r/AskGTM

ok so. seed stage startup, 11 people. our founder came back from a conference back in may absolutely VIBRATING about "GTM engineering" and by that monday i had a new title, a Clay login, and a slack channel called #growth-engine with exactly one member. me. it is now july. i have stopped crying long enough to type this.

here's what i inherited: an Apollo account nobody's opened since february, 4 sending domains that a freelancer "warmed up" (they are not warm. they are dead. i checked), an AI SDR subscription that's been emailing people this whole time (found out when a prospect replied "please stop congratulating me on my Series B, we raised it in 2021"), and a CRM where 60% of the deals have a close date of december 31, 2024. in the past.

my qualifications: i am good at excel and i once read half of a book about sales.

the founder's plan, and i quote, is "just 10x the outbound." sir. our outbound is currently emailing the past.

so, actual questions for people who do this for real:

where do i even START, fix the data, fix the domains, or just burn it all down and do 20 emails a day by hand like a victorian peasant?

is it insane that my gut says our 6 paying customers are the answer, like just... talk to them and find more people shaped like them?

and how do i tell my founder that "10x the outbound" when replies are ~3% industry-wide means 10x-ing into a void, without getting sent back to accounting?

roast me if needed but please also help me. i have a dashboard due friday and the only metric i trust is my own heart rate.

so we deployed an AI SDR in january like every other company with a pulse and a pipeline problem. first 3 months, honestly? great. meetings booked, dashboard green, i was walking around the office like i'd invented fire.

then month 4 hit and replies just... stopped. dashboard still green tho. activity through the roof. so last week i did the thing nobody who deploys an AI SDR ever actually does.

i read the emails.

reader. i was not prepared.

exhibit A: it told a CFO "as a fellow parent, i know how hectic Q4 can be." my guy. we do not know if she has children. WE do not have children. we are a SaaS company.

exhibit B: it opened an email with "loved your recent post about scaling culture!" the prospect's most recent post was about his dog passing away. his DOG. we sent that man a pipeline pitch with a smiley face.

exhibit C: it built "rapport" with a prospect in Denver by saying how much it also loves the mountains. our company is in Florida. the flattest place on earth. a prospect replied just to say "you're in Tampa."

and the kicker, none of this even mattered by then, because our sender reputation had already dropped off a cliff. turns out when the inbox providers see 10,000 emails that all have the same AI sentence-skeleton wearing different personalization hats, they just quietly stop delivering you. the data on this is brutal btw, the decay literally starts around month 4 and by month 12 the math fully flips. we were a case study and didn't know it.

the part that actually hurt: we pulled the meetings that DID book in the good months. most came from one segment where a human had written the original sequence and the AI was just scheduling. the robot was taking credit for the intern's homework the entire time.

so now we run maybe a tenth of the volume, human writes anything a prospect actually reads, AI does the research and the grunt work behind the scenes, and replies are the best they've been in a year. turns out the robots are incredible employees as long as you never let them speak.

anyway. go read your AI's sent folder. right now. i'll wait. and drop the worst thing yours has sent in the comments because i refuse to be alone in this.

seed stage. people who use the product genuinely love it, retention is real, and the ones who find us convert at a rate i'm happy with. that last sentence is the entire problem: "the ones who find us." nowhere near enough of them do.

i'm an engineer by background and i can feel distribution is a muscle i just never built. i can ship basically anything but consistently getting in front of the right people still feels like dark magic i'm watching other founders pull off while i stand there confused.

for the technical founders who got past this wall, what was the actual unlock? did you force yourself to get genuinely good at one channel, hire for it, find a distribution-brained cofounder, something else entirely? and how long did it honestly take before distribution stopped feeling like luck and started feeling like a system you actually control?

specifically not looking for "just do content" or "post on twitter bro" tier advice. looking for the real story of what flipped it from random to repeatable, because right now every good week feels like an accident i can't reproduce.

Our team used Common Room for developer intent signals. With the Zoom acquisition we're not sure where this goes. Putting together a list of Common Room alternatives for DevTool companies specifically. Not looking for generic intent tools — need something that understands developer personas, tech stack signals, that kind of thing.

So far I have Reo.Dev on my list , they seem purpose-built for technical GTM. Anyone else using something they'd recommend? What's working for your team?"

We witness the response on emails, phone calls are all getting screened by AI. Due to this, LinkedIn is the only source but is also getting very crowded . Therefore, prospecting contacts are becoming increasingly difficult . Other than collaborations partnerships, what other methods are we using for prospect reach out?

Context:

• We're a B2B agency selling a high-ticket service ($XXk/month).
• We already have a strong customer cohort.
• I used a lookalike platform to generate ~900 companies similar to our existing customers.
• The list is already filtered by geography and industry and monthly website visitors, so I'm not starting from scratch.

The next step is enrichment, and this is where I'm stuck.

The business hypotheses I'm trying to answer are roughly:

1. Is this company commercially mature enough to buy from us?
2. Do they already invest in the SEO channel we're trying to improve?
3. Which messaging angle should we use when reaching out?

The issue is that there are hundreds of possible enrichment fields.

Examples:

• Employee count
• Revenue
• Organic traffic
• Monthly website visitors
• Paid search spend
• Paid keywords
• Ranking keywords
• Marketing leadership
• SEO leadership
• Funding
• Hiring
• Tech stack
• etc.

Most of the "obvious" fields also seem fairly noisy.

Revenue estimates differ wildly across providers.

Website traffic is an estimate.

Employee counts vary depending on the source.

Paid ad spend is difficult to measure accurately.

I don't mind working with imperfect data, but I don't know which imperfect data is actually worth paying for.

What I'm trying to avoid is spending money enriching 20+ fields, only to discover that most of them have little predictive value.

So my questions are:

• If you were building an outbound motion from scratch today, how would you decide which company-level enrichments are worth collecting?
• Which fields have consistently been the most predictive for you?
• Are there any fields you thought would matter but ended up being useless?
• Do you build your segmentation around raw fields, or do you derive composite scores (e.g., "marketing maturity" or "search investment") from multiple signals?
• Are there any GTM engineering resources, blogs, talks, or people who go deep on designing enrichment schemas rather than just showing Clay workflows?

I'm interested in tool recommendations (Clay, Apollo, etc.) and in the thinking process behind deciding what data is worth enriching in the first place.

Would really appreciate hearing how experienced RevOps / GTM Engineering teams approach this.

I'm trying to understand how agencies handle inbox infrastructure once they start scaling.

A lot of providers like Mailforge/Primeforge seem to require buying mailbox slots in bulk, like 10+ at a time. I understand why agencies use multiple inboxes/domains to keep sending volume low per inbox, but I’m confused about the logistics for client work.

How would you buy and warm up inboxes in advance?

For example, if you buy 10–20 inboxes now, don't you usually have to name them early on? Like choose sender names, domains, and email addresses. But for client campaigns, the sender persona might depend on the client. It could be the founder, someone on their team, or me reaching out on their behalf.

So my questions are:

1. Do agencies usually wait until a client signs before buying domains/inboxes?
2. Do they pre-buy bulk slots and leave them unused, even though they’re paying monthly?
3. Do they use generic sender personas like “Alex” or “Sarah” across clients?
4. Do they send as the agency on behalf of the client instead of using client personas?
5. Is keeping “warm inventory” only practical once you already have multiple active clients?

Trying to avoid wasting money on unused inboxes, but also don’t want every new client to wait 3–4 weeks before campaigns can start.

Would appreciate advice from people actually running client cold email campaigns. How do you structure this?

trying to evaluate if we need field sales rep for ur b2b SaaS ? if you can give example as to what should we go for- Field Sales rep + SDR/BDR or SDR/BDR+In house sales rep? What has worked? Does the field sales rep need to be Independent Sales rep of full time employees(W2 or 1099?)

I spent most of my adult life selling boring things to boring companies. Regional operators, industrial accounts, private businesses, logistics groups, companies where nobody cared about your LinkedIn bio or your “personal brand.” My best year was a little over $1.1M. I’m retired now.

Here’s what actually mattered.

Your first real skill is not closing. It’s being normal. A lot of salespeople are strange in front of buyers. Too loud, too polished, too eager, too fake. Customers can smell neediness. The best reps I knew sounded like competent people who happened to sell something. Calm wins.

Do not treat every account the same. Some accounts deserve war. Some deserve one email and a clean exit. Young reps waste too much time trying to “nurture” people who were never going to buy. Rank accounts fast. Budget, urgency, access, pain, timing. If none of those are there, move on.

The money is usually in ugly markets. I made more selling to businesses nobody talks about than I ever would have made selling trendy stuff. Warehouses, parts, equipment, materials, regional chains, operators, family-owned companies. Less glamour, more budget.

Do not try to impress buyers with how smart you are. Make their day easier. Most buyers are buried in nonsense. Late shipments, broken vendors, angry bosses, pricing issues, internal politics. If you become the person who removes problems instead of creating more of them, you get called first.

Follow-up is not “just checking in.” Never send that email. Send a useful update, a new price, a delivery date, a cheaper alternative, a risk they should know about, or a clear next step. If you have nothing useful, wait until you do.

The best question I ever learned was: “What happens if you do nothing?” Then shut up. You will find out very quickly if there is a real deal or just a person who likes talking.

Stop trying to be liked by everyone. Being liked helps. Being trusted pays. Some of my best customers were not warm people. They did not want lunch. They did not want jokes. They wanted accuracy, no surprises, and fast answers. Give people what they value, not what your manager says “relationship selling” means.

Take pricing seriously. Discounting too fast makes you look weak. It also tells the customer your first number was fake. If you move on price, trade for something. Volume, term, faster signature, better payment, a bigger rollout, something. Never give away margin for nothing.

If procurement says you are too expensive, ask compared to what. Compared to the current vendor? A quote from last year? A number their boss made up? “Too expensive” is not information. Make them define the comparison.

Your manager is not your customer. Hit your number, keep clean notes, don’t create chaos, but do not spend your whole week trying to make your manager comfortable. The market is outside the building.

My last job was Head of GTM at a large AI company, and I’ll say this: GTM is a very promising path. Good GTM is not just sales. It is positioning, pipeline, pricing, RevOps, customer segments, expansion, and knowing where revenue gets stuck. RevOps is especially underrated. A good RevOps person can see the business better than most executives. Old-school sales still matters, but the best people now understand the whole revenue machine.

Internal reputation matters more than you think. Operations, finance, customer support, shipping, legal, credit. These people can save your deals or quietly let them die. Treat them well before you need them. Don’t only call when something is on fire.

Never lie about delivery. You can survive a high price. You can survive a tough negotiation. You can survive losing a deal. You cannot survive being the rep who says “it will be there Friday” when you know it won’t. Bad news early builds trust. Bad news late destroys it.

Keep your own notes. Know your territory better than the company does. Who owns what, who hates which vendor, who is expanding, who is cutting budget, who pays fast, who is always a nightmare. The CRM is usually a graveyard of fake activity. Your private notes are where the real business lives.

Some territories are just better. Some reps are not better than you. They inherited better accounts, better geography, better timing, or a product people already wanted. Don’t cry about it, but don’t be naive. If the territory is structurally bad, fight for a better one or leave.

Lost deals teach more than won deals, but only if you ask the real question. Did they trust someone else more? Were you late? Were you talking to the wrong person? Was there never a deal? Did you misunderstand the problem? You need the truth, even when it makes you look stupid.

Big checks are dangerous. The first time you make real money, you will want to upgrade everything. House, car, trips, restaurants, watch, whatever. Don’t. Sales income can disappear fast. Comp plans change. Territories change. Companies get acquired. Your champion leaves. A cheaper competitor shows up. Live like the money can stop, because one day it will.

The best salespeople I knew were not motivational-poster people. They were patient, observant, consistent, and hard to rattle. They knew when to push, when to disappear, when to call, and when to leave the customer alone.

At some point I realized the job was simple, not easy.

Find real problems. Get to the person who owns the problem. Tell the truth. Make the next step clear. Follow through faster than expected. Repeat for decades.

That was the whole game.

Sales gave me freedom because I treated the money like freedom, not like proof I was important. I saved aggressively, invested early, avoided debt, and never assumed the good years would last forever.

The company can replace you. The customer can replace you. The market can humble you. But the money you keep is yours.

The more money you put away, the less fear you carry. The less fear you carry, the better you sell.

Good luck.

This is r/AskGTM , a place for people working on go-to-market. You can ask questions, share what is working, post problems, compare notes, talk about careers, or just write the thing you cannot say on LinkedIn.

What go-to-market means

Go-to-market is the work of getting a product into the hands of the right customers and turning that into revenue. It includes who you sell to, how you reach them, what you say, how you sell, how you retain them, and how the whole system gets better over time.

It is not just outbound. It is not just sales. It is the full path from market to customer to revenue.

Founder go-to-market

For founders, go-to-market usually starts with doing the work yourself. Finding the first customers, choosing an ICP, picking a sales motion, writing the first emails, doing calls, handling demos, closing deals, and learning what people actually care about.

This is the place for questions about first customers, positioning, pricing, distribution, founder-led sales, when to hire, and how to know if a channel is working.

Sales

Sales is a big part of go-to-market. SDRs, AEs, AMs, founders, and sales leaders can talk about prospecting, cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn, sequences, discovery, qualification, MEDDIC, BANT, demos, objections, negotiation, closing, pipeline, quota, and comp.

The small details matter. A bad list kills a good email. A weak discovery call kills the demo. We will circle back usually means something else is broken.

Marketing and growth

Marketing and growth are also go-to-market. Inbound, content, SEO, demand gen, community, brand, product-led growth, ABM, paid, events, and lifecycle all belong here.

This is for the people trying to create demand, explain the product clearly, bring the right people in, and make sales easier before a call ever happens.

Data, signals, and outbound infrastructure

A lot of go-to-market comes down to knowing who to contact and when. That means segmentation, account selection, list building, scraping, verification, enrichment, buying signals, intent, funding, hiring, expansion, tech changes, job posts, and other triggers.

It also means deliverability. Domains, inboxes, warmup, sending volume, bounces, spam, reply rates, and why your emails are not landing.

RevOps and CRM

RevOps is the part behind the scenes that decides whether the team can see what is happening. CRM hygiene, routing, territories, reporting, attribution, forecasting, pipeline stages, handoffs, data quality, and dashboards all matter.

Bad ops makes good teams look confused. Good ops makes problems visible.

GTM engineering

GTM engineering is the newer technical side of go-to-market. It sits between revenue, data, tools, and code.

People here are building enrichment systems, replacing expensive tools, wiring APIs, scraping data, monitoring signals, cleaning lists, building internal tools, using AI coding agents, and testing whether AI SDRs are useful or just noisy. The role is new enough that some job posts ask for ten years of experience in something that barely existed two years ago.

Post-sale

Go-to-market does not stop when a deal closes. Onboarding, customer success, support, adoption, retention, expansion, renewals, referrals, and net revenue retention are part of the same system.

A bad-fit customer is often created before the contract is signed. Expansion often starts with selling the right thing the first time.

Partnerships and channel

Partnerships, agencies, resellers, affiliates, marketplaces, integrations, and channel deals are part of go-to-market too.

This is where people can talk about partner-sourced pipeline, rev share, co-selling, channel conflict, attribution, enablement, and whether the partnership is real or just two logos on a slide.

AI in go-to-market

AI now touches almost every part of the work. It can research accounts, write drafts, summarize calls, update notes, monitor signals, build tools, enrich data, and act like a 24/7 coworker.

It can also make teams faster at doing dumb things. Five hundred lazy sequences are still worse than fifty thoughtful ones. Deleting the CRM and telling an agent what happened each day might be the future, or it might be chaos. Worth discussing.

Careers, comp, and hiring

Go-to-market is also a career path. Breaking in, BDR to SDR to AE, moving into RevOps, becoming a GTM engineer, switching into marketing, joining an agency, getting laid off, surviving a bad market, interviewing, negotiating comp, and sharing real numbers all belong here.

Post the wins too. First deal, biggest deal, first commission check, new job, better title, clean dashboard, fixed deliverability, first customer, whatever.

Post here

Ask what you are stuck on. Share what worked. Share what failed. Post the messy version.

Use the closest flair so the right people find it: Founder GTM, Sales, Marketing/Growth, RevOps, GTM Engineering, Post-Sale, Partnerships, AI, Careers, Comp, Hiring, or Beginner.

everyone said this account was dead. ghosted us twice. CEO told me to drop it. i kept poking it anyway.

they just signed. $1.2M ACV. my commission on this one deal is more than i made all of last year.

in front of my laptop literally shaking and i can't say a WORD to anyone in the office. holy fk. LETS GO.

A few companies in and I've seen all the playbooks and frameworks. It still comes down to sell harder and hit the number.

Has anyone actually worked under a GTM that was real strategy and not just pressure?

seed b2b. spent a year in the classic trap, a little outbound, a little content, a little linkedin, a little community, all of it at maybe 20% effort. predictably all of it was mid. the unlock was the least sexy lesson imaginable: stop running six channels half-committed and go 100% on one until it either works or definitively dies.

the five that did ~nothing for us: paid ads (too early, no trust), generic content (no audience to read it), cold linkedin DMs (instant spam pattern, ignored), broad webinars (empty room), and a limp partnership push (nobody co-markets with a company that has no traction).

the one that became 80% of pipeline: going genuinely deep in the specific communities where our exact buyer already hangs out. not promo posting, actually being the most useful human in the room on our problem for months. eventually people started DMing asking what we were building. that inversion, them coming to you, is when distribution stopped feeling like pushing a boulder uphill.

here's what nobody tells you about "focus on one channel." it doesn't feel like focus, it feels like neglect. committing to one means consciously ignoring five others while they sit there making you anxious you're missing the magic one. that discomfort IS the cost of focus, and white-knuckling through it is the actual skill. every channel looks like it's failing at 20% effort, so you never find out which one would've printed at 100%.

what was the one channel that ended up carrying your pipeline, and how long did you grit your teeth before it actually kicked in?

’m building something in GTM space for the last 6 months, and I’m trying to sanity-check the core thesis.

Most GTM engineering / signal tools today feel like they are built for RevOps teams, operators, or founders.

But the actual salesperson still lives inside Gmail, Outlook, Teams, Slack, Calendar, and CRM.

Our thesis is:

Sales teams do not need another dashboard showing more signals.
They need those signals converted into clear actions inside the tools they already use.

So instead of only saying:

“this account visited your website”
“this company is hiring”
“this prospect engaged on LinkedIn”
“this deal has gone cold”

We want to turn those signals into workflows like:

1. Lookalike / signal-based outbound
2. LinkedIn intent outbound
3. Website visitor follow-up
4. Closed-lost account revival
5. Account growth opportunities
6. Meeting prep + CRM summaries
7. Pipeline health and risk alerts

The backend is signal capture and orchestration.

The frontend is a simple UI/plugin inside the seller’s daily workflow, especially Gmail, Outlook, Teams, Slack, and Calendar.

The question I’m trying to answer:

Is this a real enough pain for sales teams, or does it still sound like another “AI for sales” product?

Would love brutal feedback from founders, sales leaders, RevOps people, or anyone who has tried to solve this internally.

Has anyone here attended networking events that include creative workshops or art therapy? I'm curious whether founders or aspiring founders would actually enjoy that format over the usual networking sessions. lmk

Hello everyone

I am a beginner who is transitioning into GTM Engineering. Over the few weeks I have been trying to build a learning roadmap that is based on how GTM Engineers actually work, not just which tools are popular.

Far I have completed the following courses:

* HubSpot CRM Fundamentals

* HubSpot Inbound Marketing

* HubSpot Inbound Sales

These courses helped me understand the business side, such as customer journey, CRM, inbound methodology lead qualification and so on.. I realized that they do not go very deep into the technical implementation that GTM Engineers build every day.

I do not want to jump between tutorials. I am trying to learn

## My Current Plan

I am fortunate to have access to a business, Royal Fit Uniform. Rather than building fake portfolio projects I want to build real GTM systems, such as:

* Lead generation pipelines

* CRM implementation

* Workflow automation

* AI integrations

* Reporting dashboards

* Revenue operations workflows

My hope is that by solving real business problems I will learn the technical skills while also building a portfolio with measurable outcomes.

## Where I Am Unsure

I would really appreciate hearing from people who are already working in GTM Engineering.

### 1. How Much Business Knowledge Is Enough Before Focusing On Technical Implementation?

Should someone be able to design things like ICPs, customer journeys, funnels and GTM strategies first or do those skills naturally develop while building GTM systems?

### 2. If You Were Starting Today Which Technical Skills Would You Prioritize?

For example:

* HubSpot APIs

* Salesforce

* n8n

* Clay

* SQL

* JavaScript

* Python

* Postman

* Airtable

* Apollo

* Smartlead

* AI APIs

* Looker Studio

* Power BI

Which of these GTM Engineering tools have had the impact in your day-to-day work as a GTM Engineer?

### 3. What Does Your Actual GTM Stack Look Like?

I am especially interested in hearing:

* Which tools you use every week as a GTM Engineer

* Which tools everyone talks about but rarely use in GTM Engineering

* Which skills made the difference in your career as a GTM Engineer

### 4. Portfolio Question

If you were reviewing a GTM Engineer, what portfolio project would immediately tell you that this person understands how GTM systems work?

What would impress you more:

* complexity of the GTM system?

* Business thinking, behind the GTM system?

* Revenue impact of the GTM system?

* Documentation of the GTM system?

* Clean system design of the GTM system?

### 5. Looking Back

If you could restart your 6–12 months what would you learn first and what would you skip completely as a GTM Engineer?

I am not trying to collect certificates or learn every tool.

My long-term goal is to become someone who can understand a business identify GTM bottlenecks design the GTM systems and build them using automation, APIs, AI and data as a GTM Engineer.

If you have already gone through this journey I would genuinely appreciate any advice, mistakes to avoid or resources that changed how you think about GTM Engineering.

Thanks.

Essentially the question. Founders who stopped going after small customers even when revenue was coming in, was there something specific that prompted that choice, or was it more like a natural progression? How did you go about moving ICPs or segments?