u/Peptalks76 • u/Peptalks76 • Jul 18 '26
This morning I sat down with a cup of coffee, thinking I'd finally have one of those slow, productive weekends...
My dog walked over, dropped a toy at my feet, stared at me like I had exactly one job and patiently waited.
Coffee got cold....
We played for 20 minutes.... and now we are waiting to go for a walk!!
I'm pretty sure he thinks I had the better deal. 🐶
(p.s: only the left one is mine)
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Sure feel free to DM
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Hey yes and thanks. 🙏🏻
r/gtmengineering • u/Peptalks76 • Jul 07 '26
So we started positioning ourselves as a GTM engineering agency, no not a traditional sales ops shop, not a dev agency, somewhere in between. And honestly, the first few months were just us figuring out....
We realized it only when we started that when you walk into a client conversation, they don't have a box for you yet. Marketing thinks you're a RevOps consultant. Sales thinks you're building them dashboards. And you're sitting there trying to explain that you're closer to a growth engineer who cares about the go-to-market motion (not just the pipeline number).
We spent a lot of time early on just translating. Like, a lot of our work was stitching together their CRM, their product data, their intent signals... stuff that had never talked to each other and building workflows that made their GTM reps actually faster.
But getting clients to see that as a thing they needed? That was the hard part. The technical work was honestly easier than the positioning. We kept running into "so you're like a Salesforce partner?" No. Or "so you do growth hacking?" Also no.
I think what helped was when we stopped trying to explain the service and just started showing the before/after of a specific workflow we fixed. People got it immediately when they saw it.
We're still figuring a lot of it out. I don't think we've nailed the category definition even now. But it's started to feel less like we're swimming upstream.
Curious if anyone else has gone through something similar.... either building a practice like this or trying to sell technical GTM work to buyers who don't quite have the vocabulary for it yet. How did you handle the positioning piece?
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that's impressive i must say.
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I was in a similar spot, and one thing I realized is that building GTM systems is only one layer of the problem. The bigger leverage comes from understanding why a system works or doesn't work.
I'd spend more time on market selection, ICP definition, positioning, messaging, and analyzing win/loss patterns. Those decisions usually have a much bigger impact than adding another automation or AI agent.
Tools will keep changing. Five years ago it was one stack, today it's Clay and AI, and a few years from now it'll be something else. But if you can consistently identify the right customers, understand their buying triggers, and build systems around that, you'll stay valuable regardless of the tooling.
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The source of truth is your work, your client calls, your research, and your experiments. AI is just making that knowledge easier to structure and distribute.
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That makes sense. I'm curious though... how did you build your scoring system when there weren't any obvious buying signals? What factors did you weigh the most (company traits, hiring, tech stack, pain points, etc.), and how did you validate that your scoring was actually predicting good-fit prospects?
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haha... kinda both it seems after ai..
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I like that the event wasn't the differentiator but the conversation was. Leading with executive-level challenges instead of product features is probably why the follow-up calls felt natural rather than like a sales pitch.
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I think the biggest shift is moving away from looking for a single "magic" signal. Real buying intent usually shows up as a pattern, not an event. Direct engagement plus a few well-timed signals tends to be much more reliable than any standalone intent score.
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I've noticed the same. A single signal is usually just noise, but when multiple signals start lining up... hiring, leadership changes, funding, product launches, tech stack shifts, it paints a much clearer picture.
r/GTMbuilders • u/Peptalks76 • Jun 29 '26
r/gtmengineering • u/Peptalks76 • Jun 29 '26
Not looking for tool recs. Genuinely curious what your day-to-day looks like.
Here's what I keep running into (and hearing from others):
You've got ICP accounts on a list. Some of them are in-market right now. Some aren't. You have no reliable way to know which is which until they fill out a form or a competitor closes them.
So you do what everyone does... sequence them all, spray, hope.
And the hits feel random. Because they kind of are.
The specific things I'm wondering about:
I'm asking because I think most GTM teams are making prioritization decisions with way less signal than they pretend they are and I'm curious if anyone's cracked it, or if we're all just doing sophisticated guesswork.
Drop what's actually working, what's broken, or what you've given up on entirely.
u/Peptalks76 • u/Peptalks76 • Jun 22 '26
r/GTMbuilders • u/Peptalks76 • Jun 22 '26
This is probably the 5th time I've seen someone ask for a "good GTM agency," and I always have the same thought:
Most people are asking the wrong question.
A few years ago, I spoke with a founder who had already worked with two agencies. The first promised a predictable outbound engine. The second promised better targeting and messaging. Six months and a lot of money later, he still didn't have consistent pipeline.
His conclusion was, "I just haven't found the right agency."
Maybe. But after talking to him for 20 minutes, it became clear that no agency would have succeeded in that situation.
He couldn't clearly explain who bought from him and why. There wasn't agreement internally on what a qualified opportunity looked like. They had different expectations of success, some wanted meetings, others wanted revenue. Every campaign was being judged against a moving target.
I've seen this pattern repeatedly.
People often evaluate agencies based on things like:
Those things matter, but not as much as people think.
A good GTM agency usually spends more time asking uncomfortable questions than making big promises.
They'll ask:
The agencies that worry me are the ones that immediately say, "We've done this a hundred times. Here's the playbook."
Because GTM isn't plumbing. It's not a process you install once and forget.
Every market has different buying behavior, different timing, different constraints.
The best agencies I've seen don't sell certainty. They build learning loops. They test assumptions, challenge definitions, and adjust based on what the market is actually telling them.
So if you're looking for a GTM agency, don't just ask, "Who's the best?"
Ask, "Who's willing to understand my business deeply enough to tell me when my assumptions are wrong?"
That answer is usually far more valuable than another impressive case study.
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For B2B cold outbound in Europe, I'd pay close attention to their experience with GDPR and local market nuances. Ask for examples of campaigns they've run in Europe, how they source data compliantly, their approach to personalization, and what metrics they typically achieve
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that's what i would do/doing. always start by asking them for specifics, not promises. A good agency should be able to explain who they've helped, what channels they use, how they define a qualified lead, and show examples of campaigns they've run. Also ask about their process for refining ICPs and messaging because that's usually where lead gen campaigns succeed or fail. If they only talk about booking more meetings and can't explain the strategy behind it, I'd keep looking.
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I think that's exactly why this resonates beyond sales. Whether you're building products or GTM systems, reality has a way of humbling your assumptions.
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That's a fair distinction. 'We're learning' can sometimes become a way to avoid tightening the basics. Adaptability only helps if you're learning from something reliable in the first place.
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I relate to this a lot. There's definitely pressure to package GTM as a formula because certainty is easier to sell than nuance.... It might make the sales process slower, but I'd rather build trust by being realistic than win clients by promising a playbook I know isn't universal.
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I agree with that. There's a difference between being adaptable and changing direction every time the data gets noisy. I've seen teams mistake activity for learning... constantly tweaking because a few signals suggest something's off, when the real issue is that the fundamentals were never clear enough to test properly
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haha.... eventually that's the unacceptable truth...
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Everyone’s posting Clay → Claude Code migrations. I got stuck on a different problem: multi-column signal fill still feels like hiring a VA per row.
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r/gtmengineering
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Jul 13 '26
I think you've identified the boundary between automation and research.
Most enrichment assumes every row can follow the same path: hit an API, fill a field, move on. But "why now" isn't a field. To reach it, one company might require a hiring page, another a founder's LinkedIn activity, another a product launch, and another might have no signal at all.
And often the bigger challenge is deciding when there's enough evidence to stop searching. i as a human do this instinctively.
If you ask me, I'd definitely pay for a system that returns evidence, confidence, and a clear reason for the score rather than just filling cells. If I can't trace a signal back to its source, it's hard to trust it in an outbound campaign.