The hard part of starting a business is not building the product, it’s 1) finding people and 2) getting them to care. If you’ve been reading this blog awhile you’ve heard me say this a time or two. Now to really spell this out:

Finding people = Sales
Getting them to care = Marketing
Sales + Marketing = go-to-market (GTM)

In the past year this idea of ‘GTM Engineering’ has become popular amongst startups and hyperscalers. The idea is basically applying technical (AI) skills to systemize various sales and marketing processes.

It’s NOT sending mass emails, it’s things like building workflows to curate leads, enriching them with AI, prioritize them using signals, them enrolling them in personalized email/LinkedIn DM sequences.

I want to illustrate with an example. I am not an expert, but this is working for me. Here is a three step playbook you might use to generate top-of-funnel leads and convert them to meetings:

The 3 Step Playbook!

1) Define ‘already solving it’ seed list

Start by defining a 1-sentence problem statement that you can use as a litmus test to go out and identify prospects. At the end of the day this process is 80% finding good leads and 20% messaging. Let’s use an example problem statement:

Problem Statement: Say your company is a CRM for growing e-commerce brands. Your problem statement might be: "E-commerce teams need to track wholesale and B2B sales beyond Shopify"

Seed List: Armed with this, create a seed list of 10-20 companies already using adjacent tools to solve this problem. For a CRM, adjacent tools might be Hubspot, Pipedrive or spreadsheets. How can you find them? A few ways:

1. Go to the competitors’ websites and look for a customer stories page (use Google or an AI like Perplexity to expedite) → ex: Hubspot’s case studies page

2. Some sales research tools like Apollo now have the ability to search for companies based on technologies used (ex: search by Hubspot, Pipedrive)

3. Use AI-enabled tools like Happenstance to identify close connections in your social networks (LinkedIn, X, Gmail) using semantic search

4. Simply go to forums/social media and search for reviews or posts relating to the problem statement (ex: Google Alert query in footnotes)

These methods should get you to a list of some companies and personas who are currently (or recently) experiencing the problem you outlined, which is the goal From here you can begin to cook (and if you can’t find anyone… you may be solving the wrong problem)

2) Enrich your list and identify personas

One you have a list of companies, you need to enrich and organize them. You might choose to find new companies every few weeks and do this continuously.

Ultimately, you need to qualify and prioritize which ones are worth reaching out to. Again you can do this a number of ways:

• Sales intelligence/signals tools like Clay, Birddog, Zoom Info

• CRM’s like Attio will automatically enrich your leads for you

• Lean on general-purpose AI like Perplexity to fill in the blanks

• You can always hire an intern :-)

We personally use Clay to do a lot of the heavy lifting here for us. Specifically we take the list of companies that we’ve identified from step 1 and pull them into Clay.

Enriching Companies: From there we enrich the companies to pull out any qualifying information (ex: how many employees do they have, what industry are they in, where are they located, etc.) → you can use this to weed out any unqualified companies that are too small to have budget (<10 employees) or too big to get through to (>10,000).

Motion Signals: we also go through each company to identify proof of motion signals that would indicate whether or not they are urgently solving the problem; for our example these could be things like launching wholesale channels, hiring a sales team, attending trade shows. Those that are in motion move to the top of the list

After enriching and finding motion signals you should have all you need to sort and filter the companies worth prioritizing. From a list of about 100 companies we pruned down to closer to 50 that were in our ‘cue zone’ with motion signals.

Identify Decision Makers: from here you can use Clay (or other tools like Apollo) to find decision makers at your candidate companies, searching by keyword. For our example we might search for titles like Head of Sales, VP of Growth, Director of Business Development. I’d target 3-5 titles per company.

Group Into Personas: from here you’ll have 50-200 prospects. Odds are there will be a bit of a spectrum, so I’d recommend grouping them into 2-3 persona buckets that you can use to align your messaging for each. For example you might choose do like Sales Leadership as one and GTM Engineers as another - again try to keep these focused on actual decision makers and filter out the rest.

From here after a bit of manual cleaning you are probably ready to do some sequencing.

3) Enroll in sequences with BotDog

Finally, armed with a list of high priority decision makers at companies matching your problem statement, enroll them into an outreach sequence. Generally you can choose either email or LinkedIn - depends a bit on the type of buyer.

There are many CRMs and sales tools you can choose from that have sequencing capabilities (Attio is the CRM we use and can send emails). For the sake of this example lets say we want to do LinkedIn, a great automation option is BotDog 

For a typical sequence I recommend the following:

1. Befriend them (don’t include a message with the invitation, seems too salesy)

2. Wait a day, send a basic intro to provoke a reply

3. If no reply, follow up (x1-3)

When it comes to LinkedIn outreach, 3 things matter: your message, what your profile looks like, and who you are targeting. Here let’s focus on the message (keep your profile professional and hopefully sections 2 and 3 above solve for targeting)

Some advice when it comes to messaging - First, make it about them (not you!). Second, people hate being sold to, but they love to buy. Third, optimize for replies. You might do that by making them curious (ex: “We are launching a secret product…”) highlighting any uncommon commonalities, asking easy/open questions, or giving them something (even if just a gesture)

Try your message with a few initial test targets and refine until you feel good. Overall if this doesn’t get you meetings then something may be seriously wrong.

I’ll stop here because this post is getting too long and we’ll save the rest for later (so much more to say!). Let me know what you think, would love to learn from YOU if you know better than me. Again just one way of thinking about it.

IF you are extremely curious, message me and I’ll send you a loom recording of how we did this for our startup.

Cheers,
Ramsey

1  Google Alert: “Shopify wholesale" AND ("need better" OR "looking for" OR "alternatives to" OR "frustrated with") site:reddit.com/r/shopify OR site:reddit.com/r/ecommerce)