Also, if someone wanted to eventually become really good at this kind of work, or even become a GTM engineer, what skills would you recommend they deliberately build early on? I’d genuinely love to hear how you think about it.
What a great question. Develop an instinct for researching, learning, and deeply understanding people's problems in their respective industries. We all know that owners/founders wanna increase revenue and cut costs - but the mechanisms for that in each industry would be different. For a business owner in the medical field, that might look like being on more insurance providers' panels so they can take on more patients/clients. For an owner/founder in the ecom space, more efficient ad spend allocation would help them both increase rev while reducing ad costs (double whammy), and whatever product you're marketing to them should be framed as an effective means to that end. Same for when you're targeting the finance guy, the HR lady, and the operations folks. Study these verticals and industries deeply, understand the work-related pain-points they suffer everyday + the goals/objectives they're trying everyday to achieve, and how to connect both in your copy (messaging angles). Developing and training that instinct will give you a huge edge over other GTMEs who get confused about building a full GTM strategy when they're given a new client to handle, and end up writing generic copy and building lists with inaccurate targeting, and don't frame the offer in a way that would be attractive to the target persona(s).
what a simple answer and yet directional enough to start on Daayem S.. Just to add on to his pointers. be curious on understanding, they why behind the trends, visualize the mechanisms of the solution you want to implement and from there on you can actually start doing things PS: In my view GTM engineering is more of a high school or college level maths. You already know what is true, so you now just try and evaluate the right steps to reach your solution.
Daayem S. This is genuinely one of the most useful breakdowns I've read on this, thank you for taking the time to write it out. The point about connecting the daily pain points to the goals they're chasing, and using that to frame the offer, is something I'll actively start applying to how I research prospects before writing copy. Really appreciate this.
Sanjib S. Love the maths analogy, that actually reframes it perfectly. Knowing the destination and working backward through the right steps instead of guessing forward makes so much more sense than how I was approaching it. Thanks for adding onto Daayem's point, this whole thread is going straight into my notes.
Mishti S. This is genuinely great advice, and it actually validates something I've already started doing. I recently built an outreach automation combining Apollo, Clay, and n8n for a small set of real businesses, and you're right, the learning that came from actually building for a real use case was completely different from just going through tutorials. Really appreciate you taking the time to write this out, it's motivating me to go find a few more real businesses to build for next. Thank you, Mishti!
Mishti S. Thank you so much, that genuinely means a lot! I actually shared the Apollo + Clay + n8n build on LinkedIn, keeping all the actual business details private and focusing on the workflow and process. I’d be happy to send you the link if you’d like to take a look. I also sent you a connection request there, would be great to connect! Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said around narratives and GTM. As I keep building different workflows in Clay, I’m trying to get better at understanding not just what I can build, but what is actually worth building for a business. If you ever have a few minutes, I’d genuinely love to hear how you think about that distinction.
this is such a fruitful conversation, i think everyone who is new to clay, should read this 2-3 times before moving forward, no matter the stage they are at!
