The GTM Engineer: The Role You Didn't Know You Needed

What the fuck is a GTM Engineer? This was my very first LinkedIn article and it went crazy. I think the reason why this job title quote GTM engineer is going so viral is because of one company that everybody knows. It's clay dot com. They're a unicorn. They've done great stuff for the industry. I'm on top of that wave right now, but at the same time, there's not a lot of clarity about what the role actually entails.

I feel like everybody's using that term on LinkedIn. And I'll read these posts where it's like, I just replaced my 700 person marketing team with one AI agent and I'm like, I don't believe this, man. I'm working with you and I'm not Even convinced I 100% know exactly what a GTM engineer is.

In theory, you're just orchestrating everything, but in application, you're doing the job of two people as well as a data analyst, right? Then you're doing sales activation or sales enablement, you're doing attribution and tracking from sales to revenue team, you're doing market intelligence, which is the data analyst layer, and then you're coordinating and orchestrating all of that in between together to be able to go and do whatever result that you want to do.

Got the right ingredients for revenue growth. A pinch of effort and a dash of hope won't cut it anymore. Grab your utensils, you're about to get some high performing marketing recipes. Welcome to Client Boost Kitchen. Spencer, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

The reason I invited you here today is I felt like not enough people were talking about GTM engineering and AI on social media and I forget that's obviously a key area of existence for yourself.

There's a lot of fluff on LinkedIn just talking to somebody about it. And there's like a lot of people that just post n8n workflows that look really cool. They can do all these cool, different things, but at the end of the day, it's about how you apply the intelligence. It's not about just looking at everything on LinkedIn or on social medias. Hopefully we can get some good snippets in this, in this chat.

And so, you know, one of the reasons I invited you is just, you know, I think to add a little bit of context for the listeners here. So Spencer's actually been working directly with us at ClientBoost to implement new GTM engineering processes and AI enhancements of the marketing strategy. I'm on. I wouldn't position myself as either a GTM engineering or AI expert in any way, shape or form. I find myself on LinkedIn sometimes and I'll read these posts where it's like, you know, I just replaced my 700 person marketing team with one AI agent. And I'm like, I don't believe this, man. And so I'm like, where can I actually just find sources of information around this topic from somebody that's actually implemented it? And it's not just total made up bullshit that's designed for like rage bait and engagement.

Yeah, that's kind of the hard part nowadays is trying to filter through the rage bait.

You know, let's start at the very beginning because I think this topic that I want to address first is probably contentious in and of itself, but like, what actually the fuck is a GTM engineer? So I feel like everybody's using that term on LinkedIn and I'm working with you and I'm not Even convinced I 100% know exactly what a GTM engineer is.

So to keep it not PG 13, I wrote an article, I want to say a few months ago, probably back in April, and it was titled what the fuck is a GTM Engineer? And it went crazy. And I just think it's on paper. Like on paper I'm a GTM engineer, but in theory I'm probably much more than that. I think the reason why this job title, like quote GTM Engineer is going so viral is because of one company that everybody knows about. It's clay.com, huge. They're unicorn, They've done great stuff for the industry. I'm on top of that wave right now. I feel great about it, but at the same time there's not a lot of clarity about what, what the role actually entails. And I think that's for like two reasons, right? The first reason is on paper I'm a GTM engineer, but at the same time, I don't like to say that I'm an engineer. I like to say that I sit in between revenue activation and marketing strategy. And I think that's a really good discernment between what a GTM engineer actually has to do. They actually have to be the bridge between not one or two different teams, but they have to be the bridge between three different teams as well as the market, right? So and by that I mean over here you have marketing, here you have so marketing, sales, sales again, revenue, and then the markets. The market, right? So we have marketing, sales, sales, revenue, and what a GTM engineer has to do is they have to go all the way up here and capture the market and they have to understand all the knowledge that's in between those three different teams and they have to actually help the sales pipeline go from a big X right in the middle to being very fluid and all the knowledge above that they need to feed back through through the sales team and get all the information from revenue team. So in theory, I'm a GTM engineer, right? In application, I'm the one that's getting the market signals, feeding them through to sales, saying, hey, this is the best time for you guys to go reach out to people. And then I'm actually attributing that revenue back through the market, through marketing, through sales, into revenue activation, into the revenue team, and then saying, oh, hey CRO guy, you guys can actually give more money to the marketing budget, right? So there's a lot of different application layers and there's a lot of orchestration that actually happens just on the data front. But a lot of people actually just think at the end of the day, and this is not what we do. We don't just send emails. Somebody comes to me and they say like, can you send 2,000 emails to like these 2,000 accounts? Like, yeah, I can do it. But like, what is, what is your greater strategy? I think asking beyond the point value solution of can you help us with one solution is the job of a true business engineer. You know, I work in marketing, but I also do business engineering. Quote, quote, quote GTM engineer. I think that's where the they came from, you know, But I think the hype around it is that it's shiny. Clay is super shiny. If you guys are not familiar with clay, first of all, go on, go on LinkedIn. Second of all, basically it's a platform that it's, it's a giant orchestrated data sheet with probably a hundred or three hundred different application layers like already tied in and integrated in it. Basically imagine Google sheets or Sly or anything like that with steroids and, and then basically you have access to like zoom info, Apollo, LinkedIn data, custom webhooks, APIs, all that stuff. And also HubSpot and Salesforce. But then you can pretty much mangle the data however much you want to do it. So that's what makes Clay really, really a front winner right now or a breadwinner is that there's so many different applications. And as you go through the gates of marketing, sales, sales, revenue, revenue, market, market, sale, market, marketing, you know, you can apply the different knowledge bases across all of those different departments. So I think what is a GTM engineer? It's on. In theory, you're just orchestrating everything. But an application. You're actually doing the job of two people as well as a data analyst, right? Doing a marketing strategist job. It doesn't matter what you're selling. You're doing a marketing strategist job. Then you're doing sales activation or sales enablement, you're doing attribution and tracking from sales to revenue team, you're doing market intelligence, which is the data analyst layer. And then you're coordinating and orchestrating all of that in between together to be able to go and do whatever result that you want to do. So I think like a GTM engineer, at its core is an orchestrator. And it doesn't matter where you apply that orchestration or the application. It just depends on what you're trying to do with that. And the common applications are going to be sending emails or enriching your CRM or maybe getting signal intelligence from, you know, SEC filings or something like that. But it's all about the orchestration. It's understanding the bigger picture.

And so it's to me, I think, what one thing I'm kind of hearing here, and this is where I've kind of suspected that, especially in the age of AI, that the role of just anything to do with marketing and GTM in general is changing. It's like, okay, number one, which is most important, that people probably completely overlook. And you kind of alluded to that with saying that people come to you like, oh, they think we're just going to spam 2000 emails or whatever. But actually the first thing to understand is just the market. And so that in itself is a complex thing to understand, right? Find the signals in the market that people are either relevant for a product or they're actually in market for a product, et cetera. So you've got to find that information. And so there's a little bit of data analyst there, there's a little bit of economist there, there's like a few different roles. Then there's the middleman role, which is you've actually got to understand, how can I take those signals and send them to the sales team, to the marketing team, to the different platforms that we're using. And then once all that's been figured out, then you have to be good at marketing because you've got to be able to actually do the email part or do the outreach part or whatever it is that you're using those Signals for and you've got to be able to communicate a compelling marketing and sales message. One thing I've realized is it feels like the future marketer isn't going to be a specialist anymore. It's not somebody that's like really, really good at one thing. It's somebody that's really, really good at a lot of things. I don't think it's even enough to just be a T shaped marketer anymore where it's like you can be, you know, average a bunch of things and really good at one. It's like now you should be really good at a few different things. For me as well, I've seen, you know, we launched Outbound with you guys, a new outbound motion recently and it's just been going bananas. And so straight away I'm seeing the power of what this one role can bring to a company. Like that's what all marketers are going to have to compete with, right? And so with that there's all these different, you know, things that a GTM engineer needs to be good at. What would you say are kind of the characteristics of a good GTM engineer?

Okay, so I. Characteristics, I would say the characteristics of a good GTM engineer are going to be multifaceted. Like you have to be probably in just three words, I probably just sum this up really quickly. You have to be adaptable. You have to be understanding of the why, like, why does the signal match the. Like, why does the intent match the signal? And I'll discern those two later. What makes people go? What makes people tick? What data matters. And you have to also understand the general landscape. Adaptable is like the first because you have to adapt your mindset to thinking in a bigger picture. But on your point of actually saying the future of marketing is not going to be in specialists, it's going to be in deep generalists. It's not going to be a T shaped marketer. I'm not a T shaped marketer. And that's just like this. But realistically I actually am probably pretty flat. I come from the HubSpot background, so I understood data orchestration, right? For instance. And for me my knowledge base was in application. It was, hey, here's the product, here's the layer that you need to integrate into this HubSpot environment. Go implement it as a HubSpot partner, right? Like go implement it here, here's the spec sheet, all this stuff and like here, go talk to the client. When you're implementing a GTM system, you have to be able to Adopt your mind to the trigger to the market situation because everybody's going to have a different situation. Everybody should have a UVP or a unique value proposition that you have to adapt your mind and your system to fit. So this is a really big thing when like on the topic of what makes a good GTM engineer, like characteristic wise, it's not putting people in boxes that they don't belong in. Like for instance, like with Client Boost, everything is one to one, like everything. From the very beginning it was understanding the situation. Like we wanted to try this motion, we wanted to do X, Y, Z. It's understanding exactly why the solution fits the problem. And you should be able to adapt your mindset to be able to fit the solution to the exact problem, but also scale and optimize along the way. So that's a real, like, that's a really big thing that you need to do it. It's centering of your mind and adapting your mindset to saying, hey, maybe this person doesn't belong in that box. And that's more like philosophical like at the same time. The one true thing that I believe will set a good GTM engineer apart from the rest is the ability to think in systems rather than solutions. You can understand globally how your solution affects all other systems and other solutions. A CRM, for instance HubSpot or Salesforce or Addio is only one solution. It's a tech, it's a tool that you pay for. It's not part of. It is part of the system, but you don't need it to do your job. For years I used a Google spreadsheet with Zapier connected to it, for instance, for my CRM. I think I still have, at the end of the day, you don't need all those bells and whistles. And I think you need to understand as, as anybody, like as whether you're a good GTM engineer, whether you're an analyst or something like this, you need to understand the difference between need and want. Do you need the data to close that deal or do you want that data because it's shiny and you're, you're going to do it? And really like this is like, you know, I credit my grandmother with this. I was a small child in New York and I wanted that toy. You're a little boy, you want that toy. And when, I don't know, whatever. Yeah. And I remember like my grandma, she always used to say to me, do you need it or do you just want it? And it's like, oh man, like, you know, like of course this is like a life lesson of don't pay for the things you don't need and don't chase the things that you want unless they are really useful. I think that's a really big life lesson and I think it's a good characteristic to actually pull in from your life experience into what you do for work. I'm very passionate about what I do. If you can bring in that information of need versus one, that's how I adopt my situation. When I go to my sales team and I say, hey, what information do you want to close this deal? Like what makes it easier for you to close this deal? Let me go and get you that. Versus what are the qualifiers of the companies that you know? ARR, are you qualifying by geo? Are you qualifying by the exceptions? Are you qualifying by the fact that they have a chief growth officer or a head of marketing? Are those people in seat? If they're not in seat, do you want to disqualify them? So it really comes down to the power of saying no and again adopting your mindset to understand how does this solution actually fit the whole scenario of the company and the whole system of the company and how are we going to report and attribute that information in Salesforce and HubSpot? If I wanted to, I would just come in, I'd give you guys leads, it would be the, it would be done. That's not my job. My job is to come in, do the research, watch the market, look up all the ad intel, crunch all the ad information and then reach out to the people that meet the qualification criteria that you guys have given me. Adopt my thinking and then attribute that back into HubSpot, right? And then from there go and talk to your revenue and sales team, say, hey, retrospectively, were these people that you guys actually had meetings with good, like how can we improve that? And I think that is a good GTM engineer having the ability to think in a system, to think in a loop instead of a line. Right? Understand that it's all circular. You should always go and you should think about do you need it or do you want it? And then you should also think about how is that data going to look down the line and how am I going to get insights from down the line back over here so I can improve my job. And I think that's the job of an engineer, is to do continuous improvement and the GTM side of GTM engineering is to be able to monitor the market. So I think that's realistically the good characteristics. It's more, you know, mindset than, than it is application. You can apply it any way you want.

Yeah, I, I love that as well. And I think what I love about that is if we can, I feel like at a high level, me listening to that. I think I heard like really three key things there. So number one is like systems. I would even call it like systems slash, critical thinking. It sounded like understanding how the system works, but also having the critical thinking to foretell how this thing is going to, you know, play out and understand how all the different pieces fit together. Then there's a second piece which is like ruthless prioritization. I think that's probably the best, best way to describe it. Right. And then there's the final piece which is that you kind of mentioned second there around adaptability. So it's being able to watch this thing play out and understand where, where are the weak points and how can we improve it and where are the strong points and how can we double down on it. And I think to me, what's great about those three characteristics again now we're, I hate to say it cause it's so overused but like in the age of AI, it strikes me that characteristics like that, that are very, very human, those are also the things that AI struggles with. So you're then becoming this like AI enhanced marketer, which is, I'm going to focus on doing this stuff as a human that we can do really well and then let the AI stuff take the heavy lifting out in terms of automation, et cetera. So yeah, really enjoyed that summary. With that. I think we've painted a really good picture of what is GTM engineering? What does a good GTM engineer look like? And so I think time for us to move on to kind of the juicy, actionable insights that everybody comes here for. Right. They want to know, okay, how do I actually use this stuff in my own marketing to start driving more leads so that I can get the CFO and the CEO off my back. So let's approach this with a hypothetical situation. So let's say your loan marketer at 10 million plus ARR B2B. That was kind of the position I found myself in like maybe seven or eight months ago. And the CEO is breathing down your neck like ruthlessly wants, wants more. Not just leads from you, but wants more close one deals from those leads that are coming in. What would you say are the top three plays that you'll be running if you're in that position from a GTM engineering standpoint? So you want to get more qualified inbound, that's converted to close one revenue in say a 90 day period.

90 day period. Okay, well that, that's exactly what my standard period is like, plus the elongation. But anyways, 90 day period, 30, 60, 90 of of how you can transform a $10 million plus B2B ARR. In a nutshell, let's just go on the fact that you may or may not have email infrastructure in place, right? If you do, it's easy. You just take an audit of all the existing system. Let's hypothetically say that you have absolutely nothing. You're running no outbound program, you need to set up your extra domains, you need to set up your outbound motion, everything like this, right? So within the first month, my job as a GTM engineer, like if you bring me in, you're the sole marketer at this giant company, you're going to need help because you're probably managing ad spend, you're probably managing other channels. You're and you're just trying to explore things that might work for you, right? And this seems to be the case around kind of like the 5 to 15 million dollars a year marketing agency kind of range like where people start experimenting with channels because now you've got extra revenue coming in right at the $10 million range. At for ARR we start to look at marketers getting more and more budget and depending on their budget and their targeting, we can take that budget and we can go and buy extra tools, we can get those shiny objects, we can do all that different stuff, right? If we're just going to focus on inbound, outbound, all bound LinkedIn and everything like this, let's say we just want to explore this scenario within the first 30 days of actually implementing like a go to market revenue operations account based marketing system. Again, these are three things that you can do altogether is the first play that I will always implement is going and taking an audit of the existing situation. I would not recommend that you touch anything within the dollhouse for at least 30 days. And that is very important. If you're going to take an audit of a system, you don't want to mess with the system that you're taking an audit of because everything you take the solution, it changes the system, right? So at the same time, within the first 30 days you want to understand your data, you want to understand what you already have at $10 million a year more than likely you probably have some good pipeline that's waiting. You probably have some pipeline that's dead and you probably have some unknown pipeline, which is what you're probably hiring somebody like me to go and get for you, right? So bridging the gap between those and understanding where the gaps are and the layers of success throughout those, you know, unknown known dead pipeline, understanding the succession gates there should be your number one priority. And by that I mean open HubSpot, open open Salesforce and go through all of the deals that have not had a contact that you guys haven't contacted in 14 days. Right? Just do an active list criteria there. And that's what I do. I go into HubSpot, I go into Salesforce and I start filtering to oblivion and I try to find the correlations of hey, why are people not responsive? How many calls did it take you guys to actually close that deal? Right. Once you have that information, you can project backwards actually. So understanding what you have is a lot easier than going from zero and then trying to, you know, project out. Within the first 30 days though, once you're taking that audit and you're understanding kind of the CRM and the nurture pipelines and the go to market strategy already in place. You know, like Patrick, you're setting a strategy here and let's say somebody else is in your shoes. I'm going to go talk to them and you should be able to tell me, hey, we're going to go talk to this market and we're going to talk to these Personas and these are the people that I want to say no to within the first 30 days. You need to define your no. And that is like the number one quality that I see a lot of people like struggling with. Like at any business range it's ruthlessly saying no to things but then also having that kind of like eh, gray line, right? Where is your gray line and how much damage can you take before you're going to overextend yourself? If you're within the service industry, you like a marketing agency or something like this, it's a little bit different than if you're a SaaS. SaaS, you can give a discount, right to a tool like a 20, 30, 40% discount to win a customer, an enterprise customer. Over in the service industry you're cutting into your labor margin. Like I need to understand the fundamentals of how the business actually operates and where the margins are coming from before I go to the market and say hey, like actually for enterprises, we're going to do an account based marketing to these people and hit five people in their company, we're going to send them Gifts, we're going to send them like notes to their offices or emails or phone or stuff like this. But that's the first thing that I do. The very first play that I run is an audit. Like, I know it sounds really silly. And then from there I do an active filtering of all of the people that we think that we can win over within the next quarter. So while I'm in the CRM, that's the very first play that I'm going to do, is I'm going to start to segment all of the information that already exists inside the CRM, of course, coordinating with the sales leader at this time. And then I'm going to build that internal list of what I know. From there, I take that list. Let's say you have a thousand accounts and we have a hundred accounts in your pipeline. Just a hundred accounts that you say, yeah, these are super good fit. I would love for these to close. X, Y, Z. Now let's also say down the line you have 20 closed one accounts. You see all of this already. You have the data. Look at your data. It won't lie to you. So now we have a list of 20 accounts that we've won. We've had a hundred accounts that we're saying, like, hell yeah, like we'd love to close these, right? Take the list of 20, take the list of a hundred, combine them together and build a lookalike audience. You can route that through Clay, you can route that through Ocean, you could route that through Panda Match, you can route that through any data intelligence platform that you want. But that is the very first play that I will do. I will use the existing data, I will use the existing structure and I will build upon that. I'll build a lookalike audience. And then from there I'll take that back and I'll go back to you, Patrick, and I say, hey, out of these, a thousand, now which ones are a good match? And your job as a loan marketer is to ruthlessly say no to those a thousand. And then from there I can get the other criteria. I can start building the outbound engine, I can start building the infrastructure. Everything like that. I can audit everything there. But that is number one play that I think that you should do because then it lets you activate the revenue that you already have in.

You know what I love about this is that I think for me that like, very actionable for anybody listening for one. But I would say that's just great marketing advice in general, which is don't go in and blow everything up immediately if you think it's not working right. It's like actually look at what's happening and figure out what's working, what isn't, and understand truly the picture before you go. And so I've seen companies do that where they'll, you know, they won't be happy with the performance of whatever strategy they're running and they'll just blow the whole thing up and then the whole thing tanks and then they have no idea what was working before and what wasn't because nobody did the audit. Right. The other piece there is that focus on targeting. One thing I've been. It's really frustrating actually. Cause I've been trying to push this message on LinkedIn and it just, it doesn't seem to get a lot of reach. But people really need to start refining the targeting so that you, you are like really set up to win because you just have a list that is people that are the most likely to respond to this, you know, advertising that you're planning to, or whatever the case may be to them.

I want to. And I agree with that. And two things cross my mind. The first thing that crossed my mind is that you asked for the top three plays and I pretty much only gave you one while I rambled. And second thing is that the most actionable thing that you can do right now is become known, become visible. Right? Like, you're not visible. Nobody's gonna see you. Like, no duh. But, right? No. I redesigned my website. I went from a personal website to a business website. And I was like, ah, you know, I take care of go to market engineering, you know, do my niche, right? You guys will have your niche. Anybody listening is gonna, you know, you guys are gonna service your own industry. My niche is go to market engineering, revenue operations and account based marketing. And I orchestrate everything in between. I showed that website to my friend who is a graphic designer with SAP and Salesforce. And he looked at it and he said, what the hell does this all mean? And I said, and that's. And that is why my targeting is good. The second he said, he's like, what are all these keywords? What is all this? Like, what does this mean? I know Zap. You know, he saw, he saw the keyword. It was yesterday. Oh, I know Zap. Here. What, what is. What is Go to market GTM Engineering? I'm not write, I'm not writing that landing page for you. So, so for me knowing that and him saying I don't know what's going on here, and knowing that he's not within my icp, My ideal customer profile makes me feel good. My job is not to be visible and known to everybody. It's the people that are I'm trying to attract that should be able to understand what I'm writing. So about being personalized, about being targeting, like what you just said about the number one thing that you can do is like, be well targeted. You have to be relevant. Usually they'll go, those go hand in hand, right? If you have a target list, you have to make the message to be relevant. You can work it either way. Every marketer should, should take advantage of, like go on your website and literally take it to your family member or take it, take it to a friend. Take it, take it to somebody that, like, completely random. Be like, what do you think about this website? What do you think about the context of this website? What do you think about this ad? And if you take it to somebody within your icp, first of all, like, you're going to try to convert them. So it's probably not a good test. But if you take it, somebody that you know isn't going to understand your website or your, your copy or your message fit and they don't have a clue what's going on, you're probably on the right path. I know it sounds really weird, but it makes sense, right? Because you want the email to be one to one. You want the landing page to talk to the account that you're talking. Like if you're targeting Rolex, you want to talk to Rolex, you don't want to talk to Sony, right? You want to have those landing pages be completely relevant, personalized at the account and the, and the user level. And the more relevant that you can get. People trust people. People do business with people they trust. And people trust people that do their research. So do your research. Right? B roll. Be relevant. So I think it's a really easy test to understand. Like, show your designers something that you're working on in marketing. Go to engineering and be like, what do you think about this? That's stupid. Okay. Why is it stupid? I don't know what the keywords mean. Yeah, you're on the right track, you.

Know, so that's definitely against accepted wisdom there, which I love about this. I love. That's kind of against the grand thing. There's a book that so many brand marketers love that I think it's called the Mom Test. And the idea behind the Mom Test is if you, if your mom can't understand the website, it's too complicated. But actually, you know, I would say my POV is I fall somewhere in the middle. I'm very much the message should be clear. But you're right. Like it should be clear to the right people. So if it's just a, you know, if you put it in front of the right person and they don't get it, then you absolutely have a problem. But I also think that too many people take advice from people that aren't the right target audience. You know, I remember six years ago building my first website. Showed it to my partner at the time, she showed it to her friends and they were all like, I don't get it. I'm like, yeah, but you're not supposed to, you know, like it wasn't written for you. But somebody that has this problem that I'm trying to solve, which at the time was website copywriter. It made it a hundred percent sense.

It's a little bit up against the grain again, like it has to be understood. But at the end of the day, like you need to be relevant to the people that you're targeting. And I think that's the whole industry of go to market engineering or GTM engineering is you have to figure out what the formula is between who you're talking to, what they possibly care about, what the market signal is and then how do you tie in your product or solution to them to be super relevant. And then you need to package all of that up and do a really juicy, you know, a juicy package for them and it needs to not come off as shoving it down their throat. And I think that's like the really hardest part is like the packaging of the offer. It's not the offer itself sometimes, which.

I imagine is heavily fed as well from that original audit and research that you've done, right?

Yes, exactly. Because then you can understand. Exactly. So you can understand, like let's just. What's just role play. You are a $10 million ARR. Working business to business. You serve other businesses.

What's just a million miles away?

To be fair, dude, not a million miles away. Exactly. Let's just, let's just role play. And you know, you're, you're in marketing, you're by yourself. And let's just say, you know, at the end of the 30 day mark, you have the audit in hand, you're ready to go, you understand the market, you understand what consolidation efforts you need to do on the data. You understand that need versus want. You've talked to sales, you've talked to your CRO your chief revenue officer, you understand the market signals you've mapped, the signal intent you've mapped. You know, somebody raises funding, okay, let's go after them. Okay, just as an example, what are you going to do within the second 60 day period? Right? Like the plays that you're running, the first one is going to be kind of like the known, understanding the known. And over the 60 to 36, within the second phase, what you should be able to do is start doing like really crazy AB test and only testing one variable at a time. And I think this is where a lot of, like a lot of email marketers get it, really. Right. But a lot of CEOs are really impatient and I see this a lot where it's like, why are we waiting two weeks to do this test? Well, because we defined the testing period. Okay, but like I need results now. Okay, but we have to test one variable at a time. But like why do we have the test of errors? Because we're trying to, we're trying to define what works best, but why are we only getting five? You know, and the question like why, why, why, why? And it comes up and it gets really annoying. And as a marketer, like if you're alone, you're doing all of this and then like fending off the wolves at the same time and it gets, I'm sure you get it. But at the same time, I think within the second phase, from day 30 to day 60, it is your testing period. It's understanding what variables work, what variables don't work. And if, especially if you're sending emails, let's say in the email outbound motion, right? We need to isolate the testing variables. You need to test your audience, okay, don't test your subject line, don't test your contacts, don't test your cta. It's the same with ad testing. If you're an ad manager, you know this, you're going to probably do 20 different hooks, keep the content the same, 20 different call to actions. But you're probably not going to test those all at the same time, right? Unless you have a gazillion dollars, you're.

Not going to learn anything.

It becomes an experiment. Marketing is an experiment and it's a long term experiment where we're trying to always iterate and try to get better. And when we plateau in the testing period, we know to drop the third variant. So for instance, the hypothesis that you can test within week four, week five, up until week eight for email marketing is what leads to the most opens, right? Like let's say you're doing email marketing and for there like the number one reason why people would open your email is because of your subject line. We know this, this is data that we have the backs in. But at the same time you want to optimize for opens over actions because people can't take actions unless they open your email right. So like theoretically you should optimize your first test to have the same content body, the same cta, the same lead package, the same lead magnet, everything like this, the same audience targeting. So Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, isolate the audience. So Tier 1 or Tier 2 accounts in North America, in New York City. And they are, you know, it's a small list, I don't know, like however big the list is going to be, you want to go target them, maybe you know, you're doing abm, you want to target tier one, tier two, whatever you want to do. Limit every variable possible to isolate the one that you're going to test at the time and do at least a 7 to 14 day test if you can help it. Because the longer the test, the more data that you can gather. Test the subject lines, write three variants of those subject lines, keep the body the same. After you have the concrete evidence of the three, you know, ABC tests, drop the third variant and substitute in a new variant, you know, and every, every 14 days you drop the lowest contender. Unless you want to keep running those different variants as you keep going. You can implement different playbooks to enrich the, the content of the email, to enrich the, the subject line, whatever you want to do. But apparent like if you want to do out all bound with email and LinkedIn, that's another playbook that you could run. Phone, email, LinkedIn, phone text messages, WhatsApp messages. There's a ton of different tools on the market and I think that going all bound should only be done when you have concrete evidence and you're very confident. At least two solutions or two, you know, two variants. I don't think that you should just jump into all bound because there's way too many variables that you can't control. And by all bound, I mean email, LinkedIn, dialing, sending postcards, text messages, stuff like this. I think the more variables that you add, the harder it is to control. Granularly you can start testing and then after that, once we have the testing period over at the end of phase two, now we're going from day zero to 30, 30 to 60, we're at day 60 and going to 60 to 90. What you can do is you can start layering in the different intelligence signals and you can start running tests. So now we have all of the information, the intelligence layer coming from internal, like your, your agent, your agency or your company. You have all the market, you know, market validation of what's working, what's not working, hopefully in 30 days. And then after that you can combine them together and you can start scaling and optimizing. So now we can have layering. Now we know what's working and we can start scaling that, dialing it up, dialing it back. If you're going to put ads out, you're going to do the same thing. You're going to boost the budget, you're going to decrease the budget, so on and so forth. So understanding kind of like what works and what doesn't work and kind of just learning to say no early when you recognize the pattern is a valuable skill here. Yeah. So those are, those are pretty much like how I would do it if I were completely alone. That's the playbook I would run.

Yeah. So I think there's a theme that I'm getting here, which I love to hear, because it's a little bit of validation of something that I've been talking about quite a lot over the last few years, since I've been More active on LinkedIn, for example, and try to, you know, figure out what my own POV is. And a lot of what I kind of preach on LinkedIn is whatever marketing strategy is that you're doing, whether it's GTM engineering or whether it's paid ads, is that the first place to start is really just with solid marketing fundamentals. And to me, everything that we talked about so far just really sounds like marketing fundamentals, like in its essence. So it's like, okay, the first thing is you've got to make sure the targeting's right, the targeting is wrong, it's not going to land. You've also got to do the research to make sure that you actually then put in an offer in front of people that's something that they actually want and are interested in, which is also where a lot of marketers go wrong. They try and push solutions onto the market when they should be calling solutions from the market. And it's like, once you've done all that, it's like, we're not going to go all in and just spam across a hundred channels. We're going to like figure out one channel, get the playbook for that, and then take the learnings from that that we validated because we also did a proper testing cadence and didn't just like throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall. And then we're going to take those learnings and scale that across other channels, which means that we're then going to be in a much stronger position to launch on these new channels because we have validated data to take into the launch of them. So for me, it's like, you know, coming back to characteristics of a good GTM engineer just to have good marketing fundamentals seems to be one of the key ones as well.

Right? Yeah, I mean have being really good at the boring stuff helps and businesses that do the boring stuff well inconsistently get ahead. That's just the truth of it.

Makes sense. Want to add as well. You alluded to the CEOs never want to do those proper testing cadences. They're always like, why we got to wait to launch this. I think every single marketer that's listening to this podcast, when you said that felt seen in that moment, you're going to, you're going to make some friends with that one.

Dude, I think if you're. I'm piss a lot of people off with this. Uh, here, here's your hook for the, here's your hook for LinkedIn. If you're a marketer, you probably hate sales. If you're sales, you probably hate marketing. If you're in marketing and sales, management hates you. Unless you bring money. And I think the easier that you can make it for them to understand what's going on clearly. I mean, it's going to be your job to communicate, right? I've had to learn to be a communicator. You've had to learn how to be a communicator. The people that are listening have to learn how to communicate. And if you can't translate your actions to what you're doing and what you're doing into revenue, you're going to start to have a hard time. At the same time, you need to work cross functionally. And the good thing about a good GTM engineer is that you are the cross functional team member. You are the float. And to this day there's not really been a true float like role. And by a flow, I mean somebody that's bouncing around the department. Usually you have a project manager, you have somebody internally that's helping you coordinate or something. But there's never really been unless you're talking about like a growth manager, which is working in between marketing and sales, but also revenue. Like I would say that's the Closest thing that you're going to get to a GTM engineer is like a growth director. Realistically. Right. The problem with GTM engineer is that it's so new. We don't, we don't know what makes one good one. Right. We don't know if. If the best GTM engineers are, are coming from sales like XAES or marketing, like marketing strategists or engineering team, or from people like my background, from system orchestration or system design, which is like HubSpot and revenue operations. We just have no idea because it's so new and there's also no growth path. Like, we can't see the, like, I personally, I'm in the industry and I don't know, like there is no movement up or down. There is just like being in it. And being in it is the coordination layer between the departments. Right. So I, I think if you can handle the heat, it's a really good place for you to be. But yeah, marketers, you guys got to communicate in sales, you guys got to stop breathing down marketers back because everybody's tired of it. Go talk to your GTME or go talk to your growth manager about it and, and it's their job to do the coordination.

You know, the, the interesting thing is, you know, I would say again, you're going to make probably 80% of marketers that are listening to this DLC when you say, you know, marketers hate sales. Sales hate marketers. I think I'm fortunate to be in an organization where I feel like that's not the case. The sales team may disagree. I may just think they like me and they actually talk shit about me behind my back could be the case. But one thing I would say is I, I kind of always knew that I just. Because of the way our organization is structured, sales and marketing are pretty close together, were pretty tightly aligned, but I wouldn't say we were perfect. And so one of the things that we did pretty much directly aligned with introducing this GTM engineering motion into our like, GTM strategy is we. It just also kind of enabled another layer of alignment and communication because then it really requires input from both sides to make that motion work, which is the sales side of understanding the pain points, of understanding the target accounts, of understanding why deals are or aren't closing, understanding the intent signals. That's kind of the stuff that the sales team tends to be really, really hot on. What sales teams are usually not very hot on is the executional side. It's the testing cadence, it's the compelling copy they just want to spam people nonstop until they respond. And what the marketing team is good at is like getting the cadence right, getting the testing structure, creating a compelling offer. So I think that's another good reason to consider this type of motion. It really, I think, is a really good bridge between a marketing and sales team. Also probably just a really good way to get marketing more respect from like the CFO and CEO. Because I think, you know, a huge chunk of what I do is thinking about the future. It's trying to build a brand that gets remembered so that as people move from out market to in market, they think of client boost, they come to us. But also like a good chunk of what I do needs to get revenue right now. And we can't ignore that. And that also strikes me as what the GTM engineering motion or person role that you hire for this is kind of in charge of. It's looking at the actual in market data right now to get revenue right now. And I think you can really win people over as a marketer when you're trying to help the team get revenue right now. Like, you can't just say, oh, we only handle brand building, like we're not interested in revenue. You as a marketer, rightly or wrongly, are never going to make friends like that. So I think that's just another huge benefit. Okay.

As well, like, the main question here is, like, what can you do now if you're alone, right? And you have, I don't know what your budget is, but like, what can you do now that can activate revenue? And I think once you can answer that question very clearly as a marketer, you're doing a good job, not as a sales guy, as a marketer. And I think it shifts the lens of traditional marketing. Hey, we're going to go and put up this LinkedIn ad, we're going to write this blog post, we're going to go do the podcast, we're going to build the brand. Building brands take time. What can you do now to activate revenue? You need to look into your data. And the easiest way to, to make money now is to just repeat what you've already done. Go into your data, look in HubSpot, look in Salesforce, you've already done it. So that's what you should be doing first. And I genuinely think that once you understand that and you can start trying to figure out a way to activate that revenue and get it out of the tasks environment of like a sales team, the more useful and the more I would say respect that, you're going to get from the sales team because now marketing is making revenue finally, you know, and then of course, you can report that back to your managing director or CEO, right? Like, hey, like, we're actually, this is a marketing managed motion. But we, we are actually responsible for all of this revenue. Here's, here's the proof, you know, here's what we're going to test. Here's our hypothesis and here's our projected result and here's our defined testing period that we're going to commit to. And I want you to be comfortable to commit to a testing period. We're going to test for a whole month. We can't guarantee results. And that's something that, like, it's a hard conversation for somebody like me to have because some people will hire me and they expect results immediately. And I said to them, that's not how the world works, man. You know, you know, it's marketing, it's an experiment. And you know, they get pissed. Of course they're going to get pissed. They're spending their money, they're spending their budget. At the end of the day, wouldn't you rather do it really, like test really well and then blow the 80% of your budget on really what works and just spend 20% of your budget on what's not, like, you know, just testing? And so it all becomes phrasing, it all becomes communication to their needs and their concerns. I think if you do that internally, well, if you can translate that as a marketer, you can translate it outwards as well.

Makes sense. So I realize we're getting close to time here, so let's summarize what we have. So first one is really about, like, get the audit right, understand the data, build the account lists and outreach lists from that data. And that data should be data that you already have. Right. You don't necessarily need to go and find new data for this. You're probably not making the most of the data that you already have. Once you've got that next step is commit to a testing cadence and also commit to that testing cadence. Doing it in the right way, which is making sure, like test one variable at a time. Hyper. Prioritize getting the emails opened first, figure out how to get them opened. Then once you've done that, figure out how to get them clicked, whether that's, you know, testing the copy, send the value prop, testing the offer. What would you say is the third part? So let's say that takes us up to day 60. What happens at day 90?

At day 90, yeah, or 60 to 90. Yeah, sorry, day 60. Yeah, from day 60 to 90 it's about scaling. So it's making sure of course, like going back to the question of were you already running this motion or not. So in my standard agreement, like I'm responsible for the whole setup and the whole audit. So if it's existing, I audit it and if it's not existing, I set it up. So that means going into like a tool like Instantly or Smart Lead or Bison or some email sequencer, setting that up so that it's ready to go, setting up clay, building out those clay tables, building out the N8N flows within the first 30 days. And then when we start getting to kind of like day 60 to day 90, it's double checking that the messaging, the testings are correct and you're comfortable going to market at scale with your budget and defining another testing period, but running more variables and then also expanding into new campaign strategies. Right. So based on the findings of the first 30 days, based on the testings of the second 30 days, you can go to market in the third, the third phase of the last 30 days. So 60 to 90 and you can pool all of the market intent information from the market that you've done the research in as well as kind of the conversion information. And now you can omnichannel, you can go inbound motion, which is like somebody books on your website. You're going to for you're going to shorten that form. Instead of asking for first name, last name, company name, email, ARR what your job title is. Now you're just going to ask company name, company email first or like first, first name, company email and that's it. And then from there you can just go and enrich that form. Now you've decreased the friction from being seen to being in market. So now what we can do is we can start shifting our focus from architecture to scaling and doing like some small projects, personalized landing page design, rolling them out for all of your account based marketing efforts like Rolex, Google, Apple, whatever. If you're targeting those companies, if you're targeting for Fortune 500 companies, you're going to do account based marketing, you're going to put up billboards, you're going to follow the strategy that like somebody like you, Patrick, is setting. You're going to put up billboards in San Francisco for inbound. If you're going to inbound in September in California, put up the billboards, you're going to put up flyers, you're going to host events you know, you're going to do the things that a marketer is really good at doing for building a brand. But in those 60 to 90 days of a go to market motion, what you really want to do is scale what you already know, but then layer in, like bake that cake and layer in the frosting so that you can say, hey, we're actually testing email. That's great. Let's test dialing, let's test cold calling. Let's test calling them the second that they book on the website. Let's test this new tool that you can talk, that the web visitor can, you know, can talk to one of your sales reps while they're browsing your website. Let's book them, let's follow up with them on LinkedIn. The second that they book a meeting on your calendar, let's do it automatically. And I think that's within the 60 to 90 days, is optimizing the system, the processes that are already preexisting at that $10 million firm and saying, hey, you got sales team you like, you guys have to go follow up with these people that booked on the inbound form. You guys should probably reach out to them on LinkedIn. Do it automatically. It's one workflow. Make it relevant, right? Try to give them something. Give, give, give, you know, is like Gary Vee's mentality and I have taken that forward, is just give, give, give, and then hopefully some people come. But the people that do come will be of high quality. You should be selfless, you should be wanting to help. And I think that's the difference between marketing and sales, is that sales, they're getting commission and marketing, they just want to build the brand. So the goals are different. And so you need to help align those goals with realistic expectations. And that's. It's easier said than done. I think that's realistically the path forward, right? And that's the end of the 90 days. It's consolidating all of the operations, it's streamlining all the operations, finishing those side projects, using AI in your workflows, kind of like getting human in the loop for the workflows. I think that's realistically, at the end of the 90 days, you have the knowledge base, you have the testing base, you have the market, and then you're scaling into the market and then from there you're layer caking the AI applications into that application layer and the orchestration layer.

So I think to summarize, it's like audit and targeting, step one, then it's testing and optimization step two and then step three is scaling and channel expansion is probably the best way to summarize it. Tons of valuable info right there. We'll wrap it up here. But before we do it Spencer, if people want to find you and learn more about GTM engineering, what should they have?

Um, so guys I am on LinkedIn and I'm also the founder of Growth alliance and I also shout out to the bootcamp that I mentor at it's Clay Bootcamp by Nathan. So if you guys are looking to get started with go to Market Engineering if you want somebody like me to come in. I founded Growth alliance and the best way to reach me is probably on LinkedIn. I'm posting there all the time. I have a newsletter. I don't really post on it a lot but yeah usually I do deep dives and technical dives on LinkedIn pretty much every week.

Thanks a lot dude.

Cool thanks. Thanks for having me. Take care of.