Outbound Wizards by SalesRobot

In today's episode, I chat with Nik K., GTM Engineer at Postindustria, a custom software development company, about building an event-based outbound machine that booked 75 on-site meetings in a single month across multiple conferences. We explore his full pre-event workflow: segmenting attendees by industry and business model using ChatGPT before touching Clay, scraping deep company profiles with a 700-800 word output per company, running a matching prompt that compares each company against Postindustria's full portfolio and case studies to score them as high match, medium match, or disqualified, then generating three custom service offers per company based on what they'd actually benefit from—all before a single word of copy is written. Nik also shares his copywriting philosophy: give LLMs a strict structure with mandatory sentences, bullet point formats, word limits, and reading level constraints, then let AI fill only the creative variables—because too much freedom produces robotic output, while tight structure produces something that sounds human. He also shares an earlier campaign for a Martech client targeting US home builders, where he scraped the names of housing projects currently under development and opened outreach with "we were driving by and saw your project"—a hyper-local personalization angle that got genuinely interesting replies. Nik shares his path from zero outbound experience landing an SDR role at LitLink after applying on a Ukrainian job board on a whim, to discovering Clay at a small agency where he was the third hire, learning waterfalls, enrichment, and API-based personalization from scratch. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Postindustria Does: Custom Software Development Across Multiple Domains (02:00) 75 On-Site Meetings in One Month: How the Event Strategy Was Born (04:05) Pre-Event Workflow: Segmenting Attendees Before Touching Clay (06:30) Deep Company Research: 700-Word Profiles, Portfolio Matching, and ICP Scoring (09:15) Generating Three Custom Service Offers Per Company Based on Their Stack (12:00) Copywriting Philosophy: Strict Structure Plus AI Creativity Within Constraints (15:16) Home Builder Campaign: Scraping Project Names to Fake a Drive-By (18:28) Nik's Journey: Zero Outbound Experience to SDR at LitLink to Clay Agency (20:15) Discovering Clay and Learning Waterfalls, Enrichment, and API Personalization🔗 CONNECT WITH NIK 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Sahil, fractional GTM engineer working with companies that have small TAMs—sometimes as tight as 1,500 accounts—where mass cold email doesn't make sense and the real value comes from building smart in-house GTM systems. We explore his highest-ROI win: not more pipeline, but faster lead routing—building an automated system that pushed positive replies straight to Slack with full enrichment context, so the SDR could call within 10 seconds instead of hours later when the lead had gone cold, taking meeting conversion from 1-in-4 replies to 20-30%. He also shares his approach for a client with only 1-2K accounts: year-round air cover across the decision maker ecosystem so cold outreach never lands out of the blue, automated job change signals triggering enriched SDR briefings with full company context and a draft email, and a dormant lead reactivation sequence pulling from call transcripts that brought back 20% of ghosted leads. His prediction: every SaaS company builds outbound in-house within two to three years, and deliverability skills become the quiet differentiator nobody talks about enough. Sahil shares his path from entrepreneur-with-no-sales-skills to B2B SaaS sales roles, to discovering Clay when there was barely any content about it, spending six months studying during his wife's pregnancy, and landing his first inbound client right after his daughter was born. His advice: don't get intimidated by the top 1%—focus on low-hanging fruit like lead routing first, and build from there. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What a Fractional GTM Engineer Does for Small TAM Clients (02:00) Highest ROI Win: Automated Lead Routing Cutting Response Time to 10 Seconds (03:45) 1-2K TAM Strategy: Year-Round Air Cover, Job Change Signals, SDR Briefings (06:33) Dormant Lead Reactivation From Call Transcripts: 20% Came Back (09:23) Sahil's Journey: Entrepreneur Bug to B2B Sales to Discovering Clay With No Content About It (11:05) Six Months Studying During Wife's Pregnancy, First Client After Daughter Was Born (13:18) Future Predictions: Every SaaS Company Builds Outbound In-House Within 2-3 Years (14:19) Advice: Don't Aim at the Top 1%, Focus on Low-Hanging Fruit Like Lead Routing First🔗 CONNECT WITH SAHIL 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Terhile, fractional GTM engineer working across two clients in the UK and US, about doing GTM work across verticals most engineers never touch—e-commerce wholesalers, boutique shops, and brick-and-mortar businesses. We explore his campaign for a seasonal product supplier targeting boutique shops, where paid social wasn't viable because the audience skews older and offline—so he scraped businesses using OpenMart (his first time), ran a Clay agent to compare each prospect's inventory against his client's catalog, identified the gaps, and built outreach around "we can get these missing products to you in seven days"—hitting 8% reply rate on 400 emails. He also shares a bad story: forgetting to turn off Clay's auto-update after an enrichment run and watching a thousand credits disappear overnight. His prediction: GTM engineering splits into strategists and executioners, and the differentiator won't be tool knowledge but social listening and domain depth—because everyone has the same Clay table, it's what you do with it that matters. Terhile shares his path from a decade in tech project leadership, to discovering Clay via a lemlist-to-ColdIQ-to-Clay rabbit hole, building tables every day since. His advice: figure out if you're a strategist or executioner first, learn scraping and enrichment principles before tools, and don't skip copywriting. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What a Fractional GTM Engineer Does and How the Project-Based Model Works (01:33) E-Commerce Wholesale Campaign: OpenMart Scraping and Gap Analysis for Boutique Shops (04:29) Why OpenMart Beats Apollo for Niche Brick-and-Mortar Audiences (05:26) The Bad Story: Forgetting to Turn Off Clay Auto-Update and Burning 1000 Credits (07:23) Terhile's Journey: Decade in Tech Project Leadership to Discovering Clay via a Rabbit Hole (09:00) Completing the ColdIQ Application Task and Knowing This Was the Right Path (10:02) Future Predictions: GTM Splits into Strategists and Executioners (11:00) Social Listening Will Separate Great GTM Engineers From Good Ones (12:16) Same Basketball, Different Hands: Why Strategy Beats Tooling Every Time (12:56) Advice: Know Your Strength First, Learn Principles Before Tools, Don't Skip Copywriting🔗 CONNECT WITH TERHILE 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Lucas Paiva, GTM Engineer at Scient, about building Brazil's GTM engineering ecosystem from the inside—Scient is a go-to-market consulting firm founded by Silicon Valley alumni who brought frameworks like Winning by Design to Brazilian companies doing 50M+ ARR, and Lucas sits at the intersection of their education arm, running a six-week GTM Engineer Certification program and growing the community of practitioners in a country where they've mapped only 20 people with the actual GTM engineer title and around 150 doing similar work without the name. We explore Lucas's first real GTM engineering win: launching an AI SDR for Scient's new certification course, hitting 70 sales against a target of 50 in the first week—learning lead enrichment, lead scoring, and ICP segmentation on the fly, and applying everything he was going to teach before he'd even written the curriculum. He also shares how he manually mapped the entire GTM engineer landscape in Brazil to get precise data on how fast the role is growing, and what their projections look like for the next few years. His prediction: the role will grow very fast in Brazil and become standard at startups—one person who can sit between sales, marketing, and customer success and say "we can automate this, and here's what that frees you up to focus on" is going to be indispensable. Lucas shares his path from Link School of Business entrepreneurship program, to community and content manager at Scient translating GTM newsletters into Portuguese, to spending four weeks of university vacation studying n8n every day, to his founder-teacher Giovanni coming back from Bali, seeing the transformation, and immediately asking him to become their GTM engineer. His advice: understand which AI is best for which task—Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic all have different strengths—study automation to build workflows that do many jobs repeatedly rather than one at a time, and keep a close eye on how established platforms like HubSpot are integrating AI into their core products, because they have to ship something genuinely good for small businesses to adopt it without a consultant army. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Scient Does: Go-to-Market Consulting and Revenue Architecture for 50M+ ARR Companies (01:33) First 30-60-90 Days: Getting Marketing, Sales, and CS Speaking the Same Language (03:17) Lucas's Role: Growing the GTM Engineer Community and Running the Certification Program (04:01) Lucas's Journey: Business Student to Community Manager to GTM Engineer (05:32) Four Weeks of Studying n8n Every Day During University Vacation (06:03) First GTM Engineering Win: 70 Certification Sales Against a Target of 50 (07:54) Manually Mapping Brazil's GTM Engineer Landscape: 20 With the Title, 150 Doing the Work (09:11) Future Predictions: The Role Will Become Standard at Brazilian Startups (10:01) Advice: Match the Right AI to the Right Task, Build Repeatable Workflows, Watch HubSpot🔗 CONNECT WITH LUCAS 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Jessica Aires, Growth and Marketing Lead at Abstra, about running B2B sales-led growth for a Brazilian finance automation SaaS targeting CFOs and finance managers—covering revenue operations, performance ads, outbound automation, and co-founder-led content all at once. We explore her core insight on list quality: Sales Navigator data is roughly 30% wrong at any given time, and no matter how good your message is, sending it to the wrong person wastes your BDR's time, your LinkedIn connection quota, and sometimes produces meetings with completely the wrong person—so she now runs every Sales Nav list through Clay to clean and verify before it ever reaches an SDR. She also shares what's working in Brazil specifically: LinkedIn and WhatsApp outperform cold email for booking meetings, co-founder-led content from their CEO (an AI specialist) is growing fast and generating inbound interest, and email is used more as a soft nurture channel for people who aren't ready to engage yet. Her honest challenge with the space: there are so many tools and so many possibilities that the hardest skill is staying focused on the actual problem rather than building something because it's cool—the discipline to say not right now is as important as the creativity to imagine what's possible. Her prediction: every department will have its GTM engineer equivalent—a finance engineer, a marketing engineer—as AI tools get accessible enough that even finance managers can build their own automations, and the line between technical and non-technical roles dissolves. Jessica shares her path from engineering degree to sales ops and marketing analytics since 2018, using Python for reporting, discovering Clay earlier this year, and realizing that combining analytical thinking with business curiosity is exactly what this new role rewards. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Abstra Does: Finance Automation SaaS for CFOs and Finance Managers in Brazil (01:06) Running Marketing, RevOps, Outbound, and Co-Founder Content Simultaneously (01:30) The 30% Problem: Why Sales Nav Lists Need Clay to Be Trustable (03:50) The Real Cost of Talking to the Wrong Person: Wasted Quota, Time, and Meetings (05:02) Channel Mix in Brazil: LinkedIn and WhatsApp Beat Cold Email for Meetings (06:04) Jessica's Journey: Engineering Degree to Sales Ops to GTM Engineering (07:44) The Hardest Skill in GTM: Staying Focused on the Problem, Not the Shiny Tool (09:39) Future Predictions: Every Department Gets Its Own Engineer, AI Becomes Everyone's Tool (13:42) Don't Forget the Basics: Run the Reports, Listen to Your Community, Stay Grounded🔗 CONNECT WITH JESSICA 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Dario Dean, GTM Engineer at Reach, about being the first GTM engineer hired at a merchant of record company helping SaaS and e-commerce businesses expand globally—and what it looks like to build GTM strategy from scratch in-house versus the rinse-and-repeat agency world he came from. We explore his favorite campaign: a LinkedIn content agency client targeting business authors releasing books, where Dario got the agency's internal content playbook, turned it into a Clay prompt, scraped Penguin Publishing to find authors with upcoming releases, pulled chapter-level detail about each book, and generated two personalized LinkedIn content samples per prospect—sending them in the outreach email as a free preview of what working together would look like. Proof of work at scale, made to feel handcrafted. He also shares his Eventbrite scraping campaign for a printing franchise, pulling companies hosting events, enriching them in Clay, and running outbound sequences that drove 60-80 leads per month and deals worth $200K a year per location. Dario's take on where the space is going: it's somewhere between the LinkedIn crowd claiming they replaced 100-person SDR teams in two days and the people dismissing cold outreach entirely—the real answer is automating the research and prep layer while keeping humans close to the actual outreach, with GTM engineering eventually bleeding into RevOps and dark funnel marketing to build a complete picture of who's engaging and when. Dario shares his path from social content and newsletters at marketing agencies, to discovering Apollo during COVID while running virtual team-building events, to joining a cold outbound agency, to landing his current role at Reach. His advice: just get in and do it—he learned Facebook ads by selling dog portraits, learned outbound by running his own campaigns during COVID, and reckons no course or tutorial replaces the feeling of actually spending real money or sending real emails and seeing what happens. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:20) What Reach Does and Dario's Role as First GTM Engineer Hired (01:27) Agency vs In-House GTM Engineering: Rinse-and-Repeat vs Constant Strategy Innovation (03:12) Printing Franchise Campaign: Eventbrite Scraping to 60-80 Leads Per Month (04:30) LinkedIn Content Agency Campaign: Playbook-to-Prompt to Personalized Lead Magnet at Scale (06:10) Proof of Work in Cold Outreach: Making Automated Feel Handcrafted (07:07) Future Predictions: Volume Still Wins But Can't Stand Alone Anymore (08:31) Conference Prep Workflow: Enriching Attendee Lists Before the Event (09:55) GTM Engineering Bleeding Into RevOps and Dark Funnel Marketing (11:16) Dario's Journey: Social Content to Newsletters to Apollo During COVID (12:03) Advice: Just Get In and Do It—Learn Facebook Ads by Selling Dog Portraits🔗 CONNECT WITH DARIO 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Dave Wilkins, founder of SDR Leaders of EMEA (and USA and APAC), about his mission to define what the sales development function should look like in 2030—giving leaders from first-time managers to VPs running 250-plus person SDR orgs the roadmaps they need to evolve the role into the revenue-critical function it should be. We explore what Dave is seeing across the market: a back-to-the-future moment where the pile-on of tools actually reduced prospecting time rather than increasing it, and the best SDR teams are now differentiating themselves by getting back on the phone to qualify and disqualify faster. He shares a real example of a US company where a GTM-engineer-led team of seven was generating more pipeline than a traditional SDR team of 47 at the same company—and the leader kept refusing to add headcount because the system was already winning. Dave also breaks down his take on the GTM engineer versus RevOps debate: it's not just a rebrand, it's an expansion of scope with a more practical, sales-practitioner lens rather than a purely data-driven one—and the C-suite pushing for it is giving the role a much bigger charter. His prediction: SDR headcounts will come down but productivity per rep will rise sharply as AI removes the 90 minutes of daily admin currently eating into selling time, tenures will get longer, pay will go up, and the role will finally become a profession rather than a stepping stone people sprint away from. And on the blunt question of whether the SDR is dead—his survey data says 55% of EMEA companies hired more SDRs in the last 12 months, and the companies cutting the function are the ones calling back six months later asking where the pipeline went. Dave shares his path from BDR in 2013 with just a phone and Salesforce, through global sales development leadership roles, to running Snowflake's EMEA sales development org, to founding SDR Leaders of EMEA after noticing the space for developing SDR leaders was almost entirely missing—now running 30-plus meetups globally in a year and scaling to 50-plus next year. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:20) What SDR Leaders of EMEA Does: Roadmaps for Sales Development Leaders Globally (01:05) Back to the Future: Why the Best SDR Teams Are Getting Back on the Phone (02:44) GTM Engineer Adoption: 13.7% of EMEA Companies Already Employing One (04:22) GTM Engineer vs RevOps: Same Role or Expanded Scope? (06:48) Real Example: Team of 7 Outgenerating a Team of 47 with GTM Engineering Motion (08:09) First Mover Advantage: Why Late Adopters Will Struggle to Catch Up (09:04) Dave's Journey: BDR in 2013 to Snowflake EMEA Sales Development Leader (09:36) Founding SDR Leaders of EMEA: 30-Plus Meetups Globally in Year One (10:31) Future Predictions: Fewer SDRs, Longer Tenures, Higher Pay, More Pipeline Per Rep (11:40) Is the SDR Dead? 55% of EMEA Companies Hired More SDRs in the Last 12 Months🔗 CONNECT WITH DAVE 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Clark Hess, GTM Engineer at Supio, about building the entire go-to-market data infrastructure from the ground up at a legal AI startup—handling Clay, Gong, CRM architecture, and database-building for a very specific TAM: plaintiff personal injury attorneys in the United States, roughly 60,000 total. We explore two initiatives: first, building custom scrapers to pull every personal injury firm in the country (since ZoomInfo coverage for this niche is thin), then running agents against each firm to identify the right contacts—giving Supio a complete picture of their TAM from nearly day one; and second, a cohort reporting project where Clark is piping Gong transcripts into Clay via webhooks, converting them into field values, creating custom CRM objects per call, and making it possible to analyze patterns across hundreds of calls at once—competitors mentioned, objections raised, deal signals—rather than reviewing transcripts one by one. His insight: combining first-party data from calls with first-party data scraped from prospect websites means you're building a picture of your market according to your own company, not a third-party data broker. His prediction: GTM engineering will become a household name as a career field, Clay is positioned to threaten CRM incumbents, and computer use agents getting good enough to operate Clay autonomously is the genuinely wild card nobody has a confident answer for—but right now the role creates undeniable impact and is only growing. Clark shares his path from political science major to SDR at legal marketing company Avvo, to startup OfferUp where he taught himself web scraping to outprosect his peers, to pivoting into RevOps after realizing he enjoyed finding people who wanted to say yes more than closing them, to getting laid off from his first RevOps role, to a year and a half of contracting in what is now called GTM engineering before Supio brought him on full-time. His advice: learn Clay, get operationally solid with CRM, and work for cheap or free in the beginning just to get reps—because once the numbers are behind you, the opportunities follow. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Clark Does at Supio: GTM Engineering for a Legal AI Startup (01:31) Cohort Reporting from Gong Transcripts: Webhooks, Clay, and Custom CRM Objects (03:30) Building a Complete TAM Database for 60K Personal Injury Attorneys Across the US (05:23) Why First-Party Data Beats Third-Party Brokers for Niche Local TAMs (06:52) Clark's Journey: Political Science to SDR to Teaching Himself Web Scraping (07:50) Pivoting from Sales to RevOps After Realizing He Liked Finding Yeses More Than Closing (08:50) Getting Laid Off, Going Independent, and Accidentally Becoming a GTM Engineer (09:35) Future Predictions: GTM Engineering as a Career Field, Clay Threatening CRM Incumbents (11:18) Computer Use Agents Operating Clay Autonomously: The Wild Card Nobody Can Predict (12:32) Advice: Learn Clay, Get Solid on CRM, Work Cheap to Get Reps Early🔗 CONNECT WITH CLARK 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Filippo Greco, GTM Engineer at Yellow Tech, about building one of Italy's first AI-first companies—running AI adoption programs for businesses across Italy (interviews, classrooms, workshops, full 360-degree rollouts) while also building agents, automations, and Clay-based GTM systems for clients who are just beginning to understand what AI can actually do for them. We explore two standout campaigns: a cybersecurity client where Filippo built a Lovable app that automatically attempts to breach a prospect's website when the link is submitted, then sends an email with a full report of every vulnerability found—reply rates through the roof because there is no stronger proof of pain than showing someone their site just got hacked; and a signal-triggered video personalization flow where a prospect interacting with a competitor on LinkedIn enters a Clay sequence that pulls their photo, their company logo, and the CEO's face, feeds it into a Lovable-built app via HTTP request, and generates a video of the CEO appearing to speak directly to that prospect about their specific problems—which the prospect then receives by email. Filippo's core philosophy: figure out what the average GTM engineer is doing right now, then ask how to beat it—because average gets average results. He also shares how Yellow Tech operates as a hybrid human-AI company, with AI agents living inside Slack alongside the team, talking to SDRs, and handling processes that would otherwise require multiple headcount. His prediction: his generation—what he calls AI natives—will enter the workforce already thinking in agents and automations, and that generational shift will be more disruptive to companies than any single tool release. Filippo shares his path from discovering ChatGPT 3.5 at 20, immediately understanding it would change everything, studying prompt engineering deeply, doing a master's in digital marketing, becoming an AI marketing specialist building some of the earliest AI agents before they were mainstream, and co-founding Yellow Tech at 23. His advice: be creative and get your hands dirty—prompt engineering is now one of the most valuable skills you can have, soft skills beat hard coding skills for GTM work, and you can build almost anything if you're willing to experiment. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Yellow Tech Does: AI Adoption Programs and GTM Engineering for Italian Companies (02:11) Cybersecurity Client Campaign: Auto-Breaching Prospect Websites and Emailing the Results (04:48) Signal-Triggered CEO Video Personalization: Face, Logo, and Company Pain Points in One Email (07:00) Always Ask What's Average Right Now—Then Build Past It (09:19) Filippo's Journey: ChatGPT 3.5 at 20, Prompt Engineering, Digital Marketing Master's (11:23) Building AI Agents Before They Were Mainstream (11:32) Yellow Tech as a Hybrid Company: AI Agents Living in Slack Alongside the Human Team (12:58) The AI Native Generation: Entering the Workforce Already Thinking in Agents (14:19) Advice: Be Creative, Get Your Hands Dirty, Master Prompt Engineering First🔗 CONNECT WITH FILIPPO 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Thomas McCourt, founder at CalendarInvite, about running a B2B lead generation agency focused on small to medium marketing agencies—helping them build outbound systems through cold email and cold calling for clients who are great at marketing everyone else but have no formal offer or sales process for their own services. We explore his campaign for a non-agency client selling into care homes, construction, and schools—where Apollo couldn't build the list so they scraped an online care home directory, enriched the domains in Clay, used Clay's AI to find care home managers, and chained the whole workflow together—only to find the carefully segmented industry campaigns barely scraped 1% reply rates, until Thomas had a simple idea: drop the industry segmentation entirely, search Apollo by job title across all industries, use messaging that had already shown positive signals, and run one broad campaign—jumping to 3% overall reply rate and 10% positive reply rate overnight. The lesson: there's a time for creative workflows and a time to stop ignoring what's right in front of you. Thomas also shares his take on cold email deliverability: he started in 2022 when the channel was more forgiving—buying dodgy cheap domains, skipping warmup, ignoring bounce rates, sending seven-step sequences—and got away with it, but anyone starting today has to get everything right from day one because ESPs and AI spam filters have made the margin for error much thinner. His prediction: infrastructure will keep tightening, agencies that survive will be the ones building their own tools and software rather than depending entirely on third-party platforms, and adaptability at speed will be the defining skill. Thomas shares his path from a manual business development agency in 2022 working with creative agencies and brands, to moving in-house at a communications and events agency, to stumbling across an automated lead gen account on Instagram, discovering Smartlead, Clay, and the whole new wave of sales tech, running his first campaigns just to see what was possible, accidentally landing a client, and building CalendarInvite from there. His advice: follow the right voices on LinkedIn and podcasts, absorb everything, but more importantly put it into practice—and don't be afraid to cold message people you look up to and ask for advice, because most of them will say yes. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:20) What CalendarInvite Does: Lead Gen for Small to Medium Marketing Agencies (01:20) How Thomas Chose His Niche: Comfort and Familiarity Over Grand Strategy (03:48) First 30-60-90 Days: Auditing Current Sales Process and Building the Offer (06:47) Care Home Campaign: Scraping Directories, Enriching in Clay, Chaining Workflows (09:44) The Pivot That Worked: Drop the Segmentation, Search by Job Title, Watch Replies Jump (11:02) When Simple Beats Creative: The Lesson Thomas Is Taking Forward (12:15) Thomas's Journey: Manual Business Dev Agency to In-House to CalendarInvite (14:44) Discovering Smartlead and Clay on Instagram and Accidentally Landing a First Client (17:00) Why Starting in 2022 Was More Forgiving Than Starting Today (19:24) Future Predictions: Infrastructure Tightening, Agencies Need to Build Their Own Tools (22:14) Advice: Follow the Right Voices, Test Everything, Cold Message People You Admire🔗 CONNECT WITH THOMAS 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Walter, Senior Partner at Silvergreen, about running a GTM and revenue operations advisory for post-seed and Series A companies in the "teenage phase"—past the little leagues but not yet in the big leagues—where small operational mistakes are costing them massive growth and one person with the right systems can do what used to take a seven-person team. We explore two standout campaigns: scraping the entire US government SBIR loan applicant database via a public API, pulling millions of rows into Clay to find under-awarded applicants as outreach targets, and closing multiple deals in two weeks in a space where B2G sales cycles are notoriously slow; and a SOC 2 compliance client whose TAM was essentially every SaaS company on earth until Walter narrowed it to listeners of a specific niche podcast, getting double-digit reply rates just from the shared context of that community. Walter goes deep on his philosophy of finding non-obvious data sources—IRS filing data, chamber of commerce registries, political campaign FEC filings, government APIs—because the companies fishing in Apollo and Clay's standard sources are all competing in the same dry pond, while the companies using public but obscure APIs are reaching prospects nobody else is touching. He also makes the case for attributable revenue as the only KPI that actually matters to a business owner: not bounce rates, not reply rates, not cost per lead—dollars in minus dollars out, tracked from first email touch through CRM close. Walter shares his path from SQL database developer for the city of Aspen, to digital marketing agencies, to e-commerce and Etsy with a serial entrepreneur girlfriend, to eventually going fully independent after his last employer saw him making double on his own, with Silvergreen now clearing over half a million in profit between two partners. His prediction: the future belongs to people who can engineer systems—integrate APIs, flatten messy data, automate workflows in n8n—because the barrier between what you can envision and what you can build is now a tenth of what it was a year ago. His advice running through the whole conversation: find the weird niche API nobody else knows about, prove revenue not metrics, and automate your own operations first so you know what you're actually selling. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:19) What Silvergreen Does: GTM Advisory for Post-Seed and Series A Companies (01:44) Client Up 1900% Year Over Year: What the Teenage Phase Actually Looks Like (03:08) SBIR Government Loan Database Campaign: Millions of Rows, Multiple Deals in Two Weeks (05:24) Stop Fishing in Apollo's Pond: Find the Niche API Nobody Else Knows About (07:14) SOC 2 Compliance Campaign: Niche Podcast Targeting for Double-Digit Reply Rates (09:08) IRS Filing Data, Chamber of Commerce Registries, and Political Campaign FEC Data as Lead Sources (13:19) The $6M Bootstrapped Client With No CMO, No Automations, No Email Infrastructure (17:24) Attributable Revenue Is the Only KPI That Matters: Dollars In Minus Dollars Out (20:05) Building a Reporting Dashboard That Proves Value in Dollars and Cents (21:47) Walter's Journey: City of Aspen SQL Developer to Agency Life to Full-Time Independent (23:36) Future Predictions: GTM Engineering Is Now Systems Engineering (26:38) Building a Daily Lead Scraping System in an Afternoon That Saves 100 Hours a Month (28:20) n8n in Three Afternoons Beats What Used to Take a Computer Science Degree🔗 CONNECT WITH WALTER 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Ritesh, founder at InsightsTap, about running a GTM agency that works primarily with large enterprise tech companies—because companies with organized data infrastructure, proper CRMs, and data warehouses are the ones actually extracting value from AI, while companies still living in spreadsheets aren't ready for it yet. We explore two client stories: a large enterprise company that watched its organic traffic drop from 250,000 to 120,000 monthly visitors in under a year as people shifted from Google search to AI chat tools, scrambling to figure out what replaces SEO-driven lead flow; and a Canadian warehouse hardware company where Ritesh brainstormed the right signal with them—companies hiring warehouse managers—and built a list of every company posting those roles, enriching and sequencing them into outreach within days instead of months of manual research. Ritesh shares the big idea running through his whole philosophy: the shift from campaign-first to signal-first GTM, where instead of launching campaigns and waiting for people to come to you, you detect dark signals—G2 profile visits, website pricing page views, job postings, social listening, reverse IP—and reach out to decision makers before your competitors even know those buyers exist, the same way Amazon built its entire infrastructure around knowing what you want before you ask. His prediction: B2B enterprise companies are being forced to think like e-commerce companies—proactive, signal-driven, personalized at scale—and the monopoly that big budgets on Google and LinkedIn used to buy is dissolving as attention fragments across Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT and dozens of other platforms, creating a genuinely level playing field where a small player with a clever GTM strategy can out-execute a Fortune 500. Ritesh shares his path from SAP ERP developer writing code for 10 years, to freelancing in Facebook and Meta ads during the pandemic, to becoming a top-rated Fiverr Pro across enterprise marketing categories, to founding InsightsTap as a GTM agency focused on large tech companies. His advice: don't chase the shiny tool—learn the fundamentals of the industry you want to serve first, because tool shelf lives are short but marketing principles aren't, and being a Clay expert who can't diagnose a business problem is a much weaker position than being an industry expert who knows which tools to deploy. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What InsightsTap Does: GTM for Enterprise Tech Companies with Organized Data Infrastructure (02:54) Which Companies Benefit Most from AI: The Data Readiness Question (05:46) Campaign Story: Enterprise Client Losing Half Its Organic Traffic in Under a Year (08:58) Warehouse Hardware Campaign: Hiring Signals as Purchase Intent Triggers (10:53) From Idea to Campaign in 24 Hours: What AI Orchestration Actually Enables (14:31) The Shift from Campaign-First to Signal-First GTM (17:43) Dark Signals: G2 Visits, Pricing Pages, Reverse IP, Social Listening, Job Posts (20:05) Run Your B2B Company Like an E-Commerce Store: The Amazon Mental Model (24:50) Democratization of Marketing: Small Players Can Now Crush Big Budgets (27:57) Advice: Learn the Industry and the Problem First, Tools Come Second🔗 CONNECT WITH RITESH 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Daniel, RevOps Architect at justt, about running the entire GTM operation solo—supporting sales, customer success, and marketing simultaneously using Clay, Make, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong—at a success-based chargeback recovery platform that uses AI to build dispute cases for merchants across the US and UK. We explore his favorite initiative: a fully automated transcript intelligence workflow where every Gong call gets pulled into Make, sent to Claude via API with a structured prompt extracting objections, AE performance, expected close date, and buyer sentiment, then pushed directly into Salesforce fields—saving AEs manual logging time while giving marketing weekly content ideas and CS teams complete customer context before handoff. Daniel's insight: there is more gold sitting in call transcripts than most GTM teams ever touch, and the prompt is everything—once you know the right questions to ask, Claude does the rest. His prediction: smaller teams will do more than ever before, but you will always need a human managing the strategy and keeping all the tools and processes from becoming a mess—AI amplifies output, it doesn't replace oversight. Daniel also shares how he built a 200-person RevOps and marketing ops community in Israel after realizing the loneliness of being a one-person team, running webinars and in-person events so practitioners could brainstorm together—because when you're solo, you don't know what you don't know. He shares his path from a teaching degree he never used, to building freelance websites up north in Israel, to a startup founder handing him course after course until he'd learned SEO, ads, and Salesforce admin, to becoming Salesforce certified during two weeks of quarantine, to leading a three-person marketing ops team at Panarays, to his current RevOps role at justt. His advice: get hands-on with Salesforce or HubSpot first, join a team with other RevOps people before going solo, and set aside time every week to keep learning—because the tools move fast and staying current is non-negotiable. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:22) What justt Does: AI-Powered Chargeback Recovery on a Success-Based Model (01:48) Being a One-Man RevOps Band: Supporting Sales, CS, and Marketing Simultaneously (02:54) Transcript Intelligence Workflow: Gong to Make to Claude to Salesforce (05:16) Why Call Transcripts Are the Most Underused Asset in GTM (06:16) Using Close-Won Calls to Rewrite Website Copy in the Customer's Own Words (07:24) Daniel's Journey: Teaching Degree to Freelance Websites to Salesforce Admin in Quarantine (09:08) Leading Marketing Ops at Panarays to RevOps at justt (10:35) Future Predictions: Smaller Teams Doing More, But Strategy Still Needs a Human (12:38) Building a 200-Person RevOps Community in Israel for One-Person Teams (14:09) Advice: Learn Salesforce or HubSpot First, Join a Team Before Going Solo🔗 CONNECT WITH DANIEL 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Filip Nakov, co-founder at Nakora, about running hyper-targeted GTM strategy and execution exclusively for AI, dev, and data SaaS companies—a niche Filip chose because developers hate traditional marketing, most growth agencies don't know how to speak to them, and technical understanding is non-negotiable for building strategies that actually land with this audience. We explore his Clay build for a web scraping client where he mapped every competitor's alternative and versus pages across the market, identified which companies in the ICP didn't have those pages yet but should based on how well those pages convert, enriched each company with headcount, ICP roles, LinkedIn profiles, tech signals, and SEO gaps, and turned the whole table into a targeted outreach sequence that opened with: here's what your competitors have, here's what you're missing, here's how much revenue that gap is costing you. Filip also shares a personalization campaign he stumbled upon that stuck with him—someone who got a no-show created a Clay-generated image of themselves at McDonald's with two burgers and said they bought lunch for the meeting, which is the kind of B2C-inspired creativity he thinks will define where B2B outreach goes next. His prediction: GTM teams will increasingly function like engineers building systems rather than marketers running campaigns, signal-based growth will replace post-and-pray, and personalization at scale will reach a level that's hard to even picture right now. Filip shares his path from freelance copywriter for US clients, to head of growth at a New York marketing agency after going above and beyond his brief, to opening his own agency in Macedonia, to slowly attracting developer-focused B2B SaaS clients because of his technical background as a trained developer—culminating in Nakora, which launched a free GitHub visibility analyzer that pulled 700 users on day one. His advice running through the whole conversation: know your ICP pain points cold, because once you have those the targeting, messaging, and strategy all follow—right person, right message, right time is still the only formula that matters. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Nakora Does: GTM Strategy and Execution for AI, Dev, and Data SaaS (01:53) Why Developers Hate Traditional Marketing and Most Agencies Can't Speak to Them (03:55) Clay Build: Mapping Competitor Alternative Pages to Find Revenue Gaps (05:32) Turning SEO Gap Research Into Targeted Outreach With Built-In Math (09:22) No-Show McDonald's Campaign and Why B2C Creativity Is Coming to B2B (11:55) Filip's Journey: Freelance Copywriter to Head of Growth to Nakora (13:03) Opening an Agency in Macedonia and Slowly Attracting Developer-Focused Clients (15:45) Why Developer Audiences Are Harder to Earn Trust From Than Marketers (16:03) GitHub Visibility Analyzer: 700 Users on Day One (18:00) Future Predictions: GTM Teams as Engineers, Signal-Based Growth, Personalization at Scale (20:34) Orca Security Mascot Campaign and the B2C Inspiration Behind B2B Outreach🔗 CONNECT WITH FILIP 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Sachin Singh, Fractional CMO at Cocorick, about building dedicated LLM products for B2B SaaS companies that give them a competitive edge over rivals—while running a lean GTM operation that uses AI orchestration to do the work of an 8-10 person team with a fraction of the headcount. We explore his webinar attendee campaign where he pulled a list of 346 companies that had attended the same online event, enriched them in Clay, and used the shared attendance as the icebreaker—hitting a 40% positive reply rate simply because the commonality made the outreach feel like a warm conversation rather than a cold one. Sachin breaks down his philosophy that strategy always comes before tooling, SOPs should be built for every step of the GTM process including appointment setting and FAQ management, and that once your SOPs are detailed enough the next person executing them doesn't have to be human—it can be an AI agent. He also draws on his time at Turing, where a 40-person team did everything manually, to make the point that if you haven't done something by hand first, you won't know what to automate or where the errors will accumulate—which is exactly why most end-to-end AI SDR deployments fail. His prediction: operations will be fully automated, but client-facing and cognitive roles will remain human territory for the foreseeable future, and companies that try to automate the human-to-human connection will be at a disadvantage. Sachin shares his path from an MBA at Banaras Hindu University to handling email deliverability and inbox management at Turing, to learning appointment setting and data enrichment fundamentals at ColdNC in the Netherlands under a founder who invested deeply in his growth, to his current CMO role at Cocorick while also pursuing a doctoral program in AI. His advice: learn LinkedIn and Gmail community guidelines cold, nail your technical infrastructure foundations, and always start with strategy—the tool is just how you execute it. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:20) What Cocorick Does: Dedicated LLM Products for B2B SaaS (01:45) Webinar Attendee Campaign: Shared Context as Icebreaker Hitting 40% Reply Rate (03:14) Running a Lean GTM Org: One Person Doing the Work of Eight (05:10) Why Manual Experience First Makes Automation Actually Work (06:32) Why End-to-End AI SDR Deployments Fail: Automating Before Understanding (07:22) Building SOPs for Every GTM Step So AI Agents Can Execute Them (08:07) Sachin's Journey: Turing to ColdNC to Cocorick (09:55) Learning the Fundamentals Under a Founder Who Invested in His Growth (10:48) Future Predictions: Operations Fully Automated, Human Touch Stays in Client-Facing Roles (12:16) Advice: Strategy First, Tool Second, and Know Your Infrastructure Foundations🔗 CONNECT WITH SACHIN 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Akio Aida, MD at Bridge City Advisory, about combining three things most agencies treat separately—messaging, data infrastructure, and deliverability—into one unified system, with messaging as the core multiplier: better data and better deliverability give you a baseline, but if you want 400-800% multiples on your outbound, the offer and the message are where that leverage lives. We explore his fleet insurance campaign where he scraped the entire Florida state commercial truck database—crash rates, fleet sizes, violation records, cargo types—vibe-coded a custom analysis tool using Cursor to find crash patterns across thousands of fleets, discovered the state average was around 15%, and built two-way messaging: if your rate is above average, your premiums are probably suffering; if you're below, you might be leaving savings on the table. The real insight: this isn't personalization, it's research—showing someone you know their world well enough to say something that actually matters to their business. Akio also shares the rule he's starting to track: the seniority of who shows up to the meeting is determined by how strategically the outreach message is framed—solve a day-to-day technical problem and you get a manager; speak to a C-suite initiative and the C-suite comes in. His prediction: GTM engineering salaries will balloon as engineers start impacting eight-figure pipelines, but the real inflection point comes when CAC becomes truly untenable for sales orgs and the shift becomes non-negotiable. Akio shares his path as a founding AE at four startups ranging from near-zero to $13B valuation, spending hours manually reading 10-Ks to connect value props to what executives actually cared about, selling the first gen AI policies to the federal government at Grammarly, and realizing AI would let him do at scale what he'd only ever been able to do manually as an individual rep. His advice: start learning now—the market is early, the information is everywhere, and one-year-out-of-school founders are already building agencies with real traction. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:20) What Bridge City Advisory Does: Messaging, Data, and Deliverability as One System (02:43) Who the Clients Are: Companies Where Outbound CAC Has Become Untenable (04:37) Florida Fleet Insurance Campaign: Scraping State Database and Vibe-Coding the Analysis (07:23) Research vs. Personalization: Why Knowing Their World Beats Knowing Their Name (08:52) You Get Delegated to the Level You Sound Like (10:37) Akio's Journey: Founding AE at Four Startups, Reading 10-Ks Manually (12:23) Selling the First Gen AI Policies to the Federal Government at Grammarly (13:49) Future Predictions: GTM Engineer Salaries Will Balloon as Pipeline Impact Grows (15:23) The Real Inflection Point: When CAC Becomes Truly Untenable (15:28) Advice: Start Learning Now, the Market Is Still Very Early🔗 CONNECT WITH AKIO 👥 LinkedIn  💻 Website 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Tim, CRO at Agent F, about building a Berlin-based pre-seed ERP platform targeting the mid-market gap between small accounting tools like QuickBooks and enterprise giants like SAP—companies between 50 and 500 people that are too complex for the bottom and too cost-sensitive for the top, with AI now making that layer viable earlier in the company journey than ever before. We explore Tim's evolution from mass automated campaigns with 50%+ open rates but near-zero replies, to a signal-plus-manual approach that pushed response rates from 3-5% all the way to 30-40%—by switching from ICP thinking to ideal use case thinking, identifying specific life events like a founder transitioning out of founder-led finance and hiring a VP of Finance, then spending 15-30 minutes per lead doing real research that AI can't replicate (like spotting a shared VC connection in a website photo). Tim shares his trust-times-value formula: perceived value isn't fixed—it's multiplied by the trust level of the person delivering it, which means a human writing a genuinely personal message creates more perceived value than the same words sent by automation, and that in a world flooded with AI content the human brain still instinctively assigns more trust to real human contact. He also ran 10-12 small hypothesis-driven campaigns of 50-150 leads each across different segments and roles, using the data to narrow down exactly where in a startup's journey the ERP question surfaces—landing on Series A as the new sweet spot, not pre-IPO. Tim shares his path from mechanical and production engineering, to operations management at Berlin startups, to getting handed the sales team over a dinner and a bottle of red wine, discovering that sales is 70-80% human psychology, and eventually becoming CRO at Agent F. His advice runs through the whole conversation: do things that don't scale for your first customers, because trust compounds into referrals before you've even closed the deal. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:19) What Agent F Does: AI-Native ERP for the Mid-Market Gap (02:50) Early GTM: Expert Interviews, Network Leverage, and Hypothesis-Driven Campaigns (05:00) Switching from ICP to Ideal Use Case Thinking (08:00) Signal-Based Outreach Plus Manual Research: 3-5% to 30-40% Reply Rates (09:45) Why AI Can't Replace the 15-Minute Human Research Layer (11:09) The Trust-Times-Value Formula: Human Contact as a Multiplier (13:35) Do Things That Don't Scale: First 10 Customers Deserve a Human (14:12) Tim's Journey: Mechanical Engineer to CRO via a Dinner and Red Wine (16:13) How Sales Became Human Psychology and Partnership Over Pipeline (17:00) Future of Sales: Efficient Is Not the Same as Effective🔗 CONNECT WITH TIM 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Michael Slawson, founder of Apero Advisors, about running a boutique go-to-market advisory that goes deep on a small number of clients rather than running the same cookie-cutter playbook for fifty—listening to past sales calls, mapping full prospect journeys from top to bottom of funnel, and figuring out who to target, what to say, and how to reach them before touching any tooling. We explore his Y Combinator client campaign where he used Disco to build a use-case-segmented list of companies that fit their universal API product, ran them through Clay to tag accounts and filter false positives, then pushed simple founder-led outreach on LinkedIn use case by use case—letting the co-founder's profile do the advertising so the message itself could stay short and direct. Michael breaks down why Disco fills a gap that Sales Navigator can't: semantic similarity search across companies that LinkedIn's algorithm simply doesn't do well, especially for businesses outside the well-funded venture-backed universe. His prediction: outbound channels don't die suddenly, they degrade slowly like banner ad click-through rates in 1999—and the smarter bet is positioning around complexity rather than any specific channel or tool, because go-to-market will always be complex and whoever can diagnose and solve that complexity consultatively will have durable positioning. He also flags a middle-probability scenario worth watching: in five years the attention economy shifts toward a community economy built on closed loops of trust, CRM data quality gets productized and commoditized, and there's meaningful agency consolidation as infrastructure complexity rewards scale. Michael shares his path from economics grad school and infrastructure finance consulting in DC, to naively jumping at the first tech company that messaged him on LinkedIn, to origination at a private credit marketplace talking to 2,000 founders, to leading GTM for a new vertical at a healthcare marketplace, to founding Apero after a mentor told him to learn Clay. His advice: go deep before going wide—work inside a single company for a few years, because context is what's scarce for a new GTM engineer, and no company will trust you with full-funnel thinking until you've earned it somewhere. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Apero Advisors Does: Boutique GTM Advisory Going Deep on Few Clients (01:24) First 30-60-90 Days: Starting from First Principles on TAM, Offer, and Channel (04:08) YC Client Campaign: Disco + Clay + Founder-Led LinkedIn Outreach by Use Case (06:40) Why Disco Fills the Semantic Search Gap That Sales Navigator Can't (07:47) Michael's Journey: Economics Grad to Infrastructure Consulting to GTM Advisory (09:22) Talking to 2,000 Founders at a Private Credit Marketplace (10:20) Leading GTM for a New Vertical at a Healthcare Marketplace (11:25) Future Predictions: Channels Degrade Slowly, Community Economy on the Horizon (13:47) CRM Data Quality Gets Productized, Agency Consolidation Coming (15:44) Positioning Around Complexity Rather Than Any Specific Tool (17:00) Advice: Go Deep Before Going Wide, Context Is What's Scarce🔗 CONNECT WITH MICHAEL 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Hayley Brodeur, Sales Director at Alysio, about building a revenue intelligence platform that connects your entire go-to-market tech stack and lets sales leaders, RevOps teams, and the full GTM org pull insights from first marketing touch to closed-won in seconds—essentially a ChatGPT that actually talks to your tools. We explore her outbound approach of doing almost everything manually to sound human in an increasingly automated world, and why LinkedIn voice notes have become her favorite outbound play—async like a cold call, verified like a database, and intriguing by nature since there's no text above or below, just a bar someone has to press play on. Hayley breaks down why she researches every prospect before sending—sometimes going as far as looking up landmarks near where they live just to show she did the work—and the bizarre moment she had to prove she was human after responding too quickly to a LinkedIn message. Her prediction: the CRM becomes a data lake, Salesforce turns into pure storage, and the real action moves to AI layers that pull meaningful insights in real time rather than dashboards that tell you what happened last quarter. Hayley shares her path from double-majoring in early childhood education and sociology, teaching first and third grade in the Bay Area during COVID, landing her first BDR role via referral after no one believed a teacher could sell, booking 30-plus meetings a month and getting promoted in seven months, getting prompt engineer certified, selling small language models to Fortune 500 brands, and eventually finding Alysio because she'd personally felt every pain point they were solving. Her advice: be patient, be consultative, bridge the gap between what leadership thinks the problem is and what the front line is actually experiencing—and don't be afraid to tell everyone exactly what you need to succeed. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Alysio Does: Revenue Intelligence That Talks to Your Entire Tech Stack (01:57) Favorite Outbound Play: LinkedIn Voice Notes as Async Cold Calls (03:36) Doing Everything Manually to Sound Human in an Automated World (06:09) The Moment Hayley Had to Prove She Was Human After Replying Too Fast (07:48) Journey: Teaching First Grade in the Bay Area to First BDR Hire (09:24) 30-Plus Meetings a Month, Promoted in Seven Months (10:00) Advising Pre-Seed to Series D Companies on GTM Motion (10:47) Getting Prompt Engineer Certified and Selling Small Language Models (13:07) Future Prediction: CRM Becomes the Data Lake, AI Replaces the Dashboard (15:53) Advice: Be Patient, Be Consultative, Bridge Bottom to Top🔗 CONNECT WITH HAYLEY 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.

In today's episode, I chat with Abrar Hussain, founder of Signalbound and Unlocked Acquisition, about building cold email and LinkedIn outbound systems for B2B SaaS, agencies, and local market businesses—running month-to-month with no long-term contracts and letting results do the talking. We explore his HR Tech campaign where eight baseline campaigns generating 200 replies per day fed enough data to build a ninth creative campaign using job opening signals—spotting what the prospect was hiring for, referencing their clients and team members, and giving three tailored ideas for how the tool solved the exact role they were recruiting—landing four customers from 1,000 emails. Abrar breaks down his five-step outbound framework: ICP and offer confirmation, infrastructure setup, list building, copywriting, and continuous campaign testing with inbox management. His prediction: the volume game is over and signals plus timing is the new edge—with the GTM engineering role itself evolving faster than ever as tools like Cursor and Claude Code keep dropping. Abrar shares his journey starting as a VA at 14 earning $3/hour on Upwork, dropping school to go all-in on learning marketing, getting noticed for his cold email writing while applying for Google Ads internships, and discovering Clay at 15 before it was mainstream—now running his own agency at 17. His advice: learn ICP, pain points, and buying reasons before touching any tool—and work for free until you have results, because one industry win gives you the case study that makes the next client easy. Enjoy 🙂(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards (00:21) What Unlocked Acquisition Does: Cold Email and LinkedIn Outbound for B2B (01:31) First 30 Days: Month-to-Month, No Guarantees, Results-First (02:04) HR Tech Campaign: Job Opening Signals + Three Tailored Ideas = 4 Customers from 1K Emails (03:52) The Five-Step Outbound Framework (04:48) Abrar's Journey: VA at 14, Dropped School, Discovered Clay at 15 (07:07) Future Predictions: Signals Over Volume, GTM Engineering Evolving Fast (08:28) Advice: Learn Sales Fundamentals First, Work Free Until You Have Results🔗 CONNECT WITH ABRAR 👥 LinkedIn 🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV🎥 YouTube Channel🐦 X (Twitter)📸 Instagram💻 Website👥 LinkedIn📧 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.