WTF Is GTM Now? On Building Leaner, Faster Revenue Ops

Being able to pivot extremely fast, faster than these giant market leaders are, right? This is going to be your superpower.

Those people who were just sat around going, yeah, I come today, do my 9 to 5, I go home, but I'm not really committing true value to the business. They're getting found out a lot quicker now.

You're going to send an email, but you have no idea what the ICP is. Yeah, great. Awesome. That's really going to get you 8 to 10% reply rate. Really great. Great job, guys.

Welcome back to Unfair Advantage, where where we bring founders, marketers, and operators together to stress test the playbooks your team will actually run. Let's jump right in, uh, to today's topic because everyone's suddenly a GTM engineer. No one can explain what that actually means, uh, except Spencer probably. Um, your tool stacks are bloated and somehow your pipeline isn't moving. So this episode is gonna be your unfair advantage. It's your chance to ask real questions to someone who's rebuilding GTM systems from scratch. Our guest today is Spencer Tahil, founder and chief growth officer at Growth Alliance. He's a systems architect, lean teams call when all the tools are technically working, but nothing's actually moving. Uh, I called him at my last agency when we needed to build a signal-based ABM, uh, program to unbreak ops for a special client. And he's also built GTM engines using Clay, Relay, Fireflies, and more, and he's even trained his own custom AI agent, Delphi. Spencer, welcome to the show.

Hello, it's me.

It's great to have you.

Great to be here.

Awesome. I'm really looking forward to your hot takes on GTM. Why don't we start off with this? For listeners who are not too sure what is GTM, what the hell is GTM?

Okay, so the, the realistic take is GTM is just short for go-to-market. But in this market, you start hearing it having a suffix called GTM engineering. What we're probably going to be diving into today is GTM engineering. But in general, go-to-market is taking a product or a service and accelerating its market presence, basically. So you're going to market, right? In my opinion, the whole program of what surrounds a go-to-market motion is not just sales. It's also marketing, but also revenue alignment. So I think this is like where we're going to start diving into today.

Love it. Full spectrum view. And what's something that you've changed your mind about, uh, recently in GTM or ops? Because this is a field that's constantly changing.

So we spoke about it a long time ago, Maudie, when we were talking, and in the last 6 months, we're able to do so much more with AI. Like if you guys have not heard of GPT or Anthropic Claude or Gemini, like guys, like wake up, open Google, right? But I think my opinion has changed that AI is becoming more of a deterrent for growth rather than like an actual accelerant. Like it is an accelerant, but you're reading on LinkedIn and, and I post on LinkedIn a lot about this. It's the AI slop is everywhere, but it's not the AI's fault. It's the slop part. It's you, it's your fault. So I I think like when you become a high competence user of AI, like it's a really great accelerant, but there's so many, I wanna say lower competent users that get stuck in the trap of depending on it that it actually becomes their downfall. And I think this is like the opinion that I've picked up over the last 6 to 9 months of like being actually in the weeds and like building on like the operation side is just not, don't depend on it. Like you can't, you, you, you can only depend on yourself and it's just a tool. So that's probably my one learning lesson over the last few months.

Yeah, I mean, it's equally something we pick on. And it's one thing where people who resist AI are generally people who haven't put enough time in to give it enough context and understand how it works to actually give you something useful rather than just generic. And I suppose it's the The biggest problem I've found with AI is it's overwhelmed people because so many people are just outputting more, but it doesn't mean the quality's actually got any better for the majority of people. There's like maybe 10% that are actually doing valuable content with it and the rest is kind of just generic that doesn't really engage people or customers or whatever they are, you know.

Yeah, I think it's a lot of noise. I think it's creating a lot of noise and a lot of people look at that and they're like, wow, I should be doing that. But in, in essence, that template that you've seen on LinkedIn will not work for you, right? It's just, that's a template. It's not going to work.

Yeah. Get my N8N workflow. Shh.

I've never posted one of those. I just want to let you guys know. I don't, I don't believe in that.

Well, this is a good segue into like the first topic of the show is why go-to-market systems break and when. I think we should start with like the early signs that you see when you go into a company, like you're looking at the foundations. What is, what's messed up?

I think on the backend, uh, what I seem to notice is that you have a lot of tool bloat. Um, for instance, like, uh, I mean, like very transparently, I'm in talk with a pretty large company right now. They do in the million, tens of millions, and they have 75 tools on pay, like paid tools. And you know, the very first thing that they said, like, what can we build? And I said, well, I don't wanna build on top of that stack because you probably have overlapping use cases, right? Um, and I think this is the very first mistake. You're buying for features and like you go, for instance, like you've heard of clay.com. If you haven't, they're a unicorn company that does a lot of go-to-market orchestration and data orchestration. Um, people buy this to replace, you know, Apollo or ZoomInfo, right? But those tools are also good in their own values. You can buy one tool But if the use cases can overlap on a different tool and you can consolidate, wouldn't that be better on the operations side? So I think, like, this is the very first thing that I actually see happening is people are buying for individual features when they should be buying for a strategy. And I think they don't take the time to realize that putting one foot in front of the other slowly makes more sense rather than just being like, hey, we gotta hit those numbers, we gotta hit that Q1, that Q2 goal, right? So this is probably where it really starts is, is like not solving the root issue, is not asking why 5 times. Um, but yeah, I, I think like that's where it gets stuck and then you add and add and add and add and you get more and more and you get more operation strain and then your pipeline just dies because you have so many tools, all of your data is everywhere and you can't consolidate it. And then you're like, oh, nothing is working, let's change the strategy and you change the marketing side. But then it doesn't trickle down, so you can't get any attribution, or it's so complicated that it doesn't scale. I think you need to scale simplicity, and I think that's like where the root cause is, in my opinion.

Yeah, I love that. I love that buying for strategy and not for features. I think that's such a great point because we think that the tool is going to solve our problem and that we actually change the strategy around, uh, the tools that are at hand. And then there's all this noise on LinkedIn especially if you're working in the marketing space or exploring it, that, that tells you, you should do this and you should do that. And I think generally people are just confused right now with what to automate and what to keep really manual. How about like stages of a business, right? Because you said, let's simp— scale out the simplicity, right? Obviously if you're going from 0 to 1, you need a certain tool stack and if you're going from 1 to 10, you need another. Do you want to talk a bit about that, Spencer Tahil?

Yeah, so let's keep it— I mean, like 0 to 1 on the ops side and 1 to 10 on the ops side is going to be different from the 0 to 1 on the GTM side. So on the go-to-market side, it's like getting your very first paid test, like customer and getting your testimonial is probably either going to come from one or two things. It's probably going to come from product-led growth or it's going to come from founder-led growth, right? If you're, if you're a SaaS product, if you're going from 1 to 10, It means you have to scale that testimony. You have to make sure that you're doing 1 to 10 different things really, really great to be able to operationalize that value add or that value proposition, right? If you've got one, means one person believes in you. Okay, let's make that into 10, right? But convincing that one investor, convincing that one person to buy your product, right? Like these giant companies that are hundreds of millions or billions of dollars like Salesforce and HubSpot, like they don't have this problem because they have all that social proof. And so I think rapid experimentation when you're in the 0 to 1 phase and being able to pivot extremely fast, faster than these giant market, like market leaders are, right? This is gonna be, you know, your superpower. You're a team of 1, you're a team of 5, you're a team of 10. You're like, gotta crush. I don't know what, like if you're not experimenting and you're not rapidly testing, I think you're really behind. When you're trying to go from 1 to 10, it's about nailing down what works sequentially. So, okay, this strategy is working. This market message fit is working. It's resonating. Let's double down on that. Let's continue the A/B test on the marketing side, right? But on the operations side, it's a matter of getting your processes in order. So now going from $0 to $1, let's just say $0 to $1 million operationally, even in an agency, is all about processes, right? You can, you can sell ad services, you can sell whatever it's going to be. But if you don't have your processes down, you're going to get stuck at that $1 to $3 million range. You see the companies go from $1 to $10, And on, on the service side, they've nailed down their processes, they've hired an operations engineer, they've hired an operations officer, whatever have you, and then they're scaling what works while reducing their costs. So it becomes a, it becomes a game of efficiency. So to answer that, it's like kind of two-pronged. It's like GTM and operations, but there's two different tracks that you have to go on, right?

Yeah, it's really nice. I, I think, um, equally I'm kind of keen to dig into that zero to one kind of space of like on the rapidly like testing things. What are you testing? Like what, what things are you doing? How many do you test at once? Uh, that sort of thing, just so we can really make it specific.

So my background, just for people that don't know me, or maybe you do know me, but, um, right now it's like there's this whole thing in go-to-market and it's called a go-to-market engineer, and it was coined by Clay.com. It's the market leader in the orchestration space, in my opinion. Um, go-to-market engineering is not just sending emails, and this is the hot take. It's— people think that all I do is send emails, and it's not true. Um, I am in charge of orchestrating your data inside of your revenue stack, creating revenue, like expanding the revenue of knowing what works, and then turning that into marketing content and turning that marketing content into sales and sales into revenue. It's connecting the whole loop together, right? Um, when we start talking about going from 0 to 1 with rapid experimentation, you don't have that revenue to rely on. You don't have, you know, that past experience. What you need to do is you need to experiment, not just A/B, A, B, C, D, E, F. Do it as much as you can. Get every single founder, get every single person in the company to write a sales copy. Be very artistic, be very, you know, come up with every single angle that you could possibly can. Plot out your personas, your buyer personas, of course, and understand what those buyer personas probably care about. There's tons of research in the market. You can use Claude or Gemini to help you speed up that work, or even Perplexity. But now, under— doing too much too fast across multiple channels and multiple domains is going to get you in trouble. Experiment rapidly in one channel and then also experiment rapidly in a different channel, but keep the tests apples to apples. Like, don't go and do email marketing and then do ads and run different copy. Don't run a different angle because you're not going to compare apples to apples. You're going to do apples to oranges, and we can't do that, right? So if you're going to test messaging, only test one hypothesis at a time, but expand on how you deliver that hypothesis or that value-add. So I think, so, like, going slow is fast and going fast is great, you know. Um, you can't bite off too much, then you can that you can chew at the same time, in my opinion.

So essentially you're going multi-channel, same message, so it makes simplicity in the data.

Yes. And then as long as we know if that message is or is not resonating, maybe that's not the right message for that channel. Maybe you do email marketing, maybe you do LinkedIn, maybe you do SEO, right? What is the message? What is the value-add that you're conveying on all those channels? Maybe your target audience doesn't hang out on LinkedIn, maybe they only research you on Reddit. So you've got to deliver the right message on the right channel and the right tone voice, and you've gotta choose that distribution. And I think that strategy is definitely something that comes from within the company. I don't think that comes from somebody like me sometimes, unless like that is the scope of work, right? For sure.

100%. 100%. And you know, you have multiple ICPs, right? And you might do an email campaign, uh, and attract only a type of ICP. Um, so that adds that layer of complexity cuz you'll have then meta ads that are attracting a whole other type of persona.

Yeah, it's about segmentation at the end of the day, and segmentation lets you focus. So it's like, Maudie, when we work together a long time ago, it was just about deciding what we were going to focus on. And I think under— what— when you decide what you can focus on, it becomes a lot more clear about how to segment that focus. You can't do 20 things at once. I don't— I can't serve 20 clients at once. I can serve 5. So choose the 5 lanes that are going to make you the most money in, you know, as a business, right?

Totally. Do you have like a max number of ICPs that you're willing to experiment with at once? Because a company can have like 6 that they want to target.

So in, I mean, if we have the manpower, then we can take care of it, right? It's just a matter of like capacity. Um, my personal, like on my personal side, I would rather do 3 different segments at a time. Mm-hmm. And then 3 different messages for that seg— for each segment. So we do a 3x3. So it's like making sure that we can actually test the different messaging, test the different frameworks, and then test the different channels. But we're doing everything sequentially the same way you would test your ads, basically. Um, again, talking about email marketing, um, with the ICPs, it's okay to have different ideal customer profiles. It's the, it comes down to the question of, okay, you have an ideal customer profile, but how well defined is it? How well defined is your persona or how well defined is your segment? Is your— are you just defining it by revenue range? Are you just defining it by geo? That's not good enough. So being super, super niche in your segmentation allows you to get your messaging super, super niche as well. And then you can just dial in and pound into that segment basically. And that's how it doesn't matter the number in my opinion, as long as you get, as long as you're super niche to that message. Doesn't matter.

What are your red flags generally then when someone starts talking about their ICPs? I suppose like when you hear someone go, yeah, I've got 10, and then they start dialing into the details, what are the red flags you hear?

Well, okay, do you have a different value add for each segment? Okay, tell me all of them. What is the direct value? What are 3 value adds that you can give to this segment? If you can't do that for every ICP or for every profile, then you're probably not going to make the sale. Again, people, people will buy features now because they're being silly. Um, but strategically you should be able to cover every single value proposition and every angle of your offer in different words for that persona or that market segment. So the bigger issue is not being niche enough. I would say that's high level. So it's like if you have 10 ICPs, like what are you doing, dude?

Like who are you serving? Yeah.

Who are you serving? Right. You might be, you, okay, maybe you're a consultancy, but I'm, I think I'm pretty good. Melody, you're a great consultant too, but like, you know, we can't, we don't know everything about everything. So I kind of be, I start calling like kind of bullshit when you start like start saying like, oh, we're gonna serve 10 markets. That's silly in my opinion, unless you have a huge capacity to be able to serve that.

It's equally why there's such a room in the market for software that is niche, right? Because all of these, like your SEMrushes, right? They're just too big. People don't like using them. Because they have a bit of everything and it becomes complicated.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, uh, and this, this is in my opinion, this is like where a lot of tools like Clay, like ZoomInfo, I'll name all of them that I think were, are really great because they were the first to market. ZoomInfo, Apollo, Zapier, Clay.com. End story. And I think like these people, these companies, like most people that are listening have heard of these companies. They have the most, if not some of the most market share for exactly what they do in their vertical for their software. But people are buying these tools because they've, quote, heard of them, not because it solves their very niche problem. It's because their niche— some of their niche problems exist in their feature set. And I think that's a huge problem too. It's like some, some tools are so broad that they don't get niche enough, but then some tools are so niche they don't cover everything, and then you have to buy more, and then you get the tech stack quote, and that's the issue. So you kind of need somebody like with a pulse on like the use cases and the tools and everything. This is what I do, and it's like matching the tools to the use cases versus what they're trying to do versus the big strategy and like help them through that buying process. I think the buying process is fundamentally broken right now.

Definitely. I don't think there's enough guidance around there for companies. And small marketing teams within large companies to be able to navigate this. Is it like a— this is what I find when I'm speaking to some companies. On the one hand, I'm like, wow, you got this far not knowing your ICP. Like, do you have those moments like when you're coming into a company and you're like, well, this is broken, that's broken. What are some common threads that you're seeing just across the board right now?

It's— I try to focus on the companies that have already had the stable growth. I, I like to accelerate what's already working. And sometimes I get that where I'm like, how do you not have like a product definition? Like, how do you not have like these angles? But nobody likes to hear, how did you get this far? Nobody likes to hear, what the hell are you doing? So I am smart and I took a lesson from my parents. It's like smile and nod and be like, just try to help because they don't— they don't want to hear it and they don't want something. They don't want want somebody that's going to come in and be confrontational most of the time. Um, I'm very direct and I don't like to hold my tongue, but sometimes I come across businesses and I'm surprised how far they're using Zapier for and when they could just be just doing things natively. And I'm like, oh, you're duct taping this together, right? It works, but if you guys are trying to accelerate and grow, then that duct tape is going to end up ripping. And I— and then that becomes the value add that I can come in and add, like, because I can orchestrate. If they're having that conversation and they're aware that they're duct taping everything, then we can have a valid conversation. If they're not aware that they're duct taping everything together and that things are missing, then it becomes a completely different type of discussion where it's like, this is broken, this is broken, that's not going to work, that's not going to work. And you know what? Quite frankly, those are the clients that don't close. Because it's mindset. It's not a growth mindset, right?

Yeah, that's, uh, equally a really clear— the way I try to, coming from tech, I generally go, it's fine to use those tools, but once you've sold it to 3 customers, build it properly. Don't, don't use the tool that way anymore because you've got revenue to cover you actually doing it properly, and it's showing that what you did made a lot of sense and resonated. But like, that's the, the point to actually bring it in-house, because it's, it's always a risk and it's very brittle over time, right? And, and equally, like you say, you know, concurrency of more and more people coming through that pipeline, it will just fall over or be very expensive.

What are some things that founders and businesses are duct taping? Spencer, like outbound email or like, can we get a bit specific?

Um, yeah, let me, let me give some specifics here. Um, so Zapier is a big one. Um, automation is a big one. Uh, and now in the last 3 or 4 months, it's like this whole like AI forward, AI driven growth crap, you know, in my opinion. Uh, I think a lot of people piggyback on the fact that AI is gonna solve all their problems. It won't. It'll just make them just sloppier. A lot of founders, I actually feel like, have a lot less problems in the grand scheme of things than CEOs do. CEOs are like people that are very disconnected from like the day to day, right? Like you either behave like a CEO or you behave like a founder. And I think like we've discussed this before, it's founders are ground level. They understand when their product is breaking, they understand where there's— where their services are breaking and it's their baby. They're going to fix it right on a CEO level. They have a whole different type of problem. Usually not always, but like usually they've got somebody in between them and the action, which is fine because it's a scaling company. But how can they make a valid decision of what's going to happen with all that duct tape if they're so far removed, if that communication gap between execution and strategy is going through 10 different people or 5 different relays, you lose, you lose the ground level problems. And I think what people are, what businesses are duct taping is the, the kind of like the automation side of like what needs to be automated and when and how often. I think people do it too much or they don't do it enough. It's a sweet spot. And at the same time, they, they duct tape communication relays too. It's like, why am I getting an email 2 days after a sales call? It doesn't make sense. Like, why are you not taking a call transcript, sending it to your Slack channel, prepping it, and then drafting it, and then having the, and then having the rep, you know, just human in the loop, send it 5 minutes afterwards, right? So I think a lot of people, like, don't realize what can be done. It's not really duct tape at this point, but I think, like, duct taping the communications and duct taping, like, these problems in a bucket and just kind of like having one person own all those problems as an operator, like an operations manager. That's the problem. It's like being so far removed from it, especially in go-to-market. Like, like you're gonna send an email but you have no idea what the ICP is. Yeah, great, awesome. That's really going to get you 8 to 10 reply rate. Really great, great job guys, you know. Like, so that's—

yeah, that's really going to grow your revenue. And, and I guess I'm thinking of the traditional old white male CEO, but they became a CEO way before this whole AI ChatGPT tech revolution and what got them here will not get them there. So yeah, it's like your classic enterprise sales motion. You have to have your buy-ins and then you have to make everything like revenue related.

Yeah, and I think like what's happening now, and this is what I do with my clients, is we shift away from traditional marketing. Not traditional marketing. I mean, of course it still works, but like one of my mentors told me, he's like, well, what happens if in an enterprise, if the business holding just disappears? What is the enterprise? The enterprise is just a group of people that work in their own capacity, right? So you have to sell to those people if you're trying you know, if you're trying to sell into them, you're selling to people. And I think people forget that and they just make it all about like one thing. They make it about the problem. They don't, they don't lead with emotion. I think, you know, there's gap selling where it's like you're trying to figure out what the pain point is and try to reverse engineer it. It's what I do. And it's if that person is not aware of that gap or that pain point, again, that's a completely different discussion.

And they might be resistant to it because AI is taking away jobs. The more you go into these bigger organizations, the more resistance you feel to having these internal buy-ins actually adopt the solution that's going to eliminate 80% of what they were wasting their time on potentially before, right?

I mean, it's definitely showing people who just sit in their seats in big corporations, right? That I think that's the biggest thing is it's those people who were just sat around going, yeah, I come today, do my 9 to 5, I go home, but I'm not really committing true value to the business. Like, it— they're getting found out a lot quicker now, um, through all of this.

The main question I ask every tool before I'm going to pay for it, or every company before they're going to hire— they're going to buy a tool or hire a person— is like, what value adds does this purchase make? Whether that's going to be a, you know, a personal contract like a hire, or that's a tool. Like what, what value you're gonna get out of it, because it all ties back to revenue, right?

Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, like, that's what every business needs to either create— top line or bottom line in the margin, right? And it's, uh, yeah, people forget that. And equally, in especially in like if you're trying to sell— let's take it as like you're trying to sell services— it's understanding the type of business you're going for to how you approach that, like in bigger businesses, you have to have a champion that can then develop that internally and bring people with them that when you get to the management layer, it's like, people already need this. Like, we've already spoke to 5 of your team, they want it, just let them have it. And it's amazing how people forget that you can't just sell to one person and make it work.

And that is exactly what my mentor said. He's like, it doesn't matter how many people are in the business or how many people are in enterprise, you sell to the people. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

100%.

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Let's, let's flip this now and let's talk about a small team of 3 people that are wearing all the hats. That's now one person is the go-to-market person, is the operator, is the SDR. What should they be automating and what should they be keeping manual in your opinion?

They should keep strategy in-house and they should automate. I mean, if they have the technical skills to do it, they should automate market intelligence and processing and contextualization first. So like this is exactly the seat where I sit in the contextualization part and And not a lot of businesses are currently doing this. And the ones that are, you might hear in the market, it's signal-based plays or inbound, let outbound, or Clay.com and outbound, whatever. What you should automate first, in my opinion, is gathering as much intelligence as you can and contextualizing that intelligence in a processable way for your brain. Because there's nothing worse than listening to a 75-minute podcast and having like those 2 minutes at minute 42 be useful for you. So what happens if I take an RSS feed, right? If I just subscribe to a YouTube channel and every single time that YouTube channel publishes a video, I go and automatically grab that transcript and process it and turn it into a Slack message that's 3 paragraphs long for me. Okay, I've just listened to your 75-minute podcast using a, you know, temporal analysis prompt. Takes 2 seconds. The second you publish it, it comes to my, my Slack channel. Right? And I think, um, this is what you should be doing very first is Gathering as much intelligence, understanding what you know, knowing your known knowns, your known unknowns, and your unknown unknowns. And I think this strategy of how you tackle everything of like going to market, whether you're a founder, as found the 3 people, the founder, the sales part, the VP of sales, and, you know, the founding AE for— and this is like very common— is that the strategy is usually outsourced. Right. It's, it's usually like the VP of sales is brought in. They should— they have their Rolodex. Rolodex is dead in my opinion, but we'll go, we'll go on that later. When the VP of sales doesn't understand the founder's vision, there's friction internally and then they try to outsource it because their strategy, quote, is not working. This will not work. There needs to be internal alignment before somebody goes and accelerates the car. There needs to be gas in the tank before the car gets moving. Right? Um, so no matter what, automate the market intelligence gathering, automate all of the tasks that are not worth your time to learn, automate the skill gap, hire for the skill gap as fast as you can. Because at the end of the day, like, a founder is balancing multiple things. They're balancing sales if they're founder-led, they're balancing investors if they have investors, they're balancing sales and demo calls. They can't handle everything at once. So it's your job as the VP or as the third, second or third person to try to take as much of that pressure off the plate. So it comes to you to make the decision of like, is it worth your time to step away from other things and learn this technology? Or is it just worth it to spend the money and get somebody to come in and help you accelerate and kind of like put together that strategy? So end all be all, keep the strategy in-house, automate everything that is not worth your time or that you need to delegate.

I love that. There's actually a lot to unpack there, but that In a nutshell, if anyone's automating an RSS feed to their Slack, it's like that timestamp right there.

While we're here, there's two questions in the chat that probably relate quite a lot to what we've just spoken about. So one is, if you had to start again, no clients, what would you— what would be your steps in finding them? Like, I think what you spoke about there of like contextualization of data and everything, answers that. That is what you should be doing up front so you know how to reach them, where to reach them, how to talk to them, who they are, um, all of that side of things. And then the other was, if you've worked as outbound program manager plus CLAY operator, how do you position yourself to get projects or contracts or full-time from founder agency owners? Consider you've left your previous org and you do not have the recording or CLAY table Okay, a lot to unpack there.

Let's go on that. I'll, I'll answer the question in 60 seconds just to keep it easy. So high level, the question is, how do you get a full-time job or a program manager job for an outbound manager if you have nothing else, you have no resources and basically everything like this? I'll tie into the question of like, if I had to start all over again, what would I do? Um, granted I've only started Growth Alliance 5 months ago. I've been in the growth scene for about 4 to 5 years. And doing so, I've experimented with multiple tools. Right now, there are so many free tools. If you have a Google Workspace account, actually, a lot of people don't know this, but you can use Gemini for free. This is, this is huge. Having any access to something that accelerates your curiosity and getting answers to those questions is where I would start. You're not going to have a lot of calls if you have nothing. And if you are talking to a single founder, there's a reason you're on— you have a seat at that table. So answering two questions at once, if I had to start all over and I had to get conversations, I would probably tap into my Rolodex or everybody that I know. Like, hey, Melody, I see that you used to work at XYZ right now. And then I would insert exactly what I'm doing very easily for that person to be able to relay that information. I'm like, Melody, I do, I do. I set up go-to-market stacks and I do domain management. I do that. Don't do that. What you need to do is you need to give them a 1 to 2 sentence. This, this other person, this relay, be very loud about what you do very publicly. Tell them exactly what you do very concisely and exactly who you do it for. Let that person go and help you find somebody or help them or map their network using something like the Swarm. This is something that I do. If I had to get a full-time job and expand my position as like an outbound operator or a clay operator, and I was already in talks with the founder and they were already paying me, then I would say, what more— what value can I add more to what you're doing to take away some of the processes that you're handling manually? And I think when you start to remove the sales conversation and you start to, you know, like, you know, like we sit across from each other in a traditional sales scene. You sit on one side of the table, I sit on the other. There's a table in between us. Then we negotiate. That's not what you should be doing. You should take the table and throw that shit out the window as fast as you can. Because it doesn't, it doesn't allude to teamwork. It doesn't allude to us being collaborative. It's me versus you. And it should be in sales. It should be— it's me and you versus the problems that you're experiencing. And if you can help them solve their problems, then they see you as an asset and not a liability. So if you were to try to get into an outbound program manager position with Clay, then you should probably learn every single skill that they have problems doing themselves and add value for them. If you don't know how to solve it, go to YouTube University. It's free. Or hire a consultant or join a bootcamp or look everything up on Gemini for free or GPT, right? Use the deep research method. Learn how to prompt, get ahead, and don't fall for this like marketing crap noise on LinkedIn. This is the worst thing that you can do is like join like, you know, these like communities that make you pay. Like, learn as much as you can, open the textbook, ask the right questions, and then go ask the teacher. Don't just jump to paying somebody to teach you how to do something because you haven't done your homework and you're lazy. That's how I would do it. Okay, that wasn't like 1 minute, that was like 5, but like, that's how I would do it.

I'm glad we got you ranting. For more B2B therapy advice, It's you and me against the problem.

It is though. It is. It's you and me versus the problem and it should be. And that is why, and that's why like multithreading in sales works. Like Mike, we were talking about you sell to multiple people, you solve multiple problems. Okay. Now multiple people trust you. Now it's easier for them to convince one person because you have buy-in.

Explain that. Explain that multithreading.

Okay. So when this is something I was talking about with with, um, technically he's a competitor, but I don't really see him as a competitor. Um, it's that enterprise sales usually is you talk to multiple people, you have to get buy-in from— let's just say, like, for me, like, I sell into CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, but I have to get the financial buy-in from a CRO or CFO. Without that crucial last ring finger piece, I'm not married to the company, right? So I can do whatever I like, add as much value to the users or as much value to the account executives as possible. Give them like, you know, map out their networks, map out their, you know, their market, give them resources. But if there's not enough value, then the question always comes from the CRO. What's the price? Price only comes up when value isn't perceived. And this is something I learned a long time ago from Alex Hormozi, as well as like Christo on YouTube. Again, my favorite YouTube University. But when you talk to multiple people, you gather so much information that you should be able to contextualize in your head. And the best people that contextualize information at scale are enterprise reps because they're multithreading. They have 7 different perspectives, 5 different stakeholders, but they're solving one issue. So they have to contextualize all this information from different sources into an understandable format, not for them to be able to understand, but for that end buyer to understand, which is the CTO or the CRO or the CMO, whoever's in charge of that wallet. Right? So they're the really good ones about multithreading, which is just talking to multiple people at the same time. So instead of, you know, 1-to-1 bridge, you have, you know, like 1-to-5, or I, I can't do the thing, but like, it's like this, right? You're talking to 5 people and then you bring those 5 people and you talk back to the one. So instead of just saying, "Hey Jim, I talked to Melody yesterday," that sounds a lot better than, "Hey Jim, I thought that you had this problem. Here's a resource, go look at it." "Hey Jim, I was talking to Melody and Mike the other day. They told me that you guys might have been experiencing some problems with growth. I put together a free webinar package for you. Also, I attached it to this email. By the way, Melody is CC'd. I was hoping to pick up the conversation about a week's time. She said that you might be free." contextual, relevant buy-in, social buy-in from the other parties, of course get their permission to do that. But like, um, it's a lot more convincing when you have somebody on the inside. And that's multithreading in a nutshell.

And that's also how to have influence if you're within an organization, you're trying to make change.

Yeah, pretty much. You have to get buy-in from every single angle that you're going to work in. So That's like the very first thing I have to do. I have to go talk to 2 people from every department because all of their priorities are going to be different. Product team is going to have a different priority than sales team. Sales team is going to blame product for not being able to keep up. Marketing team is going to say sales team didn't close their leads. Okay, what are all of your pain points? What are all your problems? What can I do in 2 weeks to help you solve your problems? Put together the battle plan and solve it.

You know, for a founder, you just named all of our alter egos that just live in our head.

I know, ding!

When you were saying like the unknown unknown, what are unknown unknowns? So like, that's what keeps me up at night. Like, how do you— do you have a way of finding the unknown unknowns? Like, what pro— what do you prompt?

So I— it's actually the— actually really funny the way that you said that is like, that keeps you up at night. That is my very first question when I do an initial discovery call with somebody. It's like, what keeps you up late at night? And then they're I've never been asked that question before. And that because I, I sleep at like 1 a.m. and I wake up at like 8 or 9 and I sleep like shit and I'm a founder too. What keeps me up at night is making sure that I provide enough value that you can keep paying me. Okay, so how do I add more value? Right? It's like, I know I'm good at my job, but how do— why do I feel behind? You know? And I think like, that's the question a lot. Like everybody's answer is different.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Okay, well, that got deep. Let's, um, lighten things up a little bit, uh, move on to the next topic, the anti-agency model. Um, so first of all, what do we mean by that?

Um, and then, yeah, let's dig into this whole version of like long retainers versus consulting work that you're more Okay, so for the people that are automating this call transcript, uh, or possibly listening, um, I think that if you're a founder or you're a CEO listening, um, you are going most likely to want to learn about everything in the market. And that market is going to start lying to you with a lot of noise. And what your job is, is to understand what's going to work and what's not going to work very quickly because you need to pay employees and you need to make money. So A good consultant should work themselves out of a job. They should come in, they should solve the problem, they should get the hell out. A bad consultant will have you keep paying for them with no end. And if you've ever had a consultant that's come in and tried to, you know, crap on you for 6 months and not have a battle plan, then it's probably not going to feel so good, right, to hire another one. It's the same exact problem with the agency model. A lot of problems that I'm seeing in this, like, go-to-market engineering or go-to-market space is that companies are getting burned by other agencies that are just sending emails. They're not doing any AI operations. They're not— they don't come. They're like, okay, we're going to put you on a monthly retainer. We're going to do X, Y, Z. Okay, fine. That works for ads management, but that doesn't work for something that you need a systems thinker to be able to put together. And I'm going to start ranting here because You can't do anything meaningful in 30 days. You just can't do it. There's a reason why top executives are asked for a 30-60-90. It's not a 30-day damn plan. It's a 90-day plan. It gives you the ability to stack strategies on top of each other. So that's exactly why this, like, agency model is fundamentally broken is in a retainer, in a monthly retainer. Okay, fine. You can provide ad services, but not in this space, not in the go-to-market space. You have to continuously add value. Why, why would I— how am I going to continuously add value? I'm going to reduce your cost over time. So this like 90-day sprint and these like sprint schedules with a dedicated handoff is, is, should be the way in my opinion. This is how I've designed my consultancy or my whatever agency. I hate this word, um, but you— I should come in and you should hire me to come in audit, consolidate, implement, test, document, and hand off and train you on how to do it to be self-sufficient. You shouldn't have to keep paying somebody to do something. If you're paying for an accelerator, why are you going to keep paying me in the long run? What's the point of the acceleration? So I think like this is like this anti-agency model that I've kind of developed and I'm pretty vocal about it because I'm seeing a lot of people come to my desk and they say, Oh yeah, like we're like really hesitant to like hire, like give us the ROI, give us the number of hours that you're going to work on developing a channel strategy or give us the number of hours that you're going to develop a lead manager. I'm like, this is not going to happen. It's either you're going to trust me to do my job or you're not going to trust me to do my job. And that's going to piss a lot of people off. I'm fine with that.

That's the whole point of a consultancy though, right? Is that you should be a professional.— that they're hiring to trust you. If they can't trust you, like, what's the point of even reaching out?

Because they're not. Because they're looking around. And it's okay to look around. You have every right to look around. Let me help you find a competitor that's better suited than me. I have done this so many times. I'm like, actually, I'm not a good person. Like, go talk to Jacob, go talk to Zach, go talk to this person. People trust that. And I would rather tell people, be like, listen, I'm not a good fit for you. Go talk to this person. And then that person closes the deal and they're like, oh yeah, we're really helpful. Like, can you come in for some consulting and whatever, 6, 12 months, whatever. But I think knowing what you're good at from the providers, from the service provider side, knowing what you're good at and knowing what your own limitations are, you have to be— you have to nail that down. You can't just say yes to all of the money. So, and I think I see a lot of beginning agencies even coming from that agency background, whereas a fractional, it's like these agencies that are hemorrhaging money, they'll just say yes to everything and then they'll hire a junior from Upwork and then they'll just— the client gets crapped on production-wise and then they, they churn from the agency and that, that end client ends up pissed off and then they're like, oh, I don't trust agencies and all this. And it's, it's cyclical. It's businesses are never going to stop needing help. So it keeps on going, in my opinion. So this is the anti-agency approach. It's like hire somebody to be an accelerator rather than a continuous cost.

Okay. So in an ideal world, let's say a company is ready to receive your services. What does a smart GTM handoff look like? They hand you the keys to their car, like take it and go.

Yeah, they're like, here, I build the car, put the gas in the engine, I step on the gas and it's like, okay, let's hot swap the driver out. You have to hand off very detailed, very simple, but really lengthy documentation. I noticed that when I started to hand documentation off for a go-to-market plan, like, I come in, I build the thing, 8 weeks, 12 weeks. I noticed that when I started writing, like, formal documentation, unless that person was technical, then wasn't worth a damn. What I noticed is that people are mostly visual learners, actually, and it's easier for somebody to start and stop a video than it is for them to, like, look on a page, look on the other monitor. Okay, change it, go like this. So I think really good handoff when it comes to like a go-to-market system is video documentation and then a formal walkthrough of the strategy used to develop it and why it works for the exact use case. And then the preface in the middle of the, in the, in the beginning of that video of saying, just be aware that this was only developed for this use case and have that disclaimer. Because that somebody that's going to go watch that video in 6 to 8 months, that documentation, they're going to like try to change it and then they're going to like try to adapt it for a different use case. And if it's not a malleable system, it'll just break the whole thing. They have to redesign it. So being, being able to document video-wise, text-wise, as well as use case-wise, it's like a skill that you need to develop for the ease of consumption. Like I have to make it easy for you to consume what I'm giving you. Can't make it hard, right?

It's also, face it as well, now if you record a video, a lot of the other stuff you can automate the generation of more or less anyway, right? So it just makes your life easier too.

Yeah. So handing over the SOPs, I think, um, I think really good handoff, including for go-to-market, not just including of go-to-market, is SOP development and documentation, a visual walkthrough, and then a reasoning of why it was developed the way it was. You pair all three together, then I think this is the golden crux.

The reasoning is huge as well, because I think that's the— especially as new people join businesses, right? They look at something and go, why the hell did they do this? And if you don't have that initial reasoning, you can quite quickly get to an assumption that the person was stupid or whatever, rather than this is what they knew at the time. This is why they did it this way. And it's, yeah. It's huge.

Love it. One question that's in the back of my mind when you're talking about these, these systems that you're setting up is like, at what size do you need this robust system? And like, part two is, let's say you were just launched a company, your leads list is pretty healthy, but it's not massive. Like you can manage it. What, what info should a founder make sure that they're tracking from day one before their contacts list just gets It's totally messy.

They need to probably figure out who their ICP is. Bring it way back to the beginning of this conversation. I think if you're a new founder and your leads pipeline is healthy, but you're going to— and you're at capacity, you need to figure out why you're at capacity. Is it an effort problem? Is it a focus problem? Or is it just an actual delivery problem? Because if it's a delivery problem, then document exactly how you deliver the service or the product and train somebody how to do it. If you're, if you're not able to execute on the focus side, then you're, there's too much on your plate and you need to hire somebody to come in and automate something, or you need to hire a VA. If you are starting a company, but you're, you know, your leads pipeline is doing great, you should probably start tracking, um, response rates. Like, like, like, you know, engagement over time. So like in my HubSpot account, like truth be told, like Melody, you're in my HubSpot account and I have a ticker in there and it's like last date contacted. If that date gets to 90 days or above, I get a notification because I want to keep up the personal relationship with you. Right. And I think I learned this from somebody I talked to. It's like, who are the 100 people you want to talk to every quarter? And I learned it from somebody named Tiffany. So shout out Tiffany. It's like 100 people or a quarter you should, you should be talking to. That's roughly 3. That's roughly 1 a day.

I love that.

But people trust people and people buy from people they trust. So you should probably just talk to as many people as you can.

That's just great advice for career building in general.

Yeah.

Right? Like not, not just trying to sell a service and like always be the next person. So if you come up with a new product, whatever.. But actually, from a career perspective, having 100 people you can, like, just have a chat with just means that when you're in that position, you need a new job, you're looking for something new, then you've got people that will literally vouch for you because you've kept up that relation.

Yeah.

Would you rather have $1,000 or 1,000 friends?

Yeah.

Because I bet you 5 of those 1,000 friends will give you $1,000.

But equally, from the other perspective, I think there's this big misconception with um, kids these days entering the workforce fresh out of uni and they think that, oh, you can like grow your audience online, but it's like, you know, that those are actual real human connection. You know, you have to pick up a phone and speak to people and it's those in-person quote unquote relationships that, that matter so much. And it's not just—

and I think like, I think like that's what's going on now is like people are trying to automate authenticity. And it's being— people are getting tired of it. And I understand it because like I saw something on like LinkedIn Lunatics on Reddit or something and it was like, this sales guy just asked me about my, my sister's wedding from 3 weeks ago because they saw it on Facebook or something. And I'm like, that is way too far, dude. And of course they probably pulled it using like a prompt and put it in a dynamic field. And I don't think that you should be automating authenticity. Cause then it's not authentic. I think it's all— it's okay to automate relevance, but don't fake this shit, you know?

Yeah. And you must see that a lot, right? Because you're automating these flows and you can select which prompts to do. So like, what's a safe zone for personalization and what's like, what's not?

Um, so really hot take, um, screw the personalization, be ultra relevant. Um, I think relevance beats personalization any day.

I—

there's no reason you should open a formal email to me with, "Hi Spencer." You should just say like, "Hey, I'm like, I'm contacting you about your car's extended warranty." Like, that's not very relevant. But if I, you know, if my car is like breaking down, then be like, you know, you go to a shop or whatever. Or if I've clicked onto a website and I've never given them my email information, they start like cramming emails down my throat that I hate that. And I think Everybody hates that. You need to stop. But if you say like, hey, I noticed you just founded Growth Alliance around 5 or 6 months ago. You might be hiring for your first account executive. I have some— we have some experience with like strategic account management. People like companies that are funded around 6 months later start to be looking for the next hire. Is it relevant if we send over some like case studies regarding like talent placement? Guys, please do not send me talent. I don't need talent. But like, like that's relevant. And I think like I would answer that and that's authentic because maybe they've done their research on it. Right. But I think like that feels very relevant and I like it doesn't need to be personal at all. Doesn't need to be talking about my struggles on LinkedIn that I share very often or anything like this. So I think like authenticity, that like relevance, then authenticity, then personalization. There's no point to put personalization above the rest. In my opinion. Then it just gets creepy. I don't need to know about your sister, you know, like, unless you really care. Like, don't ask unless I really care, you know. But then you probably won't automate it, you know, like if you have a personal relationship with that person, you probably text them on WhatsApp anyways.

Yep. I, I equally, I find that with personalization, it goes wrong 8 times out of 10 that someone tries it with me. Like, I had one literally yesterday which started spouting off about Spurs in football, and I was like, one, I'm not originally from London, so I don't support a London football team. Two, why do I care? Like, and equally, like, you're talking about something that, like, I really don't care about. You're just wasting my time. And it was an instant, like, shut of the door.

If you send me an email, I always tell people this, if you send me a cold email and it's bad, I will call you out on it. And I do, and I've got, and you know, it's really fun to do. I mean, like, I'll offer, be like, hey, like, I'm happy to help you do this better. One person actually responded and they're like, oh yeah, like, we'd like to hire you as a consultant. And then somebody, like the same with you, it's because like you're not from London. I'm not from the Czech Republic, but I live in Prague. Somebody emailed me in Czech, but as an English speaker, we wouldn't really know that in Czech, like there's different formats, like there's different formalities, like in Spanish you have like formal and informal. It's the same in Czech. You have like, like formal and informal. And they informally emailed me and I read it in Czech. Like I do read it and I can read it, I can understand it. And I was like, I'm just letting you know, like there's no point first of all to email me in this language if you had actually really done your research. I'm not from here. And you also use the wrong format. So here's what I would improve. And it's like all these different things. And they emailed me back like, oh, can you help?

Actually, we were doing the reverse pitch with Mike, uh, recently to book some demos and networks.

Yeah, I mean, reverse pitch is a strategy, right? It's, uh, definitely, it's become one of our strongest, uh, uh, go-to-market opportunities right now in terms of like the amount of— because I'm traditionally a CTO, they, uh, and come from the tech world. I have so many dev agencies come to me and it's just Well, like, do you do content marketing? And then it goes straight into a conversation about all the tools we do from Elysium Studio. So it's, uh, yeah, amazing.

Let's, let's, um, wrap this up with one question, uh, spicy take. What is a GTM hill you're willing to die on? Like the opinion the industry hates but you know is true.

AI slop is not slop. It's not AI. It's not, it's It's not the AI's fault. It's your fault. I'll die on that hill. 10 out of 10 times. It's your fault. You don't know how to use the tool. And AI is just a tool. You're still a fool with a tool. It's just a tool. You got to get better at it, dude. Come on. Go to YouTube. Learn that shit. Doesn't take that. It takes like 2 months to get good at something. Just sit down and do it every day for like 10 minutes. Open Claude, put it on your phone and learn it like Duolingo. And you'll get good at it. I'll die on that hill.

Just the fools with the tools. All right. I'll leave it at that. Um, amazing. Uh, so power-packed episode. Uh, if I could try to summarize this in, in 3 bullets, um, here we go. Buy software for strategy, not for features. Uh, scale out simplicity and test messaging with your ICPs aggressively. And then don't be a fool with a tool.

And don't be a fool with a tool. Yeah.

Amazing. Spencer, you've developed your AI agent Delphi. I've dropped the link in the chat. I'll also drop it on Spotify and YouTube as well when we post that next week. For those listening in, it's delphi.ai/spencertahil. And you can also book a meeting with Spencer at cal.com/spencer.

Spencertahil/discovery-call. Change the backslashes to forward slashes.

Forward slash. It's the, it's the one on the bottom right of your keyboard, not on the other side of the keyboard. There you go.

The usual one. I'm like, Mike, why are you tilting the other way?

Oh God, that's funny.

Amazing. Great to have you on Spencer. Thanks so much. Thank you guys for joining. We'll see you next time.

Thank you guys.

For the season closing.

Bye.

Bye.