The GTM Engineer Podcast

Cold Email Is Becoming An Engineering Problem ft. Swagatam Maji

In today's episode, I chat with Swagatam, GTM engineer at oneaway, about collapsing 12 Clay tables into one and routing leads into 12 campaigns from a single source of truth—a restructure that produced 223 interested replies at a 7.12% interest rate in 30 days for a major data provider client.  The campaign had five angles: showing US founders that the tool already had their colleagues' phone numbers as a proof-of-data move, a competitor angle using BuiltWith to reference what tools they were already running, and three more cuts based on sales team size pulled from AIR.com—a database worth knowing for its 30-day data refresh. Swagatam's path here is one of the more unusual ones on the show: skipped campus placements after graduating in 2022 because he was already deep into cold email, joined a Netherlands-based agency, then spent two years at Instantly handling 90-100 support tickets a day and building the AI support agent that now handles the majority of their inbound queries before escalating to a human. Two years of watching exactly where people break down at scale turned out to be a better GTM education than most get deliberately. His prediction: saturation keeps climbing because volume is still the default, and Claude Code will increasingly replace Clay for enrichment as pricing rises. His advice: before building workflows, go into Slack communities, find real problems people are stuck on, solve them, and post what you learn on LinkedIn two or three times a week—you never know who's watching even when the likes are low.  Enjoy 🙂 (0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards  (0:21) What oneaway Does: Cold Email and LinkedIn Outbound for High-Growth B2B SaaS  (1:08) The 12-Tables-to-1 Restructure: 223 Interested Replies and a 7.12% Interest Rate  (3:01) Campaign Breakdown: Phone Number Angle, Competitor Angle, and Sales Team Size Segmentation  (5:25) AIR.com: The Underrated Database With 30-Day Data Refresh  (6:20) Swagatam's Journey: Skipping Campus Placements, Netherlands Agency, Joining Instantly in 2023  (8:52) Two Years of 90-100 Support Tickets a Day and Building Instantly's AI Support Agent  (10:15) Predictions: Saturation Gets Worse, Claude Code Replaces Clay Enrichment, Homework Wins  (12:39) Advice: Solve Real Problems From Slack Communities, Post on LinkedIn, Let the Work Get You Noticed 🔗 CONNECT WITH SWAGATAM 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/swagatammaji/]  🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV 🎥 YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/@_sauravgupta/videos] 🐦 X (Twitter) [https://x.com/saguppa] 📸 Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/saurav_salesrobot] 💻 Website [https://www.salesrobot.co/] 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurav-g-43b959225]📧 Email - saurabh@salesrobot.co 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) 👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

Great Content Converts Better Than Outreach, Here's Why ft. Tiffany Spahl-Nally

In today's episode, I chat with Tiffany, founder at RevEnvy, about why leading with content before outreach changes the entire dynamic of that first sales call—instead of fighting for credibility from zero, the prospect already knows you, trusts you, and has been getting value from you before you ever asked for their time.  RevEnvy runs LinkedIn outreach, email, and SDR calling like most lead gen agencies, but the layer on top is content-led outreach paired with lead magnets that are genuinely good enough that people say they would have paid for them—a cybersecurity client's lead magnet is getting exactly that response right now. The fitness instructor example is a good illustration of how the approach works in practice: full workout plans as lead magnets, prospects using them and realizing they actually want a real coach, and the conversation following naturally from there. Tiffany's journey into this is the kind that a lot of people in lead gen will relate to—decade-plus in enterprise sales, a layoff landing on the exact day she and her family closed on the sale of their house in Kentucky while in the middle of moving five states to Florida, taking the first contract VP of Sales role available just to stabilize, spending three months doing go-to-market work for one company, realizing at the end of it that a difficult boss was actually the best thing that could have happened because it made walking away easy, and asking herself why she was doing all of this for one company when she could do it for many. RevEnvy was born from that question. Her prediction: AI SDRs will get there on LinkedIn and email, probably within a few years, and the people who lean in now will have a real advantage over those who wait—but cold calling stays human both because the skill ceiling is genuinely high and because the regulatory environment around AI voice calls is a hard wall. The more interesting near-term development she points to is live AI coaching for SDRs on calls in real time, which compresses ramp time and changes the economics of building a sales team entirely. Her advice: don't go cold turkey the way she did if you can avoid it—keep the day job while you build, find a mentor who has already made the mistakes you're about to make, and don't recreate the wheel when the tools are already out there.  Enjoy 🙂 (0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards  (0:22) What RevEnvy Does: Content-Led Outreach Plus LinkedIn, Email, and SDR Calling  (1:04) Why Content Before Outreach Changes the First Call Entirely  (2:36) Client Focus: B2B Tech, SaaS, Cybersecurity, Coaches and Consultants  (3:10) Lead Magnets That People Would Actually Pay For: Fitness, Cybersecurity, and the Bar to Clear  (6:00) Tiffany's Journey: Enterprise Sales, Layoff on Moving Day, Contract Role, and Starting RevEnvy  (8:00) Why a Difficult Boss Was the Best Thing That Could Have Happened  (9:28) Predictions: AI SDRs Are Coming, Cold Calling Stays Human, Live AI Coaching Changes Ramp Time  (13:29) Advice: Keep the Day Job While You Build, Find a Mentor, Don't Recreate the Wheel 🔗 CONNECT WITH TIFFANY 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-spahl-nally/]  🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV 🎥 YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/@_sauravgupta/videos] 🐦 X (Twitter) [https://x.com/saguppa] 📸 Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/saurav_salesrobot] 💻 Website [https://www.salesrobot.co/] 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurav-g-43b959225]📧 Email - saurabh@salesrobot.co 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) 👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

Behind ElevenLabs’ GTM Culture ft. Marc Pierre

In today's episode, I chat with Marc, GTM Director for LATAM at Eleven Labs, about what it actually takes to open a brand new region for a company that already has strong penetration in the US and Europe—building a hub in Mexico City, covering the entire Latin American market except Brazil, and going after enterprise tech and consumer companies that can use Eleven Labs' voice AI to automate customer success or sales processes internally.  The story here is less about a single campaign and more about the outbound culture Eleven Labs has built from the ground up: SDRs carry a target of 50 conversations per week—not just prospects, actual conversations—and that expectation extends to AEs and directors too, because the bet the company has made is that outbound, when the product is genuinely working, is the highest-margin growth motion available. 30% of all Eleven Labs revenue comes from outbound despite the strength of the brand and inbound, and over 80% of the GTM team is hitting targets consistently. Marc's path into this role is a good one—started at 17 helping his brother build one of Spain's leading food delivery companies, founded a rental marketplace called Renty that was ahead of its time, sold it to a Barcelona company called Cipro, went into B2B SaaS at TravelPerk learning enterprise sales, moved to London for a company called 11Next that was building sales agents on top of Eleven Labs voices, realized that wasn't defensible, reached out directly to a Eleven Labs leader who happened to also be Catalan, got in, and within weeks was asked to relocate to Mexico City to own the LATAM opportunity. His prediction cuts against a lot of the current noise: selling will not get automated away because trust between people is what closes deals, customer support will shrink, but anyone who thinks AI replaces the human in a complex enterprise sale is underestimating what's actually happening in those conversations. His advice for anyone starting out in GTM: attitude over tools, passion over process—tools are a commodity, what isn't is the competitive drive to get into accounts before your competitors do and the genuine enthusiasm that makes someone on the other end of a call actually want to listen.  Enjoy 🙂 (0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards  (0:20) Marc's Role: GTM Director LATAM at Eleven Labs, Building the Mexico City Hub  (1:23) Outbound Culture at Eleven Labs: 50 Conversations Per Week, Every Level of the Team  (3:53) 30% of Revenue From Outbound Despite a Strong Brand and Inbound Motion  (4:43) Marc's Journey: Food Delivery in Spain at 17, Founding Renty, TravelPerk, 11Next, Eleven Labs  (7:41) Relocating From Barcelona to London to Mexico City in the Space of Weeks  (8:00) Advice: Attitude Over Tools, Passion Over Process, Get Into Accounts First  (9:54) Predictions: Selling Is About People, Tools Will Be a Commodity, Trust Doesn't Get Automated 🔗 CONNECT WITH MARC 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcpierremi/]  🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV 🎥 YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/@_sauravgupta/videos] 🐦 X (Twitter) [https://x.com/saguppa] 📸 Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/saurav_salesrobot] 💻 Website [https://www.salesrobot.co/] 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurav-g-43b959225]📧 Email - saurabh@salesrobot.co 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) 👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

AI Is Learning How To Run GTM Teams ft. Leo Sadeq

In today's episode, I chat with Leo, founder at Ascend AI, about building AI automation infrastructure with ROI as the actual design constraint—not just shipping chatbots and email sequences, but end-to-end workflows that automate judgment, not just tasks.  He walks through two campaigns in detail: a B2B SaaS client selling to VP Engineering at mid-market tech companies, where the team built a Clay waterfall using GitHub activity signals—open source dependency issues, legacy migration hiring—to score companies from zero to a hundred on signal density, generate a pain hypothesis for each lead, and show up in the inbox with messaging that referenced what was actually breaking in their engineering stack rather than a generic title-based pitch; and a D2C skincare brand on Shopify struggling with repeat purchase rates, where Leo's team built a post-purchase automation using Make and an AI orchestration layer on GPT-4 to predict next likely purchase, segment customers into education, replenishment, and cross-sell tracks, and trigger personalized emails, UGC sequences, and SMS offers in sequence—pushing repeat purchase rate from 20% to 34% within 40 days, email and SMS revenue per recipient up 62%, and support tickets down 41%. The throughline across both is the same: find the friction point, put intelligence into it, close the loop. Leo's path here is one of the more winding ones—laser engineering degree, left the country, taught himself digital marketing and SEO while freelancing abroad, met a product manager at a cafe in Azerbaijan and fell in love with the discipline on the spot, spent two years in PM working with startups until a growth roadmap he built got featured on Reforge, transitioned into GTM engineering when Clay started gaining traction, and eventually pivoted into AI automation when no-code tools made it possible to bridge the two without a developer background. His prediction: GTM stacks will eventually AB test their own logic autonomously, the GTM engineer role will morph into a hybrid of PM, data engineer, growth marketer, and DevOps, and the most interesting near-term development is models like Claude Opus acting as GTM architects that plan and delegate to other models and human devs underneath. His advice: think from the business owner perspective, not the tool perspective—ask what decision or task is stuck, not what you can build with a given tool—pick one vertical, master one or two tools in it, share your work in public as you go, and fix high-friction points end to end before adding more nodes on top.  Enjoy 🙂 (0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards  (0:32) What Ascend AI Does: End-to-End AI Automation Infrastructure With ROI in Mind  (2:25) B2B Campaign: GitHub Signal Scoring, Tech Debt Hypothesis, Waterfall Enrichment for VP Engineering Outreach  (6:10) Why Signal Work Only Matters If It Shows Up in the Actual Email  (8:15) D2C Campaign: Shopify Skincare Brand, Post-Purchase AI Layer, Repeat Purchase Rate From 20% to 34%  (11:22) Automating Judgment, Not Just Tasks: The Core Philosophy Behind the Agency  (12:34) Leo's Journey: Laser Engineering to Freelance SEO to PM to GTM Engineer to AI Agency Founder  (18:05) Predictions: Self-Optimizing GTM Stacks, Hybrid Roles, and Claude Opus as GTM Architect  (21:41) Advice: Fix What's Stuck, Pick One Vertical, Master One Stack, Share in Public 🔗 CONNECT WITH LEO   👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/layth-sadeq-93leo/]  💻 Website [https://ascendai.framer.ai] 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV 🎥 YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/@_sauravgupta/videos] 🐦 X (Twitter) [https://x.com/saguppa] 📸 Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/saurav_salesrobot] 💻 Website [https://www.salesrobot.co/] 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurav-g-43b959225]📧 Email - saurabh@salesrobot.co 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) 👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

AI Made Cold Email Worse ft. Michael Gardiner

In today's episode, I chat with Michael, founder at DFY Meetings, about why channel selection is the diagnosis most cold email agencies skip entirely—and why he regularly talks clients out of cold email and into direct mail or Upwork depending on how competitive their category actually is.  His framework is straightforward: the more crowded the outreach landscape for a given offer, the more unique the channel needs to be, which is why a bulldozer rental company can still crush it on cold email while a web dev agency has basically no room to stand out there but can own Upwork or direct mail. On segmentation, he breaks it into two types—logical segments (target companies hiring Salesforce developers if you do Salesforce dev) and personal segments (you're an e-commerce agency and an avid mountain biker, so let's go after mountain bike brands and mention it)—both of which get you most of the personalization benefit without burning API credits or hiring writers. The campaign story that stands out most is the direct mail play: handwritten cards, personalized or joke gifts tied to a specific angle, sent to a dream 100 list, followed up by email and phone. One example was sending a branded piggy bank with a note about all the money they were about to make together. No one does it, almost no one will start doing it because it's expensive and painful, and the conversion rate is accordingly ridiculous. Michael's backstory runs through Instagram page networks in high school, a first exit before graduation, a VA agency he built in Bangladesh and sold, another VA business with an international team he also sold, and finally DFY Meetings—all four grown on cold outbound, which is exactly why the agency works. His prediction: cold email isn't dying, costs are just rising the way Google Ads and Facebook Ads costs rose before it, and the real problem isn't that more people are good at it but that more people are in it making noise without being good at it. His advice for anyone starting out: ask your first two or three clients to forward you the cold emails they receive, spend 30 minutes going through them, and just don't sound like any of those.  Enjoy 🙂 (0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards  (0:30) What DFY Meetings Does: Cold Email, Direct Mail, and Managed Upwork Applications  (1:19) The Channel Diagnosis: Why Michael Often Talks Clients Out of Cold Email First  (3:01) Segmentation Framework: Logical Segments vs Personal Segments  (4:03) Best Performing Campaigns: Wholesale Printer Ink and Why Boring Offers Win on Cold Email  (4:29) The Direct Mail Play: Handwritten Cards, Personalized Gifts, and Ridiculous Conversion Rates  (5:44) Cold Email Cost Per Lead Is Rising—And Why Direct Mail Can Actually Be Cheaper at the High End  (6:57) Michael's Journey: Instagram Pages in High School, Three Exits, and Landing on DFY Meetings  (9:08) Predictions: Cold Email Won't Die, Costs Will Rise, Noise Will Increase  (10:33) The History of Cold Email Saturation: From Manual VA Scraping to 99-Dollar Unlimited Sending  (12:49) Advice: Ask Your Clients to Forward You the Cold Emails They Receive 🔗 CONNECT WITH MICHAEL 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrgardiner/] 💻 Website [https://dfymeetings.com] 🎥 YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelGardinerB2B]  🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV 🎥 YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/@_sauravgupta/videos] 🐦 X (Twitter) [https://x.com/saguppa] 📸 Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/saurav_salesrobot] 💻 Website [https://www.salesrobot.co/] 👥 LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurav-g-43b959225]📧 Email - saurabh@salesrobot.co 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) 👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.