S1E4 | Broken Expectations of Go-to-Market Engineers with Olivier Tytgat & Spencer Tahil

Hey everybody. Today is going to be probably a more charged recording session with Olivier. He's from Outbound Catalyst, he's leading an agency in Europe. But we've had some opinions on the go to market engineering market that we wanted to share with you. So Olivia, I give you the floor and then we can jump right in.

Thanks a lot for having me. Spencer. Excited to be here. And yeah, I mean I run a growth engineering firm where we help B2B tech companies scale their go to market or at least get rid of some go to market constraints. They might have proper growth engineering or GTM engineering as some might coin it today.

Yeah, so we talked a little bit about this before, how today's market is like a giant scam. And I wanted to open that Pandora's box up to everybody because what I've been noticing with working with a lot of United States SAS companies also the agencies, is that they come to me and they said, oh, we got burned by our last agency. Oh, we made this hire with a go to market engineer. They came out of a boot camp xyz. It was shit. So are you getting like the same type of responses and the types of calls that you're having as well? What is, what does the State of the Union look like?

Yeah, most of the time I would say probably 80%. They have already had some kind of negative experience with sales in general. Right. So whether that's high, hiring a person to help them with sales, whether that's then full cycle SDR or whatever doesn't really matter. Or have worked with external partners which they thought wasn't then successful considering their metrics and eventually it often comes down to just misalignment across the board. Know a couple of themes I see here. Not sure if I should already jump in those. Okay, cool. So yeah, a couple of themes that I see definitely is they're just not ready to work with an external partner because they expect direct results and they expect kind of the partner to be able to swipe this magic wand that will just fix everything. And they want to essentially, whether as a founder or revenue leader, skip ahead of some fundamentals that they need to set up. Right, that's definitely one of the things. Secondly is in close correlation to that that they don't have any onboarding or any documentation ready. Right. And so I believe that's actually a good time to go to a partner because they can guide you. But then you have to be willing to see it like a partnership where you are co invested in, where you will spend an equal amount of time or even more working on your go to market because it's still the most essential thing. So usually those founders or revenue leaders who have been burned, let's say mainly founders before, are usually burned because they paid peanuts and got monkeys and were then surprised that that didn't work out. Whereas that's like just obvious, right? I mean, you don't go to a Ferrari shop with a fiat budget and expect to walk out with a Ferrari. Right. I mean, you could if you're really an excellent negotiator or something, but, or rob the place. Right. But otherwise I don't think that's the right expectation to be having. Right. So that's, that's definitely a big element that I see. There's a lot of education that needs to be done around.

So do you think right now this is going to be a charged one? Do you think it's more of a problem of the buyers being uneducated or do you think that it's more of a problem of the supply being uneducated?

I think at this point it's probably both. But obviously it starts with how to evaluate whether you need a partner, whether you're ready, whether you want, what are the aligned expectations to have there. Right. And then who's the right fit for you? Right. So for example, we have a go to market readiness scan that kind of determines or helps them guide through whether we are even a good fit to help them or not. But either way they'll walk away with like actionable insights that they should apply. Right? So I think yes, there's definitely a lot of people out there who call themselves GTM engineers who are essentially just building lists in clay and copy pasting what others are doing. Right? And that's okay. That's okay because there is demand for that shit. Right? But then if you're gonna be working with those people who have no deep industry expertise, who have no broader understanding of go to market, like, just look at most of these people, they've never done a sales job in their life before, but I'm sure they can fix your go to market. Right? Like, you know, you know, they just come out of school or whatever. And I'm not here to bash on any of those people. Like, you know, I wish them the best and there's a market for that, as I said, but they need to be guided. So if you then as a company want to take up that role as the leader, the guider, the one who's going to set the direction, the vision, bring the clarity to Those people who will then go and figure out and how to execute or even just come with a like you know, ready to implement menu of some stuff that they copied from others online. That's totally fine. Right now you're aligned now you have clear expectations and outcomes defined. Now you're ready to go. Right. But usually what happens is, oh, we need outbound. Right, Cool. Goes and scouts the market for outbound and goes with whoever over promised and undercharged basically. Right. So they'll go for a partner who says, yeah, we can most definitely get you 20 meetings per month. Whereas most like for most, that's just bullshit. Like that's not a realistic number for you to have any expectations on whatsoever. Unless you're right, really vertical or have like a lot of funding and you can throw a lot of money against it. Right. So but anyway, they'll fall for that and then they'll probably pay like 2 or 3k a month or like anywhere less than 5k a month. Have no sales team in place to do any follow up. But they'll be happy that they got a lot of leads. Right? Which essentially is a second thing in this industry that is a huge misconception because a positive reply. Yeah, okay, you can call that a lead, but so is like someone being on your website then, right? Like I mean to me your ICP lists are the leads. Like those are people you can sell to and that's the definition of a lead. Right. That does not equal a opportunity. There, there are steps in between, there's work that needs to be done. Right. You know, so yeah, that doesn't equal revenue. It doesn't equal anything like you know, and so yeah, I believe that that's a big. They just need to have their expectations clear for themselves and it's the same like you know, whether you're gonna hire or work with external partner or do it yourself. You need to be clear on what you're kind of expecting and where you want to go from. Right?

Yeah. What I'm seeing a lot of now is when people come to the table and they come, you know, come to the proposal meeting or they come to the discovery call and they say, oh, like you know, we were working with a different agency. It's either like one of three scenarios there they were working with somebody before and they underperformed, which is becoming more and more prevalent as like the supply increases in the market. You know, like the boot camp students and you know, everybody coming out and you know, people that I mentor and stuff like this. But you know, I agree with you that this is, this is an issue of having a lack of clarity from the, from the demand side. And I was just speaking with somebody and I said, listen, like, I'm not going to take your Money unless we're 100% clear that the objectives, the activities and the desired outcomes are written down in the proposal and we can both sign on it and have two copies of the same thing. Right? And as, as a supplier in, you know, in this, in this market of like, you know, lifecycle marketing, revenue operations, go to market engineering, you know, I try to make that crystal clear and I feel really bad because I fucked up before where I've gone into deals and I didn't define the scope and then, you know, what ends up happening two months later is that they're unhappy with me because, you know, oh, they expected this and you know, okay, then my expectation was that you were going to be more involved and oh, oops, you know, I've messed up on my onboarding, right. And I've gone through those pains and I don't think a lot of the operators that are coming into the market right now are going to be able to catch that as soon as, you know, as soon as they start, like, we've all messed up. And you know, I'm not afraid to admit that I won't make that mistake again, hopefully. But you know, I think there's a huge difference between go to market engineering how it's portrayed on LinkedIn versus actually just building a list. And I think that this, this education is completely missing in the market. And this is actually the reason why I started this podcast series is because, you know, these B2B SaaS, founders or the other agencies that I want to work with, they have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. Right. And you know, oh, you're, you know, anybody, anybody that can hire somebody in, in the Philippines or in India to, to do like the actual hands on keyboard work, you know, that doesn't make you an engineer because you can know, you know, how to manage contracts. Right. Like as a business owner. Right. Like, I'm still doing the strategy. I think that you're still doing the strategy and many times.

Yeah.

And like you're so when you become so far removed, it becomes a lot harder to actually like, see what actually counts as a result. Right. So I think what are, I don't know, like, what are the skeptical pieces that you, that you get a lot of like, other than like, hey, like we've been burned, but is there, are there Anything that you try to say or that you try to do to when you speak to these different types of people that are looking to hire you. Of course, like now your sales strategy that can kind of put their minds at ease when they're looking for a partner, not so much of a vendor.

Yeah, well, it's kind of like a diagram flow that I walk through which is like, first of all, are you already doing any outbound? Yes or no, right? If it's yes, then let's look at what you're doing. What are the results, why do you think it's not working, what have you tried, blah, blah, all that stuff, right? In that case, it's easier to make a case and you know, usually there's clear improvements that can be done. Right. And then we just kind of navigate from there. If it's no, then, you know, as soon as it's no and they're not doing any outbound, then they're automatically in my bucket of okay, cool. Everything we do from here is complete experimentation and validation. You cannot expect any hard outcomes from this. But feedback loops, direct market feedback and experiments, Right? And so we're really good at that and we can really help you. But if you're then going to come with the next question, which is by when do you think we can expect the first meetings? The then we are already misaligned, right? So now I'm going to have to tell them like, look, okay, yes, indeed, we will have like meetings, right? But we will have to optimize for quality of meetings. We will have to like, you know, have short feedback loops so that we can increase this. Right? Because the first three to six months we're essentially going to be building your foundations, which you currently do not have. Right? And that is most likely starting from they don't have a clear ICP definition and who they are for. They don't have any numbers in terms of KPIs and objectives that they want to achieve as whether it's net new ARR, whether it's new locals added, whether it's like, you know, sometimes they don't even have none of that defined. Right. And then thirdly it's, they don't have like a very systemized way of doing sales in general. Right. So they, their discovery calls are not the same. There's no sales process that they take them through. There's no structure on that end which also makes impact on our work harder to substantiate them because we like to look at the end to end machine. And so if you're already leaking on all the different buckets, then okay, we can fix our bucket that we are involved in, but you're going to also have to spend time fixing the other buckets. Right? So yeah, those are some of the things that I see in the market right now. And just to come back to your previous statement, Spencer, on like GTM engineering versus essentially being a list builder. So I've thought about this a lot and if you look at the definition of an engineer, which usually people study for five to seven years at least in Europe, an engineer is a person who designs, builds or maintains machines, structures or systems. Right. So that's already a thing that is not like how to build a list as a system. Cool. If they can design it, build it, execute it and maintain it.

Cool.

Then you know, you can call that I'm a list building engineer, whatever. Right. What's in the name? But what we see right now and like even Companies hiring, even SaaS, companies hiring an in house GTM engineer, this happened to a friend of mine recently. They have no clue what are the expectations. They're like he got like a scope of work that said map out our current album flow and suggest improvements, but then also look at CRM and foundations and like you know, just a lot of stuff. And so I think people are confused with, by what they see online as some of these people doing and then the different buckets you want to put that in. Right. And so you don't need to necessarily put it in a bucket, but you, but you do need to be aware that if you're going to be expecting a single person to do five or six different domains, then it's going to take probably more time than you want it to take. It's going to go with a lot of trial and error. Right. And that person is going to probably need you to give them a budget so they can hire experts for each specific domain in order to be able to move faster. Right. Because there's only a few people in the world who can probably master all those domains very well and then even want to still do drive the strategy, be involved in the execution and do the maintenance. Right. That is a rare breed of person. And the same goes for whether you're hiring a salesperson from Salesforce as an early stage company. If he does not have a active Rolodex of 50 to 100 customers that he can sell in the next 12 months to, then that is not a hire you should make. Because he's used to structuring, he's used to Having an onboarding period of three months. He's used to moving slow, working with a lot of fucking budget. He's used to having maybe 5k a month just to go and take clients out for lunch. Like, you know. And so, yeah, there's just so much context that these founders skip, basically.

So we, so we talked about this a little while ago in a more heated way. When we connected, I think it was like a month ago or something like this. And we were talking and you said something along the lines. It's like, yeah, I only think that there are like 100 or so true go to market engineers or, you know, those unicorn types of people in the world. And I had, and I remember I had said something back to you. It's like, well, yeah, I think clay kind of created the ecosystem, but kind of destroyed it at the same time. Like, do you want to open that conversation back up on why you think that?

Well, I think that on the GTM engineer side, I'm not sure whether clay has per se ruined that or whatever because I think they're still driving huge amounts of education on what's possible out there. Like, you know, let's be fair, CRM enrichment is not new. Was it much harder to do before Clay? Yes, for sure. But is it something that companies had to do and just ignored for forever? Yes. And are Most companies like 99.5% out there still ignoring it? Yes. Right. We live in a bubble. Let's also not forget that like we are breathing and living this every day. We wake up and go to sleep with GTM workflows in our head and we push the boundaries of what's possible here. But most companies are not there. And they're not there because they're missing fundaments and they do not understand growth architecture, they do not understand growth models, they do not understand data models. They don't even have, like, you know, as simple as this. Like, ask any B2B sales company to pull up a list of the highest profitable customers. Maybe one out of 10 will be able to do it. Most don't even have their chargebee information connected to their HubSpot or wherever. Like, you know, that's all scattered across silos still. And maybe they have some data analysts and whatever to pull that up. But it's probably that request itself will take three to six weeks to be able to answer. Right. And now we just live in a world where that's like three hours or even less of work. If you do some proper fundamental setting and you like, you know, even to do something as simple as building a listing play. Like, you know, before this call, I was looking at merging or creating the same enrichment structure across. Across two account tables. Right? And so I manually wrote down what are the columns that I need to have unified across these tables. Right? So that's what I'm saying. Like, you know, your most aren't even going that granular, Right. For example, I interviewed the GTM engineer a while ago, and I told him, I asked him, how do you check. How do you double check the output that your AI gives so you make sure that they are not hallucinating. Right? And then he said, for example, I run it per thousand rows. Okay, cool. But have you noticed that when you run it even per thousand, like, you know, do you review the beginning, the middle, and the end? Because more towards the end there's more hallucination, right? Do you have a prompt that goes. And check the answers, double verification, like, you know, and most just don't have any of that stuff. Right? So it's that kind of granular, deep level of thinking. Essentially, it just comes down to what are your standards of quality of work. Right. And I feel in this industry, a lot of the people that I interview or speak to that are part of an agency are really in this urgency and being pushed and pressured and squeezed to produce more, faster, but not necessarily better. Right? And so we like to work with companies who appreciate deep work and understand that good things take time. Right? Like you build a unicorn company in 10 years or more, not in two. Right. I mean, that's in for the very few. But, like, you know, that's essentially what it comes down to. You know, you can be good, settle for average, or push for greatness. Right? And if you're gonna push for greatness, it's gonna take a lot of reps, a lot of time, a lot of commitment, a lot of trial and error. And I feel that, yeah, at least from a lot of people I speak to and, like, hearing all the churn that they have and stuff like that, they're just being squeezed by their clients to perform and deliver on something that's just not realistic at all. But no one, neither the agency, neither the client knows that that's not realistic. So, like, you know, that's just a Goliath kind of battle that you don't want to be in.

So. And. And I think, like, when I hire people, I always say that I'm. I don't care about your technical skills. I can teach you technical skills, dude. Right? What I can't teach you is ambition and curiosity. And I, and I, you know, I'm the face of the business the same way that you're the face of your business. And when people get on the phone, whether that's going to be like my bootcamp students, that it's going to be prospects, that's going to be partners or something like this, like, they know me first, right? And I'm genuinely curious about, like, AI. I'm genuinely curious about how far we can push the capabilities of, like, technology. I'm ambitious to learn it. I'm ambitious to, you know, of course, like, I don't care about having a super yacht in like five years. Like, I'm, I'm not a water guy, but, you know, at the same time, like, I do have my own ambitions. And I think finding the people that have their own ambitions is becoming scarcer and scarcer. Because when, you know, when people are hiring us, like, they're coming to me, they're believing in me, they're believing in my capabilities and my extension to make that higher, right? That's just agency, right? But when I'm going to hire people, what I'm noticing is the same exact problems. Like, you know, they're having the same problems of hiring that we're having at the ground level, right? Like, the talent, in my opinion, is they might be curious, they might be really technically inclined, like, okay, you know how to open Apollo, you know how to set, like, you know, the email deliverability settings. Okay, fine, you know how to open up HubSpot and, you know, put lists into segments and so on and so forth, right? Maybe you're even so great that you can make like a whole N8N automation and, you know, make multiple API calls, right? But I think the, the core issue is why. And I think, and I think that's what a lot of people miss is like, why do we do this? And I can't cram when I'm training people. And I can't expect people to learn it neither. And neither can these founders expect somebody to come into their business for one month, learn all the shit, and then, like, expect them not to fuck it all up, right? Like, learning a business takes time. Learning a language takes time. It's the same exact system. You can't just like, hop into a Mustang and just like take off. You're going to crash the thing, right? And so that's, that's like what I do. It's the same as you come in for the first phase, like, build the fundamentals, then consolidate and test and then we start scaling and I just, I just think like these unicorn hires are, they're very hard to find. Like I didn't find like Jonathan, like he's, he's coming in at Growth alliance for, for months. I wasn't ready to have a second for months either. And then I was like, this guy is, this is the right one? You know, and I, I don't know if like, do you struggle when you're hiring people? Like, what is, what are the struggles, like ground level that you're seeing that you could like maybe give these people like a little bit of taste of what you look for, for instance?

Yeah, I think it comes down to, to what I said earlier, Spencer. It's really all about like, what are your level of standards and what's the level of pride that you have in your work, right? Like, are you going to be delivering me a copy paste AI doc that you didn't proofread? And I can find hallucinations in it fairly easily. And that's going to happen like repeatedly and repeatedly within the same week after I've given you the feedback. Then now you're lacking a second trait which is coachability and feedback. Right? And thirdly, as you mentioned, like how curious and generally interested are you? Right? As in like, do you have fun? Do you consider this play? Would you do this if you wouldn't get paid? Right? And especially the last part. And it's not about not paying them or being a bad payer or whatever. It's about like, are they in it to win it for themselves or are they in it for the money and they just want to grind a couple of years or not even that and just do the bare minimum and just get some cash, which is honestly 90% of GTM engineers that we interview are generally in that third bucket where it's like, I want to make more, how can I earn more, how can I? And like, you know, as soon as the conversation is there, I'm like, you know, you're essentially speaking to people who have literally like one to two years of experience and they are asking you for a 5k a month salary, which is like just, I don't know in which reality in the US is that considered a base salary? But from the job descriptions that I see, that is not a junior salary. That is not at all the kind of quality that I expect for, for a 50 to 60k a year partner. Right? Same for us. Right? So obviously if you're then an agency and you're charging like 1k a month or 2k a month or 3k a month retainers, then I understand that you Pay your people 500 to 2k a month and that they are happy with that and it changes their life and they're obviously based in other parts of the world, which I don't understand the reality from. But yeah, that's just not gonna help you scale your, your business significantly. Right. At least I, I don't think so. So yeah, when I hire, I look at mainly how well can they think in systems, how can they articulate something that they do. Right. Also, if they don't have specific answers, like for example, tell me about the projects that you're most passionate about or most proud of. Any project can be personal, doesn't need to be professional, anything you've ever done. And like most people that I interview are 25 plus and most don't even have an answer to that. Like it's just some generic stuff like oh yeah, I ran this campaign and I got one out of a thousand positive replies and I'm like, wow, okay. So that also tell me, tells me immediately about the standards of this person. Right? So I'm like, oh, you're in the volume game. We are not in the volume game. So it's not going to be any like, you know, anything he has taught himself in the last two years he will have to unlearn and completely be re educated on. That's probably not going to be a good fit for us right now because we just don't have the capacity to do so and let alone their willingness because again, you know, that person specifically was just looking for more money essentially.

Yeah. And I think this is quite interesting. I think your interview questions are really interesting. What do you. Because what I've tried to do is I've, you know, I've run some other agencies in the past in the United States and I actually loved being tied to like variable, which is, you know, I want to have skin in the game. I actually kind of feel better sometimes with skin in the game. Especially if it's going to be like if I'm really bullish on a product and I'm like, okay, yeah, I know I can crush this project. I know I can crush this. And you know, I'll actually ask the people that are, you know, looking for a partner be like, would you be willing to do like revenue sharing or you know, variable, like a base plus variable. And what I've noticed is that when, when people come to me and they're like, well, you know, I just want to make $10,000 a month. Like I don't care how I get there. And then the second they say these two things and I'm like, you know, and I get it. Like I was just having another conversation with somebody else about like the whole 10k number, right? It's like that magic number, that magic bullet that's going to solve everybody's life, right? I think paying for good talent of course, like is a, it's, it's great, like having like great talent. You know, I've, I've had to learn, we've, we've both had to learn that. But I genuinely think like right now everybody has the same capabilities. It just comes down to how much time you're willing to invest to learn something. And I think you don't even have to be creative at this point in time to be able to succeed in the marketing field. You have so many different artificial intelligence providers right now that will help you to iterate spar test, you know, generate all of these different things that AI is really great at. And I think that's why like clay and like this whole go to market engineering thing is blowing up. And I just, I think it's hurting buyers because they're being misled and I think it's hurting suppliers because they're, they're relying on this crutch, right? And it makes it confusing for the people that are actually doing it like us because we're, I honestly, I feel like very honest take here. I feel completely misrepresented in the industry that we're sitting in. And I think that the industry that we're sitting in right now, this, this whole go to market engineering space is simply, if you break it down in marketing terms, it's life cycle marketing and revenue operations sitting together in one seat. That's technical.

In the best case, I would say.

In the best case.

In the best case because in most cases it's just doing what VAs in the Philippines were doing for, for €5 an hour four years ago and that was called growth marketing by the way. To build those lists using Phantom Buster, Scrap IO and using multiple tools, cleaning it up manually, etc. Has now been made so much easier using Klei. Other people like us were already doing that using Integromato or whatever types of web scripts that we could write. Or Eric as an OG in this game was doing all that stuff already back in whatever year, even probably 2015 or whatever, right? And so you cannot take away the learnings from people who have just been in the game. For so long. And yes, they're maybe overshadowed by newer people who are better at LinkedIn content and at attention grabbing but don't deliver results right. And so now I feel again it's also if you allow it to feel like that of course, but it has been over prioritized to look at people who have nice Designs on their LinkedIn posts and post about how much money they are making as a company versus the actual impact they have on their customers and how happy their customers are and how long their customers stay. And all that stuff has been pushed to the shadow over self promotion and self bloated ego driven marketing versus like you know, actually talking about substantial impact. And again like you know it's all about like how you just market it then. But I'm more in the boat of I would love to deliver and be of my word and rather under promise because there's so many things we can't control. I saw this as a salesperson myself as well. Like you know, no funding round closed, spreadsheet numbers, portraits in the, in the, in the meeting on Monday. Hey guys, we need to get there like you know, this is how we closed a 6 million funding round. We're going to have 2,500 users by the end of next year. And I'm like bro, we have like 200 now. So like you know how we going to get there A have fun figuring it out. And I'm like cool, what's my budget? Nothing. What? Okay cool. So why we raised all this bunch of money then? To develop the product. Okay, cool, so we're doing like a product round, not a go to market round. So why are users important right? Why, why why isn't amount of bugs in your Excel funding memo? Why isn't releases there? Like you know, why is all the pressure always on the sales people versus like what do you actually raise the money for?

You know, because sales, because salespeople their only their only mile marker is revenue in and I've seen it, I've seen the same shit.

Yeah but it's just like you know, I think AI will, will help. I mean like let's just call it as it is. Like most businesses shouldn't be in business because they don't add any substantial value into this ecosystems they are part of. And of course having failed projects, unhappy clients, all that stuff is part of business. You have to learn or we as business owners have to learn how to deal with that as well. You can't satisfy everyone and there's learnings that you and those Learnings cost you money, cost your clients money, everyone. Sometimes you just have, like, a lose, lose. And as long as you learn from it and move on, all good. That's part of the game we're playing. But it shouldn't be the standard, right? It shouldn't be, like. Because that's what I feel a little bit, that the overall vibe of Legion Agencies has become. Yeah, they steal my money for three months, and then I'll just churn, and I'm like, wow. I mean, cool. And then the founder is there, like, oh, yeah. I'm like, in Dubai living my best life, and I'm like, well, okay, cool. Like, good for you. Like, you know, essentially, you could be a crypto scammer or anything similar, I would say. Or, like, you know, sell products that get taken out of the market three months later because they use some shitty thing. Or, like, you know, it happens to the best of companies that they've used some product which is then suddenly irregulated in Europe and they have to recall. And, like, even car manufacturers have callbacks every year. Like, you know, that's all normal. It just, like, you know, correlates again with the type of person you want to be and what you want to represent and stand for in the market, I would say.

So do you. And I think I know the answer to this. Do you think that business is a game?

Oh, 100%.

Yeah. And I think that's why we get along in it, to win it, you know? Like, I. I don't know about you, but I move. I mean, I think, you know, you're in Europe as well. I've moved from the United States to Europe, and, like, the. The work life kind of like this balance of, like, hey, you're gonna work, and then you're gonna, you know, you're gonna take time off. You're gonna go to Greece, you're gonna go to Portugal. You know, you're gonna drink your beer, whatever you're gonna do. And I think this. I think it's important to have a culture also, like, within the business as well. And I think that business culture is why people start to buy and they start to trust. Because, you know, I do a lot of business with Americans, but I've noticed that recently I've actually been getting more inbound from Europeans, which is quite interesting, like, from, like, France and Germany and Spain. And they said, like, oh, can you help us get us into the American market? And I said, I don't. I'm just one American out of a couple, you know, A couple million or billion, I don't know everybody. But you know, I do understand that market. I think it's easier to speak to your own, you know, your own culture that you've already, you know, that you grew up using and the language and everything like that. But I think I, I think like being evaluated as a partner comes down to like an emotional decision at the end of the day. And, and this is where I like want to, I want to kind of like turn the conversation. It's like you're in Europe, you're European, you work with European companies and I'm American, but I sit in Europe and I work with American companies. Are there like, from what you've noticed recently, are there any specific, I don't know, like mile markers of what they look for in a partner in this side of the world in Europe versus in the United States and how they're viewing vendors. Like, because I know neither one of us position as a vendor, we position as partners.

I think it's location agnostic. Honestly. I've worked with US Companies and have found same. It's all about mindset and attitude, right? So as in like are you willing to own the deficits of your existing machinery? Are you willing to own and look yourself in the eye clearly of where they actually are? Right. Like for example, are you portraying yourself as a scale up but you have five people and 500k ARR, right. Or do you still believe you're a startup and you're not even ready to scale yet? Like you know, all those things are just things that we look for and so the moment there's urgency, need, magic wand type stuff, I am happy to pass on those opportunities because this might sound arrogant but like I've already achieved some stuff. I don't need to prove myself. I do feel a obligation to serve, to educate, to pass on my knowledge. But I believe that the right people will come our way and they'll stay. So I know that this is a recent realization. But like, and it's something, for example, people like Alex Harmozi say the same thing. Like if you're selling high value product at a, at a fair price, you're probably going to lose most deals versus winning them because most people are just not ready. They are just not in the same boat or mindset or attitude to evaluate that. Right. So yeah, for example, how I do my goal setting, like also for next year, I've written down yesterday, like we want like 15 to 20 clients next year who stay with us 12 months or more and do all that with a team of five to seven people, max. So everyone can. Can be paid well, so everyone can have their days off, so everyone can have like a balance and work 40 hours a week instead of 60 or 80. They can still do that if they want to. I do that when I want to. But it shouldn't be a requirement or a must. That can be. And if you're up, as long as you're upfront about it, it's all good, right? So, yeah, I just wish that in general, they would be more upfront of where they're at, where they want to go, etc. That's also why I started doing this scan, because I used to talk to founders who wanted to hire me when I was still doing fractional sales for them, and they told me a bunch of lies until you then arrive and there's no onboarding and you have to figure it out. And you ask for documents and you're not getting them. You can't have access to this. You can't have access to that. Okay, cool. Now I'm just in a stage of my life where I'll say, like, look, you're making this overly complicated to become successful or for both of us to get impact here. So, you know, doesn't sound like or seem like you're ready. So let's just call it quits here. Bam. Here's your money back. Go and have fun. Spend it somewhere else. Because I don't want to be taking any money from you if there is no collaboration or willingness on your end to be transparent with us. Right? Like, we need access, we need input, right? So if, on the other hand, you have across the table someone who asks, what's the expected input that you'll need from us, how many hours of a week should I, as a CEO be involved in this? Right? Then I'm like, cool, nice. You're obviously willing, right? Or if I ask them, like, where you're at with in terms of icp, and they're like, we have no clue. We've been thinking about this for a year. And I'm like, okay, cool. We have two ways of doing this. Number one is who you want to work with, which might not be who you currently work with. That is a route of 12 to 18 months that we're going to go down to, because you're basically going to start from scratch, right? That's one route. Just know that that's then the choice you're making. Or the second route, we can look at the data, we can look at your profitability per client. Because in my opinion, the best clients are the ones who complain the least, have the best results, and bring you the most money as a business. Right. And so if you want to go down that road, that answer I can give you within the next 30 minutes, as if you give me access to your data. Right. So, and then from there we have a clear roadmap. We can set like realistic expectations and KPIs. Are you down to explore that? And they're down. So then I'm like, cool now, now it's a partnership because they actually see the value of doing the groundwork and going deep into stuff and giving access. Right. So yeah, what I look at mainly is how controlling, like one of the things that I used to have when I was working alone was how good of a CEO and leader is sitting in front of me. Because I want to learn, right. Even though I'm selling my expertise, I also want to learn and grow as a person from working with that person who's going to be taking up 90 hours of my time a month. Right.

So, yeah, that's, yeah, that's. It's a really good point to always do your due diligence like this. You know, again, like I've, like I said earlier, like I've, I've learned my lessons. Like I've, again, like I've proven myself too, you know. Okay. So I want to. We can either take this in one of two directions. We can go down the route of what we posted about on LinkedIn and not so long ago about the topic of a fool with a fool with a tool is still a fool. Or if you want to explore just general advice to wrap up, which direction would you like to take this?

Let's go into like, general advice, I.

Would say, okay, so in less than, in less than five sentences, if you were to give advice to somebody up and coming in the go to market engineering or growth space that was looking to hire, looking to evaluate and looking to understand the space more, what would you tell them?

As in like an agency owner or GDM Engineer or a SaaS company, SaaS.

Company or even so, buyers, I would say, right, okay.

Spend the next 30 to 60 days on top of your existing sales team and go to market motion. Just analyze that. Write down as much as possible, identify gaps, speak to experts here and there. Go with concrete, precise questions until you find out where you want to go. Then you identify the gaps. With the gaps, you find industry experts or subject matter experts who can help you fill those faster than you can with your internal resources. That's basically the simple step process on how to solve any business constraint whatsoever that I would go through. So first do a deep analysis, like really thoroughly understand, make sure you're in it for the right thing. Because like, you know, this was what happened to me and how I started out on the catalyst. Because these companies, they used to hire me as a sales, they wanted revenue, right? But they never had any pipeline. So now I'm hired as an account executive or full cycle salesperson and I have to do my own prospecting, but I also have to close deals. So yeah, what I saw is if I spend two weeks only prospecting, I have a full pipeline. The moment I need to start taking those calls and start developing deals, etc. Attention deviates from the pipeline building, right? So that's how I actually started into automating stuff because I thought, okay, maybe I can replicate some of the stuff I've been doing here and just automate it so I can still do all of the other stuff as well. Now what happens after that is you just end up working way more, right? Because you're essentially doing multiple jobs, right? And so that's another thing like you know, be very clear as a salesperson, this is mainly on the budgeting part, right? Of you have to understand what it takes, what success looks like. And yeah, you probably should be asking more granular questions instead of high level stuff like not don't ask how many meetings a month can we get, but ask questions like how much time or work or what would be the required inputs from us to be able to have a successful automation workflow. What does an end to end revenue automation workflow look like in your world? Yeah, ask more questions like that, right? For example, my current close rate is 30%. We create deals starting from the meeting booked. And I'm like, okay, cool, let's just do an experiment. Let's look at, let's leave out the discovery meetings or the meetings booked and look at your close rate. Now is it higher or lower? If it's higher, cool. Now we know we have a top of funnel problem, right? There are unqualified leads getting in. So let's look at that. If it's lower then you have a closing problem, right? And so that's where you should be evaluating your machine more on how like you know, where is the overall funnel pipeline? Like you know, are all your stages clear? Otherwise we're just going to get you more conversations essentially with random people until we know which are the exact people that convert the best.

Super well said in my opinion. So I think that's a wrap if you're good for it. Olivier, thanks for coming on. Where can people find you on LinkedIn?

On YouTube? Probably link it in wherever we broadcast this. But yeah, just find me on LinkedIn, mainly. Oliver Tatehot. Same on YouTube. I'll be putting out a lot of content similar to this and thanks a lot for having me, Spence. I feel like I left it all out in the field.

That's what I hoped. So appreciate you jumping on and thank you for everybody joining us.

Take care, bye.