How Leading Teams are Engineering Growth

Brad (00:00:00) The tricky thing about this new wave of go-to-market is that these tools are incredibly powerful for building an intelligence layer. Still, the companies that are winning are thinking about it differently.

Ben (00:00:10) People would much rather be told what to do by AI, meaning they would rather sit at a computer and not have to talk to a human yet, and look up the exact solution to the problem that they're facing. So really, the question is: how do companies match that attitude?

Martina (00:00:27) Everybody thinks of go-to-market as, ‘I’m going to get Clay and blast 40,000 AI-personalized emails because I’m doing go-to-market engineering.’

Ben (00:00:37) That's lazy.

Brad (00:00:49) We have a different cast of characters today. Today, we’re diving into go-to-market, but not in the traditional sense. We’re talking about the new era of go-to-market, more specifically, go-to-market engineering. So we have Martina and Ben, who have been deep-diving into this over the last few months on how to build this.

Brad (00:01:16) Let's start with the state of the current B2B buyer. A 6sense study surveyed more than 4,000 companies and found that 80% of seller conversations were buyer-initiated. Those buyers were already 61% of the way through their buying journey when they made contact.

Brad (00:01:47) And then of the conversions that happened, 95% of those companies were on the day-one shortlist. So what we can take away from this study is that buyers are pickier than ever, which makes sense. Our inboxes are being inundated. We're being dripped. Lots of content that we don't care about or may not be relevant to us.

Brad (00:02:15) It seems like everybody's got a podcast. And we've all been in those shoes where there's something that we want, and usually it doesn't come from an email that hits the top of our inbox. It usually comes from us going on our own buyer journey to figure it out, exploring the different options, and then coming to the solutions.

Brad (00:02:36) And so it might have been that way in B2C, but now we're seeing it in B2B. I want to talk about the pressure that companies are under right now, given that these are the circumstances. So if you're a company and you're trying to reach your client, how are you thinking about this differently than what it was in the past?

Ben (00:03:01) Everybody's a consumer. This was probably always true. And now it's very clear. And the way people are buying it starts with consumers. Now move to the way people are purchasing things for their companies. It's much more comfortable now, where people have shorter attention spans and less willingness to spend time on, maybe, cognitive waste. I'll call it, in terms of exploring options that may not be fitting to what they want.

Ben (00:03:28) People would much rather be told what to do by AI or a search engine, meaning they would rather sit at a computer and not have to talk to a human yet, and look up the exact solutions to the problem they're facing. So really, the question is: how do companies match that attitude? And I think it'll continue to go in that direction.

Ben (00:03:53) What I said earlier about it will absolutely be in the next, maybe 1 to 5 years. Most decision-makers and companies are just asking whatever AI they use, whatever agent they use to solve the problem that they have, and it'll be direct. It's a more efficient process. It sounds almost counter-intuitive cause you're like, what's going to happen?

Ben (00:04:17) It's all the salesmen. What's going to happen? I want to talk to people, and I want people to address my problems and care about me. But it's actually that people are inefficient. And there are good and bad outcomes for this, but it's certainly going to happen. It's where people are just interfacing with technology. It's all their problems first.

Ben (00:04:39) That's how we get to that 61% number. That's all going to grow.

Martina (00:04:42) Go-to-market engineering right now is a much broader, multichannel approach that encompasses not only outbound or inbound; it also involves a lot of internal alignment within the company, like marketing, speaking with sales, and creating these touchpoints. AI plays a huge role in the future of marketing. That’s why GEO has become increasingly important, although it is still only one part of a broader strategy. Understanding how buyers approach decisions is becoming more important across every department, not only marketing.

Brad (00:05:19) I'm glad you brought that up, because I think what the buyer behavior shows is that outbound is becoming increasingly difficult, right? So let's dive into the companies that we feel are doing it differently. And that is some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Bessemer Venture Partners studied 20 companies, ten of which they called AI supernovas.

Brad (00:05:48) The other ten are called AI shooting stars. The supernovas were companies that went from $0 to $125 million in ARR in two years, which is crazy. And the AI shooting stars went from $0 to $100 million in ARR in four years. So we have this cohort of companies that are growing really rapidly, yet we're seeing the decline of outbound.

Brad (00:06:18) So what now? Now we don't work inside these companies. But there are patterns that we see. So, based on the observations that you've seen, what are things that companies are doing differently now that may not have been before that are attributed to growth? Right. The study shows 80% of seller conversations were buyer-initiated, so only 20% were done through outbound.

Brad (00:06:43) So how should companies be thinking about this differently?

Ben (00:06:45) A lot of that growth. Let's use Lovable as an example. They made a really amazing product in one. So we can't ignore the fact that these companies have amazing product-market fit better than any companies in the history of the world, maybe. So that's number one.

Martina (00:07:03) Lovable, they market it differently because if you think about building up an app, you can download Claude and build one, but the way that they market it, everybody can build an app. You don't need any experience. And Claude is marketed differently.

Ben (00:07:22) Totally. I think the way Lovable does that is by creating a network of developers. So they made a product so good that people can easily build new websites, build new applications, and then be so proud of those things that they want to show their friends on YouTube.

Martina (00:07:43) Community building is incredibly important, and that is a big part of how Clay built its brand. People wanted to showcase the workflows they were creating—the results they built using Clay. Community has increasingly become so important. And we also see that in search; we see that Reddit got a huge surge in search with AI recommendations because people really rely a lot on AI to give them answers.

Martina (00:08:13) They prefer answers from the community over content a company creates about itself.

Ben (00:08:22) Absolutely.

Martina (00:08:22) It's interesting because LinkedIn has changed a lot, too. I think two weeks ago they released this function where you can report a post as AI slop. The community aspect is getting increasingly important, but so is authenticity within a community.

Ben (00:08:43) I'm glad to see that authenticity, because if you think about it, if you are the user, you would much rather see real products being real things being done with a company like Lovable or Clay. Then you would rather have them tell you how great they are.

Martina (00:09:08) Exactly. That’s why YouTube is so important. If I want to build a workflow using Clay, I’m going to YouTube before I even search its knowledge base.

Ben (00:09:16) And it's also entertaining. You look up on YouTube, like cool apps, but with Lovable. And you start thinking, well, what cool apps could I build? It changes how people take in the product on first impressions.

Brad (00:09:34) Yeah. And one of the things you didn't point to was that it was a form of targeted marketing by Lovable. On Clay's website, they have a Lovable case study. That said, they used Clay to target influencers, figure out who got the best engagement, and do deals with them to showcase their talent and their product.

Brad (00:10:01) These tools, and the way these fast-growing companies are approaching go-to-market, feel very different. And I think what it shows is that they're finding very creative and effective ways to get in front of their ICP before they ever reach out to them.

Martina (00:10:23) We used to look at potential clients mainly as accounts, but that perspective has broadened. We're not only targeting people within Google, Google Ads, or any paid media; we're seeing big companies invest in B2C platforms. That's something we haven't seen in the past few years.

Martina (00:10:48) I think the whole concept of AI personalization and hyper-personalized outreach is dying. You open, like, your LinkedIn and you see an AI-personalized message like, " Oh, I saw that you posted about X.”

Ben (00:11:05) An outrage.

Martina (00:11:07) That's not targeting because it doesn't know you as a user the way your social media algorithm knows you, so they can target you on these multichannel levels and be like, " Oh, actually, this looks really interesting. I'm interested in learning more about AI. So Lovable comes as a good opportunity.”

Brad (00:11:31) We feel, as end consumers, that outreach on LinkedIn is dead, emails are dead, whereas I don't know if it's effectively dead. So we can put a fork in it and call it dead. But it is the lack of context before reaching out. Right?

Brad (00:11:59) If you are going to be targeted, there may be a place for that just further down the funnel. Right. So one of the things that we've observed, going down a lot of research into this topic, is that the buyer committees now in B2B are up to 10 people on B2B platforms. And then you need so many more touchpoints than before.

Martina (00:12:20) And you're only going to speak with three out of those.

Brad (00:12:23) Exactly. So who's on the shortlist? How do you make sure you get your name on the day-one shortlist when your software or the pain points are so big in the company that they have to approach somebody about it? The odds are that if you don't have a creative marketing campaign already built in, the odds are stacked against you to reach it.

Brad (00:12:46) If you're in that 20% hoping to catch them at the right time. Hoping they answer my LinkedIn message, whatever it may be. It goes to show the odds are stacked against you more than ever.

Martina (00:12:59) It’s not a volume game anymore. It’s an intelligence game.

Ben (00:13:04) Absolutely. If you're a company that solves other companies' problems, you want to look for companies that not only have the problem, but are also looking to solve the problem you solve.

Martina (00:13:17) I think social proof is increasingly important when you're considering vendors. If you see they've delivered results for someone in a similar industry, that's huge social proof for why you'd choose them.

Ben (00:13:32) Absolutely.

Brad (00:13:33) This all sounds appealing. I'm sure it's great. I think it makes sense to a lot of people. The solution is to sign on with Clay and call it a day, right? So, whereas, hey, I can spend 40 bucks a month and get access to 40,000 emails, and it'll type up an email and blast it out.

Brad (00:14:00) But is it that simple, or what? Like, what's the barrier to entry here? Like, how are these companies doing it differently? Because this all sounds great.

Ben (00:14:09) So technology like Clay's a great, great company. They certainly have a great product. Technology is a delivery method. What you're really just doing is understanding your customer well enough to have an ICP. A lot of companies don't really know their ICP; there's a lot of light in demand out there.

Martina (00:14:28) Or they don’t know their messaging, which I think is even more important. Because you can get data; you can decide to blast everybody who has money to pay for my product. But what is the message? What is the message that is going to matter to them, right now?

Ben (00:14:43) And how do you fit that?

Martina (00:14:44) And how do you communicate that to that specific person? I think Clay is a really important tool, and it has great significance for the go-to-market engineering mentioned above. Still, it's part of a much bigger infrastructure: you can build it, but maintaining consistency is the hardest part.

Martina (00:15:10) You can hire a go-to-market engineer, but how about when you're drafting up the message? That requires a lot of psychology. How about maintaining the health of your ecosystem? How about aligning it with the ads that you're going to give? How about the alignment within the apartments? That's the broader go-to-market engineering, and Clay sits within that system as an orchestration tool.

Ben (00:15:36) And you're right. It's certainly without understanding your customer on the front end, fitting your message in a really appealing way when you actually get to talk to your customers, and if those two things aren't competitive. Marketing will always be important. And it's more important now that we can reach customers more effectively with go-to-market engineering.

Ben (00:16:05) The way that I think about it is you have an ICP, you understand your customer, you want to see what customers are looking for in your solution right now. Because if you're the end user, you would much rather be looking for a solution and have the solution right there because you found it, because you're looking for it.

Ben (00:16:26) Then if you're not looking for it, but you might have the problem, and you're just getting berated with all these emails.

Martina (00:16:34) People can tell.

Ben (00:16:35) They feel that.

Martina (00:16:37) And that's why having an impactful message for your specific ICP and situation is really important. Also, go-to-market engineering is not outbound. And I think that's the biggest misconception everybody has about go-to-market. I'm going to get Clay, and I'm going to blast like 40,000 AI-personalized emails because I'm doing go-to-market engineering.

Martina (00:17:01) That’s lazy. That is not go-to-market engineering. Outbound is only one part of a much broader strategy. I think that is why it is called engineering: you are designing and coordinating multiple parts of the system.

Ben (00:17:16) The engineering intelligence.

Martina (00:17:19) Does it work?

Ben (00:17:20) Outreach would be: how do you talk to your customers? It's always going to be important.

Martina (00:17:25) It's always going to be important.

Ben (00:17:27) That 61% number is so important. 61% of the buyer journey is made before you make contact with the solution. That's going to fix your problem.

Martina (00:17:38) That’s why inbound is so important. Because if you think about the way that you're searching for a solution, if you put all of your go-to-market engineering budget into outbound, you are ignoring a huge part of marketing: creating inbound demand, making sure that when they are searching, you appear.

Martina (00:17:59) I think that's where a lot of people are lacking.

Ben (00:18:02) Totally.

Brad (00:18:03) Well, because it's hard.

Martina (00:18:04) Yeah. It takes time.

Ben (00:18:06) Like constantly.

Martina (00:18:07) If you want quick wins, you can put all your money into ads and rank at the top for the keywords you care about, but that is not sustainable long-term.

Ben (00:18:23) GEO is certainly important. It's fun and scary to think about. If there's an equilibrium out there where every company has intelligence and uses GEO intensively to promote their keywords, constantly beating each other until you reach an equilibrium scenario, what's the next step to get people searching for solutions that my company provides?

Ben (00:19:00) What's the next step in getting my name, my company name, to the front? Because I think I'm sure that's going to happen very soon. I don't have the answers, obviously, but it's a really interesting thought.

Brad (00:19:15) I don't know if there's a silver bullet. I think that the tricky thing behind this new wave of go-to-market is that these tools are so powerful when you're building out this intelligence layer. But the companies that are winning or thinking about it differently, like we just caught ourselves in our own conversation talking about how Lovable did such a great job.

Brad (00:19:37) YouTubers were talking about Lovable's words, and that is targeted marketing. You had no idea. They were ninjas about it. People will search AI chat or Google, but what about the other way? Sneaky ways, like paying influencers.

Brad (00:20:04) People pay influencers; I get that. But it's so much so that they understand that people will search for how to build with Lovable or how to build without Claude. And they use YouTube as one of those mediums. And so I think you talked about an omnichannel, right?

Brad (00:20:26) Heard terms like surround sound for your ICP, right? You're just hitting them from all these different angles where they don't even realize it. So they're showing up in your Meta. They're showing up in Meta ads. They're showing up on LinkedIn. There are probably other ways that they're being dripped right through traditional TV; I'm sure there are all kinds of different marketing.

Martina (00:20:49) I think they also positioned themselves very deliberately. If you think about Clay and if you think about the category that we would have put Clay before, they would have competed against Salesforce. They create a new category and popularize the term ‘go-to-market engineer,’ positioning themselves as a leader within it.

Martina (00:21:09) And that's the same thing with Lovable; they are the leaders within their category of upbuilding. Even though you can do the same thing with Claude, they build a new perception thanks to marketing. And then they created the solution to a problem that a lot of people would have never thought they could solve.

Brad (00:21:33) To approach modern-day marketing, you have to do it through layers of intelligence.

Martina (00:21:40) Yeah.

Brad (00:21:41) And so that's the tricky thing: it's not as simple as signing up for a tool. There is a whole suite of tools, along with Clay.

Martina (00:21:55) You can build many of the same capabilities with Clay, without Clay, or with Claude.

Ben (00:21:59) Definitely.

Martina (00:22:00) They win because they bring everything together on one platform.

Ben (00:22:05) And it never ends.

Brad (00:22:07) Can you guys talk about some of the specific tools that you're seeing? You don't have to name these tools, but the tools the best companies are using. What are some of the superpowers that these tools have now?

Ben (00:22:25) I would say that everything revolves around you figuring out precisely what problem you're solving, and then approaching that problem with a fitting solution in terms of messaging tools you can use to do that. You're largely looking at what signs of problems are on the internet and who those problems are attributed to. For instance, if a company's CEO needs someone to power-wash his warehouse, that's a good college example.

Ben (00:23:10) Let's say you're at an AI-native power washing company, which should exist, by the way. If you're that company, you're looking for that CEO talking to his network about who's going to power-wash my warehouse. Let's see who's replying to ads, commenting on another power-washing company CEO's LinkedIn Meta.

Brad (00:23:50) Put a 20x multiple on this power-washing company.

Ben (00:23:53) It's the first of its kind. It's all about looking for those signals that someone is looking for a solution. There are various ways to do that. I'll shout out my favorite company: Bright Data- an all-encompassing scraper; you can get extremely creative with that. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of these tools.

Ben (00:24:15) I don't want to name the more specific ones, like there are too many of them, but there are social signals. There are all sorts of things you'll be looking at all the time.

Martina (00:24:27) Signals can include social activity or hiring increases. For example, if you see someone who's hiring like five people as the hours, they are probably preparing for growth and may be investing in go-to-market engineering. You can also see popular keywords emerging in the market.

Martina (00:24:49) Those social signals can be super useful for getting your brand out there. For example, there was this Netflix show, Squid Game. They were wearing white Vans in the show. Vans put screenshots of the show, and they were wearing white Vans.

Martina (00:25:18) They sold it out. These small, little signals of being deep into the market and being able to get to the right people at the right time, I think, are really the future. But not every signal requires action. I think that is where go-to-market intelligence really comes in.

Brad (00:25:39) Explain more.

Martina (00:25:40) Like your power-wash example, if somebody comes on, they're like, " Great job, guys.” That does not mean that person is interested in power-washing. That means that he commented on that specific profile. He could be on the radar to track to see more signals. If we see him, like, popping again and another power-washing CEO and being like, love your power-washing job, then maybe we can reach out.

Ben (00:26:12) Getting a little more excited about this power-washing company. By the way, I just thought of something. There are also ways you can see the amount of creativity, by the way, that is accessible and required to make this work is immense. Let's say if you were that power-wash company, you could look on Google Maps, and let's say you're in Miami.

Ben (00:26:47) If you're targeting warehouses in Miami, you can go on Google Maps, look at the most recent picture of that warehouse, and say the concrete is dirty; you can check the date and see if that's something you want to pursue. You can get that precision at scale too.

Martina (00:27:09) We definitely need to start a power washing company.

Ben (00:27:12) I'm really getting excited about that.

Brad (00:27:16) Let’s raise for power-wash.

Brad (00:27:20) Now that we're really setting the stage. This is complex. The path for companies is getting there. Is it as simple as signing up for Clay? You build this framework. Once you sign up through a Clay-certified vendor or what? Somebody who could build this for you? Is it as simple as that, or what's the requirement for, like, achieving this?

Brad (00:27:48) Right. If we're saying, hey, this is the new way that marketing needs to be done from here on out, what's the path to successfully achieving this?

Martina (00:27:56) I think building the infrastructure is relatively easy, but maintaining it is hard. You may have a campaign that works well for three months, then you're going to see that everyone in the market is doing the same. So you've got people. You gotta look for new signals. You've got to learn from and build an intelligence engine that learns and understands: this account was a success because we targeted this signal and this signal and this signal.

Martina (00:28:25) You need to create a system that looks at specific signals together so it can build a fuller picture of each company. And I think that's where it gets hard because everybody can track new jobs. Everybody can track comments on your competitor, but building a system that understands when and why to act is the real challenge.

Brad (00:29:01) It's not as simple as signing up for a suite of tools. It's not as simple as building it once, handing it off to you, and expecting it to be good forever. It will require ongoing maintenance. It's going to require the intelligence to interpret the data. It's going to require really targeted content to reach the ICP based on the signals, and then having the infrastructure to handle inbound and outbound.

Brad (00:29:28) But at the core of it, this is an evolving intelligence layer that you're building to help power your go-to-market. And so that's how I think people need to frame this and think about this properly: it does take a lot to set something like this up.

Brad (00:29:52) The companies that are doing it and doing it well, they make 125 million in less than two years. We could probably attribute some of that success to the way that they're orchestrating it. We know at least Lovable is part of that. I think companies need to be thinking about this differently.

Brad (00:30:13) It goes back to the first stat that we talked about. 80% of buyers initiate the conversation, right? So you reach them through creative ways, and you have tools that make it happen. And you'll notice it if you're on Instagram, you're on Meta, you're getting Salesforce, you're getting these B2B platforms advertising to you now. So the ability to connect the personal with the professional and get really targeted with your ICP to what matters is the super unlock.

Brad (00:30:47) With these tools now, these capabilities, absolutely.

Ben (00:30:52) The company's job is to build a really good product or service that helps the world in some way, and then gain economic value from it. And if you can't find people with the problem that you're solving, you can't really do the second thing.

Martina (00:31:11) What do you think is more important: product or marketing? Because I also see other companies with great marketing, but their product is bad.

Ben (00:31:19) That it is set to fail.

Brad (00:31:20) One thing the study highlights is that, yes, they're growing revenue, but it is not tracking stickiness. It's not tracking client retention. A fantastic point that you brought up was that it's not good enough for companies to nail marketing. You'll sure catch a rocket ship for a little bit.

Brad (00:31:47) But if you don't have a lasting product that's providing value to your consumer, it's all for nothing, because eventually the customers won't stick around. But the market is so flooded; I think it was like over 90% of companies coming out of Y Combinator or B2B.

Ben (00:32:07) Yeah, very.

Brad (00:32:08) Good lord.

Ben (00:32:10) There are a lot of consumers out there.

Ben (00:32:18) They need some great products. I will say, just as there are great and poor products with great marketing, there are great products with a strong ability to grow. There are also a lot of very smart, technical people out there that are building great products.

Martina (00:32:37) But they don’t know how to market, and I think that is the majority.

Ben (00:32:40) Y Combinator does a great job of helping people build marketing skills. They are building really impressive things that are good for consumers and businesses; hopefully, to reach the people they want to reach, it takes another step. It takes another, frankly, 0-to-1 step to have a very competitive market.

Brad (00:33:13) You have to be we're all overstimulated, over-caffeinated; the attention economy is real.

Brad (00:33:24) So you have to get creative. And the only way to stand out is to get really targeted with precision to your ICP.

Ben (00:33:32) Palantir hires engineers for a reason: they need to understand art. And I don't know how much they enforce that. That is a requirement. As far as I know, when you're building technology as a delivery method for a greater purpose, understanding how to change that technology to mold around what you want to do requires more than just coding.

Ben (00:34:09) It was a lot more than just coding; it required more than just engineering. And it takes a certain skill and a person to be able to do that, and it takes a certain company to be willing to do that.

Martina (00:34:22) I think we’re going to see a rise in traditional forms of marketing. There will be a surge in direct mail campaigns, something that was left behind a long time ago. But I see more and more companies investing in traditional forms of marketing.

Ben (00:34:39) It's authenticity.

Martina (00:34:44) Exactly.

Ben (00:34:45) Although they might outsource the writing. Those companies would.

Martina (00:34:52) Yeah, absolutely. But as long as there is no em dash, I can read it.

Brad (00:34:57) Negative parallelism.

Martina (00:34:59) Oh, I hate those. It's not X, it's Y.

Brad (00:35:03) Dead giveaway.

Martina (00:35:04) I also hate the word the gap. There's a gap; AI is going to change the language.

Ben (00:35:15) Learning how large these LLMs are and how much emphasis is on scaling in the data sets. But for some reason, I guess it's just the way people have been writing on the internet, and now in books, for so many years.

Brad (00:35:37) It's probably you're caching a lot of responses too. They don't actually have to tap into that.

Ben (00:35:43) That is also that.

Brad (00:35:44) I hope this email finds you well.

Martina (00:35:48) That's why, when you're thinking about the copy for outbound, I always think of it in like three ways. The first one: creating intrigue. So if you're selling a company, I will come and tell you. Do you want to know how much your company is worth?

Martina (00:36:08) Will you open that email? I will open that email. Tell me what my company is worth. I know what it's worth; how do you? Then the second one is creating FOMO; I made your competitor win $20 million yesterday. I would answer, " Let's see if it's true or not.

Martina (00:36:33) The third one is with humor. So be authentic. Throw in a joke. Make sure it makes me laugh; I will be more willing to answer your message.

Ben (00:36:51) Do you think I could write a joke? That's fine. Then you would genuinely laugh at it.

Martina (00:36:58) I think it depends on your humor.

Brad (00:37:02) To summarize, this is exactly how we're thinking about marketing going forward and how we want to position all our clients. For companies to survive, they have to combine all these things and go to market. There is no silver bullet, right? It has to be a well-thought-out, intelligent orchestration, but we have to make efforts on inbound and outbound, and create tasteful content not written by AI.

Martina (00:37:35) And also the ability to learn and to pivot. And I think that's what a lot of companies are missing. They are like, oh, I'm gonna copy that strategy. Okay, it did not work. Oh, let's, let's put more volume into it. How about we do A/B testing to see where it went wrong, how we can improve, and make it not a system locked into one fixed workflow, that can and will consistently change.

Brad (00:38:06) Like, launch videos and launches are cool at first, but man, like now everybody needs a launch video, and okay, we get it. I don't know when I last watched a launch video. But you talk about these types of engagements going stale. Are these types of outreach like, how do I farm engagement?

Brad (00:38:28) Right. It goes stale after a time. And you're forced to be creative because not only giving cash to a lot of these companies, but they told him to flood the zone. So now everybody's got a podcast, everybody's got tons of content that's just flooding our X and LinkedIn feeds, and it's just so noisy that you have to pivot.

Brad (00:38:54) You have to be targeted, right? And you have to do it in a very thoughtful and precise manner. And that's a new age for go-to-market.

Martina (00:39:02) Yeah, absolutely.