The Mount Rushmore Of GTM Engineering "Plays"

I’ve been working fractionally as a GTM engineer for a few months now (along with our recruiting/content/community initiatives at VibeScaling), typically managing 3-4 clients at once, and I’ve seen a variety of different approaches work and not work.

I wanted to write a short article on the four plays I’d look to implement on day one if I had only a few weeks to show results.

Reflection: the hardest part of this game so far has been managing expectations. So many founders want 100 meetings overnight. More on that in a future post.

If sales/outbound was so easy to crack in a month, a lot more would go into the profession. However, let this mispriced asset be one in our favor 🙂.

It’s been harder than ever to crack through the inbox to book meetings, with LI being way more successful than email.

Keep in mind that the companies I’m typically working with are seed through B (at the latest) - I’m typically in the trenches with the founding team and working with founders or their founding business/sales hire.

See below for the 4 plays that have been working well for our clients, with “positive replies” as the main KPI there.

Play 1 - Website Visitors

Absolutely the first play you should be launching.

If they’re on your website, and they’re in ICP, they are low enough in the funnel to shoot targeted messaging.

Tools I love here are RB2B and Vector: mainly because the startups I work with only care about building pipeline with companies here in the US, and those tools avoid GDPR compliance (and thus can deanonymize random folks at a higher rate).

Steps:

• Run a webhook from RB2B/Vector (that is set up on your website) into Clay

• Enrich in Clay, and use AI to confirm they’re in your ICP (company size, industry, title of person, etc.)

  • If ICP, put a check and filter down on the checks

• If ICP, then shoot messaging (from the founder) through a tool like HeyReach (which integrates nicely with Clay)

Great video on this here.

This gets set up and put on autopilot, and we’ve seen a number of meetings get booked through this. At the very least, a thoughtful outreach is made when they are in the market.

Messaging I like:

Play 2 - Competitor LI Follower Scrape

Another one that has hit for some clients who play in spaces where there are known incumbents / tools that suck that they are typically ripping out when they win deals.

Steps:

• Use a tool like ScrapeLi or Boomerang to scrape your competitors LinkedIn company page

• Put this CSV into Clay and mock it up accordingly for ICP (OpenAI API key is great here)

• Send this to an email sequencing tool (Instantly or Smartlead)

Messaging I like:

Play 3 - Warm Intros

This should probably be #1 - obvious that this is an easy way to brute force some easy wins in the beginning.

However, it wasn’t till I found out about The Swarm that there’s an easy way to do this in Clay.

Steps:

• Upload an ideal account list in Clay (whether through CRM pull or CSV)

• Use The Swarm to see who at your company (employees, advisors, investors) are connected to folks at those accounts

• Start sending out emails/texts/LI messages to those folks to get on calls, I like using “product feedback” requests, and then the right folks it leads to sales

Play 4 - GitHub

Only relevant for dev-focused companies, however GitHub is a treasure trove of usage data - whether it’s your own company or open source competitors. Can get emails and LinkedIns from this, and shoot out messaging.

Steps:

• Scrape GitHub repos from Clay’s integration (or a tool like PhantomBuster)

• Enrich in Clay and get a list of contacts showing intent

• Shoot out messaging in the LI/email tool of your choosing

Clay’s integration guide is here, along with an example play here.

Thanks for reading, y’all. For those that want to learn more on plays that are working / want to go deeper here, feel free to shoot me a LI DM or email at [email protected].

Cheers 🫡,

Chris