see, you know like as I heard you talking exactly, there's not just a paradigm shift in technology and, or how we do go to market, but in the team structure and like the culture that needs to support this shift. Right, but I guess we can talk about this for hours and hours anyway. And if you had to let's say like keep only three tools in your GTM stack, what would they be?

It would be hard to do what I was just describing with just three tools. But at the end of the day I would have Clay still be that, that orchestration engine just simply because there's so much integration and just it's kind of the glue in the middle. And then if I had to pick one sequencer for that outbound motion. Lately I've been gearing or been geared a little bit more towards LEM List and frankly that's just because it, it does the multi channel approach. You can dial through it, you could do the LinkedIn piece. You can if you're just doing email. Smart lead and instantly are certainly still the way to go. But for us at TAM to target we are a hundred percent multi channel. So Clay, LEM List and then it would be a, a tough toss up if between using a CRM like HubSpot or, or Octave, they're, they're two completely different tools, don't get me wrong. But it would be really hard for me to leave Octave on the side here just because so much of our everything is built within them. But I can't imagine doing it without, without HubSpot too on some sort of CRM. So I guess at the end of the day if I wanted to get started with go to market engineering, it would be Clay, HubSpot and then a sequencer like lemlist.

How much harder was this before Octave? Were you doing some of these workflows previously?

Not to this extent. You know, Octave has allowed us to evolve as an agency.

Right.

Like we, when I first started working with Octave we were email only kind of performance based and now we're full go to market Operating systems. We just evolved as a company, but I couldn't imagine doing this with, without Octave. However, the interesting part, which is not exactly what you asked, but it's related, is I had to decide if I wanted to get on the Octave train because once you're on like you're going to have some stuff that you're going to change because it's going to change the way that you do messaging and do ICP and do everything. And so you'll see some big names out there in the agency world that haven't adopted Octave. And it's not because they don't believe that it's a great product. It's probably because they doing things so differently outside of it that it's scary to, to make the switch. So I made the choice and, and I'm, I'm, I'm on it and luckily I picked the right train to get on.

I think, yeah, I was going to ask what sort of performance gains have you seen in your campaigns as a result?

I send less emails and get more replies. Put it that way. Like there's, so there's, that, there's just the straight up metrics of, of more leads and more meetings. But also on the cost saving side, I buy less domains, I, I buy less email boxes unless I need to send more emails, of course, but I can send out less emails because I'm finding the better fit leads because I'm ICP fitting them on the front end and then sending the best fed emails as a result. The other thing that it's done is I don't have to spin tax my emails anymore because everything, every single one of them is unique. The change that I wasn't even expecting was just how much more consultative I can be with my clients because we build our, we, we build their Octave profile and all their things together and so they're involved, they're making their playbooks with me and I'm helping them to uncover what their go to market motion needs to be. Whereas before I was saying, hey, this is the campaign idea, here's the copy we came up with. And now it's like, okay, what signals are we going to use? Let's create a playbook for that. What are the use cases? Okay, you're rolling out a new product, great, let's go ahead and get that into your profile. So it's just become so much more of a collaborative experience and Octave has allowed us to build that within our platform, which I wasn't expecting, but it's been a really nice secondary. But Benefit, I suppose.

Would you be able to come up with a specific company or project as an example? And you know, you can withhold the names of the innocent if needed, but it'd be great to have a kind of a story to go behind that and kind of help describe what some of your favorite plays have been with Octave or without, but using a specific project.

Yeah, I think for us right now we have a newer client that's in the K12 space. And so it's a. It's a little bit different than maybe a lot of your, you know, the audience listening to the podcast will, will be working with. But a lot of the companies we work with that TAM to target are, are in that K12 space. Probably because both myself and our COO were former teachers and stuff like that. But anyways, so they do leadership development and so you can think about it as kind of like executive coaching, but for principals and district leadership and stuff. So in terms of the way that we've. We've built out like a really awesome play with, with Octave is we have a partnership with a company called Nation Graph. And Nation Graph does signal based, like they detect signals in, in like the state and local education and public sector. Okay. So they're scraping all the stuff that apify is not doing and Clay is not really doing. They're scraping the board meeting minutes of public school district boards and stuff.

Right.

So that we know, like, hey, what the hell is going on at these board meetings across every school district in the country? Which is pretty crazy. So we can now tell you.

Very crazy.

Yeah, it's awesome. And that in and of itself, like, that's not. That's been around for a year and a half now or so. But what Nation Grab's doing is they've got an AI layer that's just like really awesome because they're taking that data. Then they're saying, okay, let's get the strategic plans that are all public. Then they'll do FOIA requests and stuff like Freedom of Information act type stuff. So they're getting all this public data that used to be really hard to get anyways. It's really cool. But it's a signal. Okay. So we can then say on a weekly basis, hey, what districts this in their last board meeting, we're talking about leadership development. Cool. As simple, easy as that signal. And we're taking those signals and, and we have playbooks built into Octave for different states because a lot of this is kind of state specific. Take that. And then we create messaging based or we Run, we run it through the icp, make sure they're a good fit messaging and we can provide that individual context to the message in Octave and tell it, hey, at last week's board meeting, they talked about this, this and this. And this school was mentioned as needing leadership development. And so now we're able to create these messages and we send them out and we're like, hey, notice last week that Thomas Middle School is needing some leadership development. We're running a program in September. You want me to send you the application or a quick video or something like that? And what's really cool about it is it's obviously performing well because it's relevant, it's personalized. But in the K12 space, every one of those principles is getting the same BS emails that are like, hi, I'm hope, hope this finds you well. I'm here to tell you about leadership development something, right? It's all like this product focused stuff, right? Nobody's doing this. So it's a really good opportunity for us as a company. But it also is just, it's allowing us to change the buyer experience in an entire market because soon, if, if other companies start doing this, hopefully the number of emails that these principals are getting is going to get reduced and hopefully the quality will go up. And for me that's important because I used to get those damn emails when I was in on the other end and I hated it. And now there's just, you know, there's only more of those damn emails getting sent out. So that's a really good example of using a creative signal, popping it right into Octave with some work and then getting it out there both on LinkedIn as well, and cold calling and all that kind of stuff.

So.

So that's the kind of stuff we're doing.

So transcripts of local board meetings. That's not available as a default data column in Apollo.

No, not exactly though, no.

How did you even figure out that that existed? What was the moment in which you said, oh, maybe somebody's recording all these board meetings. Let me go search for that, man.

How did I. It's just like the same way that I met you guys. It's all just through networking, right? Like somebody was like, oh man, you're doing outbound. Like, have you heard of this new company coming up? And I, you know, met with them and struck up a partnership and here we go. Right?

So serendipity and good karma, basically.

Yeah. And staying active, you know, like, you can't, you can't hide and hide in Your office, like doing this, you know, meeting with you guys and doing the go to market stuff and being on LinkedIn and all that. Like you just, you got to get your face out there and then you meet the right people, you know, that's the spirit.

And so like, you know, we talked a bit about, you know, like principles, workflows, signals and we talked about as well that there like all of this is coming with a paradigm shift. Right. And we touched upon like also some cultural shifts in team structure shifts. But when it comes to skill set and mindset, what do you see new skills as emerging or becoming really more critical for GTM engineers specifically?

You know, I don't know if it's like totally emerging, but it's become more table stakes now that, okay, so like using clay, that's table stakes. You got to know how to do that, right? And, and right now I've been interviewing go to market engineers and if, if they are saying like, yeah, I've just started playing around with clay, I'm like, that's awesome. Right now that's not the best fit for my agency, but there are companies that would hire you. So for me it's experience with that is is basic. Whereas nine months ago, if somebody was just learning clay, I probably would hire them. Right? So to answer your question, you need to know API language, you need to understand JSON and low code like n8n or make.com even like that's becoming more of a non negotiable. I need people on my team that if they needed to send a JSON body of data to an integration, they understand what that coding language looks like and are able to interpret the results and, and set that those kind of workflows up. Whereas before we were relying a little bit more on native integrations, now you really got to understand that kind of coding language in my opinion.

Love it. And as you said, so like things are becoming more technical and like the work is happening within specific tools. So like you gotta know your way around these tools. And as we talked about before, there's so many new tools coming up, so you gotta stay up to trend and know what's coming up and keep learning, keep experimenting with these new tools, right. And it's obviously a challenge for aspiring GTM engineers, right to there's so much pressure to learn new things, to stay up to trend, to stay up to date and just like do the thing right. So like how would you advise aspiring GTM engineer folks to learn these new skills and just like stay up to up to the market.

Well, these two dudes, Matteo and Jared, came up with this awesome course you should take.

This was clearly not meant to be.

A plug, but thank you. Jokes aside, like you, it's really hard, I think, to do what you're asking. The nice thing is, is that Clay University has been out for years, right? So they do a pretty good there of teaching you that. But I would recommend that anybody that's really aspiring to be a good market engineer to acquire those API and JSON skills. If you're doing the Clay University type of tasks or you're maybe doing some freelance work and there is an opportunity for you to use an integration that's native to clay. Let's say it's HubSpot, for example. Don't use the HubSpot native integration. Use the HTTP API call and see if you can do it manually. HubSpot might not be a great example because I'm not sure if they're using API keys anymore. But the point is this, don't use the native integration. Like Lead Magic, for example, is a great one. Try not to use the API integration with Lead Magic that's native to clay. Go and do the HTTP call and see if you can't figure out how to do the same functionality because you'll, you'll fail and you'll learn how to do the JSON and then you can go Google it and you do yourself started learning because that's what go to market engineers do and you'll figure it out because then you can use the native one and compare the results and you'll figure out whether or not you did it right. So just force yourself to get out of the habit of using those native ones until you, you know JSON really well. That's just an easy trick on how to kind of learn that kind of language. So ghost crappy, uh, like get stuck.

Make mistakes, you know, like, and hit a wall and figure it out.

Yeah, definitely. And that's gonna happen no matter what. But yeah, force yourself to, to hit that wall. Yeah, that's a good point.

So Bobby, is there a practical tip you, you can think of that all of our listeners can implement today?

Yeah, I think it'll go back to my mentality of, of. Of limit your tam. Right, so, so don't reach out to everybody. Find the ones that are in market and use signals to do that and then make sure that those companies are hitting your or your client's ICP and be really confident about that. So the practical tip is whether you're using Octave or You create it using an OpenAI assistant or whatever it is. Use an ICP agent, and that data you get out of that agent will. Will help you limit the number of people you're reaching out to to the right fit people. And it also will give your client really good data on why they're a good fit or why they'. And if you review that data with your client, they might be able to tell you, like, actually, no, these are good fits. And then you can adjust the agent like that so it's a better conversation you might have with your client. So my recommendation is, if you're not using some sort of ICP agent or qualifying agent on the front end, to go ahead and start doing that as kind of standard practice.

Okay, fantastic. And then, Bobby, where can our listeners reach out to you?

So, easiest way is just on LinkedIn and we can give people my. My profile, but my name's pretty unique. There's like eight off dingers on the planet, and I birthed four of them, so. Or my wife did. So there's. There's only one Mr. O. Right? There's only one. Only one Mr. O. That's right. So LinkedIn's great. And then, you know, our website's tam2target.com you can check it out there. But yeah, just any anybody wants to connect on LinkedIn, I'm. I'm happy to have a conversation.

Awesome. All right. Yeah, this was great. So, Bobby, a teacher turned go to market engineer. I think you showed us today that great sales isn't just about volume, it's about precision. Just like your grandfather. Right? There you go. Who used home buying lists. Right. To sell insurance. And today's go to market engineers use AI and smart signals to create meaningful connections, but not that dissimilar. So I think, Bobby, you're proven that with the right strategy, we can transform outreach from noise to nuance. And hopefully, if everybody follows us. Yes. We'll all get fewer emails, they'll be more relevant, and world peace will follow from there.

Sounds like a plan, man.

Thank you so much, Bobby. This was great.

Yeah, always good. Looking forward to the next one. Be a good time.

Bring it on.

All right, thanks, Bobby.

Cool.

Take care now.