The 90-Day Sprint Framework I use to Accelerate Revenue

Hi folks, my name is Charles and I'm the host of Go-To-Market Hackers, the show where we go inside the minds of revenue architects creating systems that deliver winning outcomes. Now, before I introduce our awesome guest today, I'll share a little bit about myself. I am a SaaS founder with over 12 years of here in scaling go-to-market teams. And what I always find fascinating is understanding how the best go-to-market teams are using AI to unlock outstanding results. And so this podcast is about interviewing revenue architects that are sharing how they're combining the tools and the processes to create these winning outcomes. And today's guest is my friend Spencer Tahil, who's the founder of Growth Alliance. Uh, Growth Alliance is a revenue activation consultancy that works with high-growth startups to accelerate their go-to-market motions. Spencer, really great to have you on the show. Thanks again for joining. Maybe we can start by sharing a little bit about who's Spencer Tahil, how do you get into building growth engines at startups, and then we'll dive into some of the cool things you've been doing.

Yep. Hey Charles, I feel like we just talked yesterday. So for everybody else, I'm Spencer Tahil. I am running Growth Alliance, and for the most part, I'm implementing a lot of AI-powered workflows and agents for startups and agencies. So What I do now is kind of engineer the backend between the marketing and the sales systems and connect it back to revenue activation. So, um, while I'm mentoring, I always preach that every single action should be tied back to revenue. And this is like something, part of the process that I follow. So everything that I do must be tied back to revenue, either in direct revenue generated or time saved or becoming more efficient, something like this. This is That's for the most part what I do, but I'm sure that we're going to talk more about it as we go through today's call.

So already I have a question there. So you're working with a bunch of startups. I think you said Series A, Series B, and above, and you just said tying everything to revenue, which is great. I love that. Is that also how you prioritize the specific initiatives or campaigns you work on? Meaning, do you, do you have a table and be like, all right, these are the 10 things and these 3 things we should start here because that's going to have the biggest impact on time saved, et cetera, which, you know, converts to revenue? Is that how you think about it? Or are there some more infrastructure things that sometimes you have to start on which might not have a strong title revenue, but where you might start? How do you think of that?

So it depends on the stage. Usually a lot of Series A companies differ from like Series B companies, and the differences between seed round companies are completely different as well. So as far as prioritizing initiatives, especially with or without AI, it doesn't really matter. AI is just a tool. It will accelerate all of the bullshit that you do, but it will also accelerate all the great things that you do. For prioritization, I usually undergo a pretty lengthy diagnosis or discovery process. I've spent, you know, 5 hours with some teams, 9 hours with some other teams without even getting paid. You know, my job is to figure out how to get to the desired state. And every company is going to have a different desired state. If they want to consolidate all of their data, then we need to figure out where all of their data sources and where all their data hubs are lying. Like, it might not just be HubSpot, it might not just be Salesforce. My job is to diagnose and try to figure out what are the blockers for success. And then prioritize the blockers so that we can then go and actually do the meaningful work. So depending on that, then those get prioritized. But if, let's say, just in, in a unicorn level kind of play, all of the data is perfectly clean, all of the contact information is doing great, all of the workflows, they have an internal marketing operations person, they've got an AI engineer, like awesome, like they have the right people. What ends up happening then is that nobody talks to each other. So it's my job to liaise on, and everybody thinks differently. So I think establishing communication first and foremost is always my very first initiative because if we start work on anything, on any initiative, what ends up happening is that if there's any misalignment, it can go sideways. So that's always priority number one. As far as hands-on keyboard initiatives, that this is very particular to every business that I've ever worked in.

Yeah, I think we talked earlier about how, to your point, depending on the stage, the different initiatives vary quite a bit, right? If a company still is pre-PMF, they're figuring things out. The infrastructure is probably pretty basic. The data is probably simple. Also, the pipelines are pretty clean. So you probably focus on initiatives that are going to help gear towards that PMF. Versus others that already have PMF, you're more of a growth mode. And in that case, probably like removing bottlenecks, scaling the programs, maybe to a certain extent focusing more on the data, because there's probably more data of like either, you know, the type of prospects that are good fit versus the ones that, you know, the feedback from the team was, hey, this was a good fit, but initially we thought it was a good fit, but actually they churned 6 months later and they were a terrible customer.

Right? Does that make sense? Yes. So it's a lot of like stepping on the gas of like, if the car's already moving, step on the gas harder. What do we have to— what kind of oil and what kind of gas do we have to put in the car, right? Like, do we have to change from a manual shift, like shift gears, right? And think about it like that. Like, businesses are systems, and the human body is also a system, right? Like, how hard do we have to train to make ourselves run faster? And once we— for instance, once a business has PMF, or product market fit, How do we double down on what's working? How do we rapidly experiment on the channel strategy? What do we test in what order and what brings revenue faster by testing? So we never want to test and lose revenue, but if we can somehow recoup revenue while also testing and gathering more information, then contextually it makes more sense, right? That's how I think about it.

But it's funny you say we never want to test and lose revenue, but I do think it's part of the testing too, right? You have to have— it's like kind of like short-term risk versus long-term risk, you know? Trying out a new initiative that might even seem like it's a further path to revenue, but by creating lead magnets or whatever the case, instead of driving towards activation immediately, right? Driving some of the suspects towards a deeper engagement with the product or service, then to be able to convert them better. So I guess, you know, that's also, I'm sure it depends on the level of risk that each startup is willing to take upon. But yeah, I'm curious to get your thoughts on like the, How do you weigh the two things, like the risk of kind of deferring revenue maybe versus seeking it at all costs and ASAP or yesterday, like most founders do?

So I'm going to try not to generalize here, but what I've noticed is that nowadays, I mean, now we all have access to GPT. We all have access to the best models of AI, right? This is the cutting edge tool of our century, in my opinion. And at the end of the day, I'm not in charge of your time. Like, I'm not going to be in charge of your timelines at the startup, right? Like, you're going to hire us to come in, we're going to help the startups. Like Charles, we both work with startups, right? But at the end of the day, like, we don't control the money, we don't control that investment. The investors demand things and it's up to the VPs of sales and it's up to the CEOs to be able to make the hires, to be able to go and get those things right. And I think being able to understand really like what are the realistic goals versus what are the investor-level goals and trying to meet both of them as high as you can. Is the hardest part of doing demand gen, is the hardest part of doing experimental testing. Because sometimes, you know, CEOs, investors, they don't want to wait. They don't want to do that long-term play that, you know, might be better for them. And I'm seeing this a lot now, or a lot of people are impatient. And me trying to convince somebody, be like, listen, this is the best way. You should probably not buy this tool. Oh, by the way, it saves you $80,000 a year. Oh, now you've got me talking. Oh, it makes me 80,000. It has a potential to make me $80,000. I think it's all in the verbiage and it comes down to how you present the solution. And it also comes down to the risk tolerance of whoever's running that startup or whoever's running that company. If they're very risk-averse and they want to go for that giant pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, then they'll probably take the risk. But if they're less risky, then they're probably going to want to say like, hey, get me the revenue right up front. They're not going to want to bet on you. And I think like when I've pitched things, this is— I know I'm rambling a bit right here, but what I've— what I've noticed is that a lot of these startups, especially Series A, Series B, like they already have teams, they already have people they can depend out of their network. It's the seed round funded companies that are only like 1 to 3 people and usually they are very hesitant. To spend money, actually. And I think they have every right to be hesitant. You know, if you're hiring somebody in pre-seed, seed, you should do your proper homework. You should figure out like, is this person a perfect fit? Okay, great. If they're not a perfect fit, are you willing to accept the risk for not perfect fit or non-perfect results?

Makes sense. I totally agree, by the way. Can I ask you, when we talked together before this, you had talked about how you like to attack things in sprints. And you were a big fan of getting startups to quote unquote fire you at a certain stage, right? So getting them to kind of graduate and then, you know, keep scaling on their own and internalize the role of a growth engineer or whatever we want to call it, right? Growth leader. So can you talk about how do you structure those sprints typically? And you said from the beginning of the conversation, you try to tie things to revenue. If you do a sprint, whether it's a 30, 60, 90-day sprint, however you structure that, can you actually tie it back to revenue within that sprint? Or how do you kind of go about running those sprints and then trying to tie them to revenue at some point?

So the only non-generating activity that I actually push inside of my agreements and proposals is video documentation. So this is like in my head right here. So the way that I like to work and the way that I've noticed working with startups and scaleups over the past few years is that the investors and also the CEOs and whoever's running the show, they always end up saying the same thing. Ah, we want to build a high-class team. We want to build a world-class team. Completely acceptable. You know, that's awesome. You should, you should retain your talent. What that means for outside talent like us is that we have no business being in the company more than 6 to 12 months, in my opinion. And I've noticed this just by looking back at my wins and looking at like my churn rate is clients will only churn for one of two reasons. And I'm talking like, you know, from an outside perspective, right? I've noticed that in startups and scaleups that they're either churning because they're really successful or because they're wildly unsuccessful. And that usually comes around like the 8 to 10 month range. So I think, you know, logically what I did is I worked backwards and I was like, let's do everything in 3 to 6 months. And, you know, get in there, get our hands dirty, get in with the team, work as a design partner, work as a sales partner, and really build kind of this like go-to-market system or, you know, I hate to say it, like a go-to-market engineering system, right? And what that ends up doing is that within the first 2 weeks, we've got infrastructure online. We've got, you know, your ads connected to, you know, your CRM. We've got a CRM audited, right? If you don't have a CRM, okay, like we've got to set that up. How does that tie back to revenue in the sprint? Okay, you have visibility into the revenue, you have visibility into the pipeline, or you have more data that's connected that helps you close more deals. The second sprint, right? I usually sprint in 1-month sprints, 2 to 4-week sprints. First month is usually always going to be like contextualization and as so like auditing, consolidation, building the initial infrastructure, like just understanding kind of like What type of sand I'm building the sandcastle with here. Phase 2 or Sprint 2 is usually about controlled testing, consolidation, expanded testing, as well as like overall stress testing. So if we're running email campaigns, if we're running direct mail campaigns, if we're running lifecycle nurture campaigns from HubSpot or Salesforce, like what is resonating? Let's gather the data now that we have all the systems operational. Let's turn everything on. Stress test, and now we've got more data. How does that translate to revenue? Okay, now you know your market resonance. You're not going to see enterprise-level sales come in within 3 days and close, but at least you can test what's resonating with your audience. Phase 3, or Sprint 3, is usually always about scaling, expansion, and documentation. So in my instance, if I could do all of that in 90 days, I consider that a win, and then I can offer to stay on and help these startup founders and say like, hey, 60 days, if you don't need me in 60 days, just let me know. I'm going to help you guys train your incoming hire. I fully expect you guys to build an in-house team. So and this is realistically how everything gets tied back. I wouldn't say every single minute task is like this makes $10, but it's totally—

exactly. Yeah.

And that's like the confusing part. And I want to preface that it's like if you have a goal, I need to know what that goal is and I need to know what the qualities of success look like before I start working so that I can bridge the gap. If I can't figure out where I'm going, then I will want to refuse the work. Because for me, I've made that mistake before and it ends up messy. And I think that's the duty of the hire-er, like the startup founder as well. It's like, you need to write your job description before you go out and interview talent, you know?

Totally. So let me just make sure I, I understood and say it back. First of all, you need to understand, like, when you start working with startups, basically you want to make sure that the startup has very clear goals and success metrics in mind. And then from there, once you're aligned on what those look like, you start breaking down what the, you know, let's say 3-month engagement might look like. And typically you have 3 sprints that are defined based on those goals, and then you work on hitting those. Now they do tie into revenue in some shape, but it may be that again, if you're, you know, specifically working on campaigns around automation for You talked about nurture, et cetera. It's obviously very different than if you're doing a pure outbound campaign or if you're working on some inbound campaigns or inbound automation or CRM automation. So they are tied to revenue, but it kind of like dotted line in some cases, it sounds like. And then I'm sure the revenue sometimes comes a little bit later than even that 3-month timeframe. It could be that, you know, the actual campaigns that will drive the revenue only start in month 2. So it'll take like, you know, a couple of weeks from there to even start showing success or not, right?

Yes. Well, again, it depends. Are they like, you know, are they a rapidly expanding software tool that has awesome PLG, like product-led growth, or are they like a traditional enterprise sales motion when, you know, it has to go through 4 hands, you have to multithread and things like this? Again, it completely depends on the business. With startups, again, nowadays that's usually going to be SaaS companies. I'm going to just generalize here. You're going to know, like, the market will either resonate with your product because you're actually solving a true pain point, or it just won't. And unfortunately, like, that's what I've noticed too. It's like 1 or 2 months in, if it's not resonating, then I'm like, you know, and there has to be a strategic decision. And I just tell them like, hey, listen, like, we need to completely change gears, we need to experiment. And I think that's what you guys need to do first, or like what you know, a lot of startups need to do first is they can't be afraid of rapid experimentation. Like screw A/B testing, do like the whole gambit, do like A, B, C, D, E, F testing. Yeah.

So maybe we can double-click on that because I've actually experienced this personally. I started working with a startup where they were, you could tell that the founders were engineer, very technical product. And what they wanted to do is they wanted to, they were putting a little bit of the carriage before the horse. They wanted to optimize every single step of the funnel and how leads came in, et cetera. But when I was talking to sales reps and AEs, they were like, listen, dude, they don't want what we're building. Like, they don't want this shit. And I said, well, what do you mean? I was like, well, look, you know, we started walking through the pipeline and understanding, like, I dive into the objections he was having and understanding, like, what's the close rate and also what's the, you know, churn rate and usage. And there was a real big problem. The founders thought they had PMF, but when you look at all the metrics from sales, They did not. And what they were looking to optimize for was the whole marketing stuff and making sure that literally they had such a perfect engine to go from like inbound lead to this, that, and they were optimizing on all these things around it where I eventually told the CEO, listen, this is really actually, I'm impressed by the way you set up the marketing ops for this, but just listen to the sales team. The sales team is saying that you don't have A, B, C, D. Nobody wants to buy this. And by the way, you don't have a CS team yet. You have one dude that's handling customers and you have like out of the 10 customers you have, 3 have already churned. Like, you know, so, so I think sometimes there's a little bit of that, you know, making sure that you're putting your dollars in the right place to have ROI so that they avoid what you describe, which is at some point you either go this where like, you know, that customer dies off or, you know, basically exponential.

I think it's all a game of focus. What I've noticed, the same thing I'm actually surprised about what you just said, is that the sales team said something and they said it directly to the CEO and they weren't afraid of getting fired.

So they said it to me first. They said it to me first as an external person.

Yeah. And, and I think like that's the golden nugget right there, is that when these people, these salespeople, like they are the experts in their field in sales. They know how to do discovery. I mean, let's hope, right? And what I'm noticing is that, no, I'm not going to listen to them or I'm not afraid of speaking up because I'm afraid of my position. You know, I think like that's the complete opposite of like having an external party. It's like we have a contract, we have a fixed thing. Like hopefully you have a fixed thing. You come in as a consultant, you're the expert, you're there for a reason to like give expertise to the startup founder or the CEO, right? I've noticed that it's the exact same scenario that you just said. It's like they tell an external party before they tell the other person, which is a huge issue in communication and internal alignment. And like, and going back to what I was saying before, it's like, I've talked to the VP, I've done the 9 hours of discovery call, and that was the same exact issue. There were 7 different people on that Series B team, and only 2 people got put on the project 4 months ago. The rest of the 5 were brand new to the project and You know, they're supposed to be my points of contact. I'm like, what the hell, guys? I think like that's a huge problem when there's internal misalignment and you're trying to hire somebody or trying to get advice. Who, who's calling the shots? Like, who's actually listening? And I think like that's a mindset thing. I think that's a growth mindset for these startup founders that they have to adopt. It's like, yeah, you might be running the show, but you're not running the show. You are in charge But you should realistically hire and you should surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, in my opinion. And you should be willing to take that advice. And I see a lot of people not willing to do that. It's a huge issue.

Of course. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

So I want to, I want to take this in a slightly different direction, but I'm just curious what you're seeing happening in the market right now. From my conversations, there's oftentimes like AI is being brought into organization like GTM organizations in a very ad hoc way, right? There's one BDR that's starting to use it for campaigns without necessarily telling everybody. There's another person that there's a RevOps guy that's doing some CRM automation and there's a sales guy that's also doing some stuff on his. So there's, which is great. I love initiatives like this, right? It's kind of like grassroots. But at the same time, it can be kind of chaotic because suddenly everybody's building different things. There's no kind of leadership on, hey, this is how we're gonna be using AI. We want AI everywhere. We need to, you know, we need to have a strategy for doing ABC. And I'm curious for you, when you come into these startups and you start mapping out kind of the gaps that they have, do you sometimes see that the teams are like, in terms of the structure of how they're incorporating AI, that it's a little bit all over the place using AI or dabbling in AI. Is there structure to it or are we still in the phase where it's very chaotic? Because again, for me it's oftentimes very chaotic, which again, I like it cuz startups are messy and that's fine, but I just get concerned about how that scales, right?

Yes. I so much so agree with you. How I like to think about it and how I like to think about today's market, especially with AI and especially in the sector of marketing, which is the sector that we both sit in, is that it's a lot of unorganized chaos. And that's not okay. It needs to be organized chaos. That's startup life is like everybody goes, you know, everybody's saying like you start at 8, you work until the sun goes down. I don't believe in that life personally, but I understand the grind. I understand the hustle of building a great product, but it needs to be organized. There needs to be leadership. There needs to be everybody marching in the same general direction. Right? Like you don't need to be stampeding, which is, you know, everybody's running, you know, just like full force. That happens in some companies, but you can't be walking. One person can't be using Gemini and one person can't be using GPT. But where are your margins going, dude? And this is what I see a lot of teams doing instead of adapting to the system or the team that's in place. And this happens startups, agencies. This happens in companies that are like pre-$2 million in revenue that I've noticed when I was like a fractional. It's like, how do we get the broader team to become aligned to be using with this main goal? And I think again, it comes down to internal alignment and leadership, but like, that's just my opinion. And when I go in, the state of the market right now is that everybody will just use whatever they've seen online and whatever they are most susceptible to in the marketing scheme right now. Like, you know, Clay.com is a huge sector winner right now. If everybody has not heard of them, they are leading the go-to-market engineering space and they've coined this term go-to-market engineer. It's a spreadsheet with an LLM attached to it with a native integration site, 200 tools or something like that. I've dumbed that down as much as I can for you, but it's a pretty awesome tool. You can experiment rapidly, but the people that are adopting it and that are high competence users will understand that it's a limited tool. Sometimes, right? And I think the people that are adopting AI or the people that are adopting workflows are going to be coming from one of three buckets. First and foremost, the curious ones, the ambitious ones, or the tech-forward ones. You don't really see anybody else outside of those three mental mindsets to be able to adopt AI in its, like, current state. And now then the rest of the market lags behind those visionaries or lags behind those people, and then they say, oh, I've seen somebody do it online. I've seen that N8N workflow. So I think like when you start becoming organized in the way that you work and the way that you adopt tools and that you, a way that you adopt solutions, it needs to go from unorganized chaos to organized chaos to organized. And then going from like 1 to 10, you know, like this, this multiplier is going from unorganized chaos to just organized. Right?

Totally. So I do have a question related to that, which is So earlier you said if you do a good job, at some point, you know, you will pass the baton to somebody else to continue to run the program or lead it. And so, you know, let's say you've done a great job. Everybody's super happy. They're graduating. They've been with you or you've been with them for 6 months. Like, do you typically, as part of your engagement, say, all right, let me hire this specific person to do it? Do you pass that over to a RevOps leader? The person like, you know, director of RevOps, who do you typically pass that to? Or is it just, hey, the person that's like, as you said, like one of those three or somebody who's obviously excited about GTM and has a little bit of a higher level view, not just like narrow around outbound or inbound or marketing ops, it's just a little bit broader. So just curious, how do you effectively then help them transition to being autonomous? And also this is a trickier one, like How do you transition them from, you know, disorganized chaos to organized chaos? Meaning like, do you also have to bust some balls and be like, all right, dude, that this is not how it's happening anymore. And then, you know, basically restructure some of the, the whole thinking around this and even maybe even the responsibilities of some of the folks.

Yeah. So I've messed up before and like going back to like talking about what's worked and what's not worked. This is something that's not worked. I've either not well-defined my scope and then I'm the one that's, you know, stuck doing the reorganization of either the team or the tools or anything like this. And I've also failed before to properly qualify the scope, like qualify the scope and my responsibilities. So, I mean, it's kind of the same thing, like one is scope and like one is failure to, to do it. And then one is failure to actually diagnose what the underlying problems were. As far as organizing a team, do I have the ability to do that? Do you have the ability to do that? Like, Charles, I know your work history as well, and it's like, yes, we have the ability to, but most of the time that's not going to be within our scope of work unless it's like really given to us, right? That's a chief of staff position. That's going to be like a fractional COO position or VP of sales position, right? As far as who do I pass the baton to at these stages, I mean, like in the seed round, I was just working with a company. They do a lot of e-com, D2C. I was able to map their whole target addressable market in the United United States and Canada. They ended up having around like 4.5 million businesses that they could go do business with. XYZ, XYZ. I set up the system. They had pretty good success. I mean, they had like 100+ MQLs a week. And then, you know, they're like, oh, our engineering team needs to catch up. They have a VP of sales. So they said, can we pause the contract? And I said, absolutely. Here's how everything works. It's like the documentation is there. And, you know, the VP of sales just took care of it. They usually appoint somebody on the inside. Was he the most technical? No. But was the documentation that I handed over to him to become self-efficient and like, you know, able to manage the system by himself, was it sufficient? I would say yes, because months later he's still running the show. I can see it in the logs and everything like that. But I think with Series A, Series B, it's completely different because you have a completely different team landscape and you have more resources, you have more money flowing in, you have, you know, just in general, just more resources at your fingertips. With the agencies or these, these larger companies, there's usually a dedicated technical personnel or dedicated technical team that's assisting the sales motion or assisting the marketing and revenue operations team, whether that's going to be a marketing operations lead, whether that's going to be a specialist coming in, whether that's going to be a full lifecycle marketer that also knows how to set up like individual workflows. If that's a revenue operations lead, awesome. It completely depends on who they have that I'm going to hand that back off to. The realistic part is some of these companies don't have a technical person that's going to want to apply that skill into managing a program, into managing 7 different tools, into managing a consolidated tech stack, stuff like this. So that's where I say to them like, hey, if you want me to stay on board until you find somebody, I'm— I can be here. You know, the next 60 days we just roll it out. You know, you guys don't have to take care of it. I already know how it works, right? Makes it easy for them. But who I'm usually seeing it go to is either the VP of sales and then they're going to hire somebody to kind of like dabble in it, or I hand it to a marketing operations or revenue operations lead and they're going to be more technical. They're just going to be managing the system and the data flows and orchestration. So these are usually the two people and the person that sits between that in today's market is called a go-to-market engineer. This is how I think about it, right? What is the role that sits between sales, marketing, revenue, and operations? And that's kind of this triangle that Clay has carved out in the market right now and stuff like this. They totally, yeah.

But, but I will say, I still think that the term go-to-market GTM engineer is not known enough, and most startups I work with do not have GTM engineers. And you're right, the ones who typically lead it are sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops. Those are typically the roles that I see kind of taking this on. And some of them do like the tech parts, but the tech and, you know, understanding the systems, but some of them are more, they like the strategy parts. So I think in those cases, it's not always the best fit in terms of who will end up leading it after you might depart. But it makes sense. Everything's in flux. I'm sure if we had this conversation in 6 months, it'll change, right? So it makes a lot of sense. I did want to, um, you know, as you know, in Go-To-Market Hackers, we try to make this really tangible. We want to demystify the process and also show how you can apply this in-house as a founder of a startup or scale-up. We talked together about both the successes you've had and also the times where a specific campaign doesn't work. So maybe now is a good time for you to share a little bit the experience you have in building these specific workflow and building these specific programs or these specific sprints that you talked about and would love to dive into a couple that you've done, including some that are less successful and didn't turn out like expected, but also what are the learnings there?

Yes. So let's start from when I failed and getting to where I was. First of all, I also agree that it's not well known enough. It's not defined well enough. And this is clearly just a definition problem. It's resonating with the market. But going back to defining kind of what I do, how I've learned it is I come from the HubSpot world. I come from this, you know, marketing operations world as well. So I've fallen into learning about these different tools over the past 5, 6 years. And Clay, I'm just going to talk about what I do now. Clay is a forerunner in setting up these like outbound systems, inbound down, let outbound. This is coined by Adam Robinson, like, from RB2B. Clay.com, this is led by Varun. And, you know, like, these are leaders in the space that have, like, pretty good products. What I have failed to do before, previously, was not understand the capabilities of each tool in its full— its entirety. And I have bought tools for features when I should have been buying tools for strategies. And, and this is something that I talk a lot about, like on my podcast and like on my LinkedIn as well, is do not buy the tool for the feature, buy the tool to underlie your strategy, right? And to help you there. And what I mean by that is Zapier is an amazing product, right? Clay is an amazing product. HubSpot is an amazing product. So is Salesforce, right? I guarantee you, if I say that all of these products are the best products in the world, I'm going to piss everybody else off. Because at the end of the day, there are limitations of every single tool. There's limitations of every single system. What I see a lot of my failure points in startups being is that I didn't know the full capabilities and the limitations of the system, meaning the team or the resources, and I prescribed the wrong medicine, right? And I prescribed the wrong toolset or I prescribed the wrong strategy. And unfortunately, that's just the way of the world. Like, I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. And it sucks to taint your name and to make that wrong recommendation as an expert or make a recommendation and just see the hypothesis fail. At the end of the day, I have to say like, hey, I was hired as an expert. I came in, we tried it, we did our best. If you're not trying your best as an individual and you fail, then that's still on you. If you're trying your best and you fail, at least you gave it your best and at least you know you've done your best. And I think that's something else that I've learned along the way with working with these like startups. And it's a lot of it's a mental game as much of it's like an actual hands-on keyboard game. Are you doing your best work? Are you curious about it? Are you ambitious about it? Curiosity and ambition are the two things that I hire for as well. And then I try to show people when I'm like, I'm really curious about your product. Like, I'm really ambitious about the AI in the market, the go-to-market scene. Like, that's where passion is. Like, what, what do you watch on YouTube? What book are you reading? Like, what podcasts are you listening to now? And totally staying up to date with the whole market is something that I've learned that I have to do as an expert. That's my domain. That's my uniqueness, is that I have the ability to learn a lot of small little different things about a lot of different tools. And for the failure points of prescribing the wrong medicine, I will never make that. Well, I mean, I will probably make the same mistake again, but at least I'll be more knowledgeable in the scene of like, hey, like, do not buy this tool because you can buy this tool and get another feature that's gonna overlap. So you don't have to buy 3, you can just buy 1 and have it all in 1. Is that your desired state? So it all comes back to the one question, what is your desired state? And I think that's the one mistake that I've gone over time is like the number one thing is failure to recognize that the desired state is not well defined enough. Yeah, it's— and that has every single time that I've done 2 or 3 lengthy, you know, discovery process. If I nail down the scope, if I go down the scope of work, if I go down the agreement and we get buy-in from everybody, then everybody says, yep, yep, yep, green light, looks good, looks good. Oh, what about that? I want them to raise their hands and tell me what's wrong with the work. I want them to. I encourage people to. And as a founder or somebody leading a team, you need to be able to be critical. You need to be able to nitpick. You need to be able to do, put down on paper definitions. You need to be able to start somewhere on that. So that's the first failure point.

I had a couple thoughts about, you know, I think it's interesting that you're saying the set of features of a tool isn't necessarily the most important, which I understand. It's like, what do you want to get out of it and the strategy behind it? The only part I'll push back a little bit, and I think you wouldn't disagree, I think it's a matter of definitions. I know that whenever I'm hiring somebody, I'll typically ask the same questions you ask, which is, hey, tell me about some of the tools you use, right? And if somebody just throws out tools that are, you know, tools that you used 7 years ago, I don't know, like, you know, they're like, for you, I'm just thinking right now of LinkedIn automation. Like a tool I love is HeyReach and I'm not sponsored by them or any, any thing like that. Great tool for LinkedIn automation. And I know a lot of them. And if somebody's like, hey, I, I love Linked Helper, which is a tool that's been around like 10 years old at this point. That's gonna be a red flag for me. And so I agree that the tool isn't the most important and the features of that tool aren't necessarily the most important, but there are some, you know, there are some limitations to that. Like if somebody's gonna recommend a terrible tool that's really outdated and that has a lot of gaps and maybe that's not flexible enough and that doesn't have enough integrations and that is inferior in so many ways to the other kind of bleeding edge tools, then for me, those are red flags. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I'm going to agree with you fully because LinkedIn automation is just its own beast as well. And if somebody said, oh yeah, I'm using HeyReach too, I'll be like, okay, you're like pretty up to date on the market, right? That's a dinosaur right there. Yeah. And I totally agree with you in that sense. I think there are red flags. I think when people come to the table and, you know, when I have those conversations with, you know, hopefully the listeners here of like seed, Series A, Series B, you know, Series C startup founders and scaleups is when they come to the table and they say, hey, have you used Clay? And I'm like, yes. But my question back to them is, what are you trying to get out of it? What type of strategy?

I agree.

And I think like, that's my due diligence is like, if you just give me a fricking tool, man, and you like expect me to tell you everything that I do with it, I think like that shows lack of depth and Totally.

So I call this GTM porn where it's basically like you have, and maybe you see this too, like founders that are just, they've heard of a tool and they're like, oh, I wanna use this tool. And I guess what you're saying is, okay, tell me why. Like, why do you wanna use that tool? I mean, aside from the fact that your other 3 friends said it was a great tool and they're using it in their startup, just like there's a, a broad variety of tools we can use that might be a good fit, but explain like what's the rationale? And that, that's kind of your—

and it's a, it's a huge issue. And it's like people, and we were talking about this on my podcast, it's like people buy with emotion and they validate with rationale. And that's just the reality of the situation. It's like, oh, my friends use it, I need it. Yeah, referral code, you know, like, and, and that's just the, that's the reality of the situation. We're never gonna change human mindset. We're never gonna go from a, like a society or a human type of capability to think of like, oh, we see this thing that other people are using, it must be valid. It's already pre-validated. I should probably see what it can do for me. That's the due diligence. And I think like that's the type of scope of work. That's the type of definition that you need. Before you go into scaling anything with or without AI, I think this is the number one failure point is like lack of definitions, like lack of scope. And yeah, I think it's a lot of LinkedIn crap too. I think there's a lot of like top of funnel noise, a lot of middle of funnel noise, which is like buy my NNN workflow and all this crap, you know, like workflows are templates, recipes in the kitchen are templates. Like you're allergic to apples. Okay, don't put the damn apples in the pie. Like put peaches or something, right? And you have to be able to diagnose what the problems are and what the desired state's gonna be for you to implement the right tool. It just might not be the right fit solution.

So we started talking about this because we were, you were talking about some failures that you've had. So one of the, like, if I kind of summarize what you said, one of the failure was kind of maybe not pushing back enough early enough into some of these decision points by a CEO that wants to use X, Y, Z new shiny tool, and then you start implementing and you realize actually this, you know, we kind of are misaligned in terms of what the expectations are of why we wanted this tool in the first place. And then I guess you waste a lot of time too and you spend money on a tool that's not the right fit for what they're looking to achieve. Is that kind of the idea?

Yes, I would, I would say that's pretty right on the money.

Makes sense. So then, okay, that's a great one. What are examples of projects that you've worked on where you've had success and can give a bit of a glimpse of what does it take to be successful in launching a specific type of workflow or automation? Would love to dive into that.

Yeah. So I think I'm just on the side of my other screen here. So if you catch me looking on the top right corner, I have one of the contracts that's actually been signed. It's a renewal. And in, you know, we're in month 9 now, right? And it's objectives, activities, as well as desired outcomes. And that's how I structure everything. So what are the objectives of the initiative, right? Like whether that's going to be the sprint, whether that's going to be the workflow, whether that's going to be the track. Am I fixing your CRM? Okay, let's define what fixing means. Are your contacts disassociated or are they just missing data? Okay, let's get formal definitions down, pen on paper, right? What are the objectives? Understand what— uncover lost pipeline. Okay, that's going to be like the high level, right? Because that tied back to revenue, right? What are the activities that I need to get there? Activities. Okay, I need to take a snapshot of the CRM and I need to figure out exactly how many contacts out of your 500,000 contacts in there are not in your ICP, not in your target persona, not in your segments, and/or are missing critical fields. Enrichment. Okay, that's an activity. What is the desired outcome of this workflow of data consolidation? You know, desired outcome is to uncover stale contacts as well as deassociate and reassociate the proper segmented personas in your target accounts list so that you can uncover and reactivate revenue of both closed in pipeline and closed lost if possible. At the same time, while I'm taking the snapshot, let's go into your closed one deals extract the companies, try to figure out who bought, why they bought, and when they bought, and see if there are any patterns over cycles. Is the deal average deal? It says in HubSpot that your average deal length is 68 days, but in reality, is it more close to 120? Because, you know, maybe you've been introduced, maybe they saw your ad. How did they see your ad? Okay. Is that data even attached to the contact record of being marketing, you know, marketed to? Where does the attribution come in? So I think like knocking everything down when you're implementing something new, like what I do successfully is I define the objectives, the C-level objectives, right? Like it's like 10 bullet points or 5 bullet points. It's like, I'll read it right here. It's like begin Salesforce mailbox setup and warm up critical January. Or second bullet is consolidate 2.25 million service addressable contacts from scattered sources into master database. Right. Maintain campaign velocity without migration, but also reconsolidate. Those are like 3 high-level objectives. And then what are the activity? It's like, you know, migration timeline finalization. That's month 1 because we can't just migrate immediately, right? Like we have to reconsolidate and we have to build the workflows. And then what does that look like at the desired outcome level? So always you go objectives, high level. This is what that manager is going to take to your investors. Like, Make it very easy. Objectives, activities. What are the ground level groundwork that you need to do? So defined objectives and the activities that match. And then also define at the bottom for the middle managers as well. You know, I'm just— my mindset here is I always multithread on my deals. So it's— I define the objectives for the investors, CEOs, the activities that I need to get there. That's the gap between the current state and the desired state. And the desired outcomes is the future state. Right. So desired outcomes are going to be some mixture between, you know, what we're trying to do versus where we're trying to go. But it's also going to be concrete. And I think putting pen on paper, if it's going to be either a metric increase like 50 SQLs by the end of Q1, or if it's going to be a percentage increase, but whatever you're going to do, keep that metric the same so that you're not tracking against apples versus oranges. So I think this is like one of the bigger successes is being able to break down an initiative between those three. Just high-level objective, then the activities on the ground level, and then the desired outcomes, and then working backwards. So it's a lot of like reverse engineering of like, where do you want to go and how do you want to do it? But this is what I've seen work very well, at least for the past like 2 years since I started implementing this in like some of my agreements and, you know, my, you know, my working agreements with startups as well, because then everybody has the same copy. Everybody knows what everybody else wants and everybody else knows what that other person is doing and what they're responsible for. We forget.

Makes sense.

Um, our attention and our memory is finite, so you might as well just write it down and you better sign on it. This is what I share with prospects, for instance. This is what I show to Series A and Series B startup founders. It's like, what does it actually look like on the map, right? So the first line up at the top is what you guys are going to get in your hand at the end of every single phase. Timeline moving forward is Disco, Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, and then the finalization. And then underneath in purple are all of the little tiny kind of like ground level work that I'm going to have to do to get you guys to your desired state. So again, like going back, it's like understanding the current state, taking an audit, doing the foundational builds, making minor optimizations should all be done first before you start doing strategic testing. What is the date like? How are you going to review the data quality if you guys haven't built the foundational builds, if you haven't taken a snapshot or an audit? It's a blocker, right? So I think when you start to design a program and you start to design a go-to-market motion, if you start to design anything, any initiative, I think you need to map it out on dependent on blockers. So in startup life, it's understanding what success looks like, and then it's defining the success, like redefining the success. It's testing what success looks like against your hypothesis, and then it's scaling that success, right? And if you want to continue that into a larger program, you want to expand it into LinkedIn ads or different marketing channels, you know, stuff like this, continuous improvement, then that's continued success. And this is realistically like how I look at it. And this is what I put in front of people to realistically like convince them that I can help them get to their desired state.

So first of all, thanks for sharing because this is super illuminating as an example. When I read this, My first thought was, holy shit, this is a heavy engagement. Help me understand, you're not doing this by yourself because this is like, this could take, you know, just the attribution infrastructure. I've seen folks spend 4 to 6 months on that because it's broken. Who do you work with? Or are these just kind of examples? Do you kind of do all these bullets in purple here? Just so I understand. And maybe it's other folks on your team, right? Maybe it's like you have you know, 3, 4 people that come in. But how do you, how are you able to keep everything, you know, first of all, you said that the sprints are typically like, I think you said 2 to 4 weeks. So like, let's say about a month, like you're talking about doing something here in like 3, you know, 3, 4 months for all of this. That sounds insane. So just help me understand.

I can't work with more than 4 clients at a time. Mm-hmm. So I've been in the startup life, I've been in the agency life. I understand that startups hire agency agencies to fix their shit and then they get burned by the agency because they are serving everybody like they're a piece of meat and they're trying to push you into a box. I hated that. I absolutely hated it and I've seen it firsthand. I'm not saying all agencies do that. I vowed that I would never just not want to be custom. Like I think like being custom and being more hands-on is, I like having a personal relationship like Charles, like we haven't worked together, but we have a friendship, right? And I think in the long run that feels better in my soul to be able to know I'm just like, I'm helping and it's very personal to me. And that's what I do. Like phase one, what, like we just wrapped up an engagement with a crypto, you know, a crypto company. They wanted to create an automatic onboarding sequence, right? They didn't have infrastructure. Like we had to set up their N8N account. We had to set up everything to go into Salesforce, everything like go and mint everything. Phase 1, what I ended up putting in front of them was a 6-month plan. And it was, you know, Phase 1 was 2 months, Phase 2 was 2 months, Phase 3 was 2 months. But during those months, right, they said like, oh my God. And that's exactly what ended up happening was they said Phase 2 and 3 is really heavy and it's heavy for us to commit to right now. Can we put it as optional? Can we just commit for the first 2? Yeah, man, let's do it. So like what? And then that's what we did. We ended up committing for the first phase, the first 2 months, and then we actually accelerated because we got the work done sooner and we started phase 2 and we just wrapped up. That's the benefit of keeping it very small and lean is I, I made a full-time hire. His name is Jonathan. He's sitting out in Los Angeles. He's a very good friend of mine. We met at one of those agencies that ended up throwing people around. And we both left. We went our separate ways. We reconnected on Discord playing games like years or months later. And now he handles implementation. So I'm still the one that you talk to. I'm your first point of contact. I'm the one that's putting the strategy together that, you know, is putting out these phase breakdowns. He's the one that's behind the scenes, hands on keyboard, you know, not really talking to a lot of people. That's what he wanted in his JD was he's like, as long as you take care of sales, marketing, partnerships, and prompt engineering, I'll take care of the rest. And that was our handshake, right? And, and that's it. It's just me and him. Love it. And, and, you know, hopefully we'll make a new, like, we get more demand and we, we expand a little bit, but totally, you know, this, this—

so super lean and you guys pack a, like, a serious punch.

Yeah.

Again, everything that you described in that roadmap is heavy. And I mean, it's, it's impressive that two guys are able to execute that across even four clients at a time. That's a lot. But it's very cool.

What ends up happening, and you know what I tell people, it's like, why are you gonna keep paying me as a consultant? I've been a consultant before. Like, a good consultant should work their way out of a job. I shouldn't be in your company for 7 months, dude. It means that I'm not good at my job at fixing the problems. So, and I think like, people get trapped in this thought of like, you need continuous human manpower to be able to power a system, but that kind of defeats the purpose of building the car, you know, right. And putting gas in it and making sure that it works when it leaves the factory. Like they don't sell Porsche and Ferrari and, you know, expect you to put the wheels on it, right? I hope they wouldn't. And that's pretty much it. What I do is I charge a premium, but I'm already understanding in that Series A or Series B that's about to hire their 5th SDR and 4th AE What ends up happening is how much, roughly how much I ask them very directly in a private call. I say, you know, what is the cost of your sales organization right now? $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a year plus commissions. Okay, that's for the year. What I do is I say, all right, so if I were to put something in front of you and I were to be able to accelerate your sales growth in 3 to 6 months, for $50,000, $75,000, whatever it ends up being for the amount of work, because everything is custom. If I were to be able to do it in half the amount of time and enable your sales organization to be more efficient at their jobs and stop wasting 3 hours of their day across 10 team members, is that valuable at all? Of course they're going to say like, yeah, no, and we're going to talk about it. But it's about time. And especially in startups, you need to move pretty quickly because usually you have investor relationships to take care of as well. So if they're breathing down your back to make pipeline generation and show demand, right, that's a big value creation thing. If we can do it in less amount of time while also keeping manpower off of the projects and enabling them for long-term success, that's usually the lever that I try to pull. Right. So of course I'm doing this in 3 to 6 months, but then it's yours and you don't have to depend on me. So everybody wins. But at the same time, I'm going to charge 20, 30, 40% more because I know that my LTV personally, from my sales side, my lifetime value is going to be equal. Right.

Makes sense. These are, these are great examples. Super, super helpful, I think, for founders. And there's a lot of things I'll take away from this conversation as well. Maybe last question is, what is maybe the single biggest mistake you're seeing startups make when you, when you typically join in or like they started making when they're, you know, again, when they're trying to inject AI in all parts of their GTM and you're like, whoa, like before we all do all this, like what's that biggest thing that you see consistently across startups? Maybe not consistently, but oftentimes. I'm wondering if you can like share what that might look like, even in a couple sentences.

I would say it's not going to the table with a growth mindset. I like to work with people that I like to work with, and that's why I do what I do. And I think if you're a passionate founder, you're a passionate visionary, you're really technical, you know, whatever your prowess is gonna be, understand that, that is your uniqueness, that it is not everybody's uniqueness. So for you to succeed, you should work with people that you enjoy working with that are also going to round out your unique skills. And I think it all comes down to talent. It comes down to, of course, work-life balance. But when we start to look at building and scaling products, it's to set reasonable timelines, it's to set reasonable goals, and to also validate your own work and take work in sprints. Don't be afraid to experiment with timelines. Don't be afraid to experiment with personnel. Don't be afraid to experiment with tools, but know when to end the test. And I think that is a larger mistake is they've run the test for too long or they don't run the test at all, and then they either end up behind or scared to run something else, or they double down and they have a, a Lost Cause Fallacy or whatever it's called. The mistakes that I see a lot of these visionaries making are they place a lot of hope in sometimes the wrong people or in the wrong energy fields. And the technical guys, what I see is they're either very hesitant to adopt a tool stack and they end up behind, or the tech guy was like, yeah, let's do this. And they jump on it and it, you know, talking about like, GTM porn and everything, right? So, and I think you need to slow down. They try to go super fast and they try to do it without defining where they're going. It's like turning on the GPS and not putting an address in. Dude, you gotta know where you're going to be able to drive the car there. I'm using a lot of idioms and metaphors here, but like, you know, I love it. I love it. You should really, you, you've gotta, you've gotta slow down. You've gotta figure out what is the mission? Help as many people?

Yeah.

To, you know, is it to sell enterprise SaaS to like Google and Walmart and all these things? Like, what is the problem and what is the solution to accompany that problem? But also let's define the path. Like, what is the short-term goal? I don't know, like let's do 10 YouTube videos for demand generation. That was my goal. That's my 6-month goal. My big goal is to go in a year and a half you know, I don't, I don't have a startup, but like, I still have this, this mentality is what is long-term for you? Everybody has a different definition. Everybody's a different stage of their life. It's very personal. Business is a very personal journey. I don't think a lot of people think about it like that and just realize that you need to define the goals very concretely as much as you can., and then you need to have somebody rip that plan apart and tell you everything that they think is wrong with it. And that person needs to be somebody that you have a friendship with and somebody that you have a relationship with, like a working relationship with, so that you can understand their feedback and their constructive criticism, and you can build a better goal and then follow it and test it.

By the way, I think that's a really good summary also for, you know, when you say growth mindset, I think growth mindset is also not being afraid to test your ideas and your assumptions. And when you say, you know, what are your goals and have somebody rip, rip it apart, I think that's also part of the growth mindset is making sure you're thinking of things from first principles, thinking of things the right way and being open to feedback either from someone like you or from the market and testing as much as possible and as fast as possible to basically learn and iterate. So I think it's a really, really good conclusion to all this. Spencer, where can people find you? I mean, you obviously have your blog that you've also published. You're quite vocal on LinkedIn and I love your content. Where should people, you know, get in touch and find you?

The best place is going to be LinkedIn and just say that Charles sent you or you saw a video. So it's LinkedIn slash whatever the slug is. It's just going to be Spencer Tahil, S-P-E-N-C-E-R. Yeah, you'll put it there.

I'll put it in the show notes.

And then I'm on YouTube. I'm actually in January. I'm dropping the first 5 to 10 episodes of my podcast. So Charles is actually going to be on there. So you can find me on YouTube as well under Growth Alliance as well as Spencer Tahil.

Amazing. Spencer, this has really been really eye-opening, super interesting, and I'm sure that a lot of founders are going to find it helpful as they're going through their growth journey as well. So thanks for joining and excited to see where this all leads for you.

Thanks for having me.