What are the benefits of a strong GTM tech stack? 

​​A strong tech stack helps you automate repetitive sales tasks and improve efficiency – if software can execute a task just as well as (or better than) a human, a strong tech stack can free up valuable time that skilled salespeople can use to connect with prospects, build relationships, and focus on other people-centric activities that drive value for the business. 

most tasks that must be repeated on a weekly or daily basis can be executed just as well (or often better) by a sales tool.

The tech stack enables sales reps to focus on high-value work – for example, instead of spending time dialing phone numbers that don’t work, you can use a tool to validate phone numbers first. This allows your team to connect with 2X more prospects in the same amount of time, potentially doubling your opportunity creation rate.

The impact of an effective tech stack multiplies as your team grows – GTM tools magnify results. While a tech stack can’t unilaterally fix a sales motion that doesn’t work, it can supercharge a team’s ability to scale, drive revenue, and improve results over time.

Automation accelerates optimization and improves data tracking – automated systems make it easier to conduct experiments, improve your GTM strategies and tactics, and track results in a structured way that helps you find product-market fit faster. 

How do you think about GTM tech stack strategy? 

Always start with manual processes before adding tools to your tech stack – no tool will solve fundamental problems with your sales approach. Develop a playbook that works manually before you invest in technology. Invest in finding product market fit, identifying your target customer, and building out GTM fundamentals.  Once you’ve proven that your approach works, look for tools that can help you do the same thing more efficiently and at scale. 

Choose tools based on your operational and strategic needs, not market trends – instead of looking for a technology-driven “quick fix”, prioritize optimizing your sales strategy, tailoring your approach to prospecting and maintaining customer relationships, and then using technology to augment these proven manual processes.

CRM

Which tools should you add to your GTM tech stack first?

CRM
What it is	The database for all market opportunities and customers –  it is the source of truth for market interactions and the foundation of your tech stack.    Note: very early-stage companies can get away with using a spreadsheet instead of a CRM, but CRMs become crucial as you mature – once you spend 2+ hours per day manually maintaining a spreadsheet, you need a dedicated CRM that can log this information automatically. As your team grows, the cost of not having a CRM increases dramatically and impairs your ability to report on performance, forecast revenue, set goals, and make decisions.
Example	Salesforce, HubSpot, Attio

What CRM data admin practices should you institute to improve your CRM’s value? 

Log all customer interactions within your CRM – log meeting and call notes within your contact and account records of the CRM so that you have a comprehensive record of a client’s interactions with your company.

Automate data capture whenever possible – CRMs can automatically log information that sales teams spend time manually inputting. Implement website tracking, email integrations, meeting tools, and other automations to capture prospect activities automatically. If you’re spending more time on CRM administration than on actual customer conversations, you need better automations.

Treat the nuclear unit of a CRM as a contact and not a company – buying decisions happen with people, not companies. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and the nuclear unit of a CRM is an individual contact, not a company. This distinction is critical because sales occur at the individual level amongst people who may move between companies.

How should you customize the lead stages within a CRM?

Customize the CRM’s data model and lead stages to match your sales process – a CRM’s out-of-the-box customer journey map rarely matches real sales processes. Take the time to adjust the data model to reflect your end-to-end sales process and ensure that all the data you need to make decisions is captured from the beginning.

Sample Customer Journey and Pipeline Definitions For CRM

After implementing a CRM, what is the next most important tool to add to your tech stack?

Once you’ve chosen a CRM, your next tool should solve your most important bottleneck – there is no “one size fits all” order in which you should adopt new tools. Focus on finding a solution to your biggest problem, whether that solution involves adding a tool to your tech stack or refining your GTM strategy.

For early-stage companies, prospecting tools often come next – filling the pipeline with qualified deals is 1 of the most critical challenges for sales teams at startups. Tools that help you identify and reach potential customers—such as data enrichment platforms, outreach automation tools, or lead generation services—can help solve this issue in different ways.

If you don’t have a clear bottleneck, explore tools that enable your sales team to spend more time interacting directly with prospects and customers – with many tool-light tech stacks, there is an opportunity to save teams time by adding tools that automate administrative tasks, data entry, and routine communications.  

Data Enrichment Tools

What are data enrichment tools?

Data Enrichment Tools
What they do	Aggregate additional information about leads to support targeted prospecting – data enrichment tools provide critical information that makes your prospect outreach more relevant and effective.
Example	Clay, ZoomInfo

Tips for incorporating enrichment data in your sales cycle:

• Share information between data enrichment tools and your CRM – top-of-funnel information from a tool like Clay can enrich your prospecting lists and allow you to tailor each prospect’s customer experience.
• Don’t expect enrichment to be the “be all, end all” – data enrichment tools can significantly impact funnel performance. However, some sales teams have overestimated how much tools like Clay can actually do.
• Clay can become a repository of contact information for leads that are not ready to move into your CRM – if your CRM is canonical, think of Clay as your rough draft where you can keep prospects and leads before “converting” them to your CRM.

How do you reduce data enrichment costs?  

Use a waterfall approach to find contact information efficiently – reduce Clay costs by configuring enrichment steps that prioritizes sourcing data from cheaper providers and moving to the next cheapest option until all the data is found.

Use your CRM to induce memory into Clay to avoid duplicate work – Clay doesn’t automatically track which contacts you’ve already enriched, which could cause you to pay multiple times for the same information. Counter this by sending a timestamped master contact list to your CRM from Clay, and having Clay check against it before running new outreach campaigns.

Start by using Clay–not a single data provider–to enrich data – Clay’s sandbox environment allows you to sample data providers such as ZoomInfo. However, data provider credit costs for information like emails are often significantly higher than the costs of using pieces of that data through Clay’s enrichment processes. If you do end up using one data provider significantly more than any others, consider purchasing a license. 

Email Sequencers

What are email sequencers?

Email Sequencers
What it is	Automate personalized outreach – email sequencers help manage cold outreach at scale while maintaining personalization.   Email sequencers rely on several key capabilities to run cold email campaigns: • Domain management – do not send cold emails from your main domain. Running cold email outreach campaigns can require 100s of domains. Email sequencing platforms let users manage those domains through a single account. • Inbox load balancing – rotating the inboxes you use to send cold emails improves campaign performance and reduces the likelihood that your emails are flagged as spam. • “Warm up” services – email sequencers “warm up” outboxes  by gradually increasing email volume and simulating natural email engagement. A few modern sequencers have warm-up features that use a network of AI bots (and their corresponding email addresses) to respond to 30-40% of the emails sent during warm up sequences. • Efficient lead management  – modern sequencers offer a  centralized reply management interface and charge per user, not per outbox/domain.
Example	Smartlead, Instantly

How do you run more effective campaigns using email sequencers?

Use email sequencers to send outreach that prospects are not expecting – if someone expects you to email them (e.g., with an invoice, a proposal, a calendar invite for a meeting, etc.), send that email from your main domain. Cold outreach campaigns should be sent from domains that were acquired and configured for this purpose, which protects the reputation of your main domain and prevents important business communications from getting flagged as spam.

Don’t transfer prospects from an email sequencer to your CRM inbox until they’re qualified – an SDR should manage your sequencer inbox and keep a pulse on cold outreach campaigns. It benefits the reputation of your cold email domain to have two-way conversations with prospects, rather than picking up the conversation from your main domain as soon as a prospect responds. Since your CRM should be integrated with your email sequencer, all activities will be logged in the same place even if they’re sent from different domains.

Do the opposite of what a scammer would do – think of how the Nigerian prince scam email campaigns were structured and do the opposite to increase the chances of your campaigns getting delivered. Buy .com domains, create warm up sequences that simulate “chatter”, and limit inbox and domain email quantities.

Cap cold outreach campaigns at 20-25 email/outbox/day – for example, if you need to send 4,000 cold outreach emails in a day, you could send 20 messages from 100 domains, each of which has 2 inboxes. 

Workflow Automation Tools

What is a workflow automation tool?

Workflow Automation Tools
What they do	Seamlessly connect your tech ecosystem – these tools let you create sophisticated workflows across multiple tools. This allows you to build trigger-based systems that automatically detect signals (e.g., a company hiring a VP of Marketing) and initiate relevant outreach (e.g., a cold email campaign) without manual intervention.
Example	API integrations, Appify
How to get the most out of it	Identify triggers that are associated with qualified leads – workflow automations can have significant impact if they help you reach high potential prospects faster and more effectively.

Leveraging GTM Tools

What are some of the most useful integrations to consider adding to your GTM tech stack?

Integrate all customer communication channels with your CRM – document every way your team interacts with prospects and customers. When evaluating new customer-facing tools, always check if it integrates with your CRM before purchasing. Important communication tools to integrate include:

• Email (Gmail/Outlook)
• Calling software (Aircall)
• Meeting schedulers (Calendly)
• Chat applications (Intercom)
• Social media tools

Leverage native features before adding new tools – both HubSpot and Salesforce offer extensive built-in capabilities that users often overlook. When you need a new tool or capability, use the built-in version. Once you’ve utilized it enough to “break” it and identify the additional features that you need, you are ready to explore paid options.

Don’t forget to integrate tools that are used across the customer lifecycle – each phase may require different integration priorities and sets of tools that could be costing your team valuable time. These tools can differ by sales motion, but they fall into 3 categories:

• Phase 1 (prospecting) tools – used for reaching people who aren’t yet opportunities
• Phase 2 (pipeline) tools – for engaging active opportunities
• Phase 3 (customer success) tools – for serving existing customers

What are some of the most useful automations to consider adding to your GTM tech stack?

Have AI tools automatically brief you before important calls – before recruiting calls or introductions to new agencies/potential partners, use a tool to scrape the other person’s LinkedIn, suggest interesting or relevant questions to ask, and provide you with a general overview to help you prepare for the meeting more quickly. 

Building Lists/Targeting

How do you target and prioritize your lists at scale?

Take a hierarchical approach to prioritizing who to reach out to – each level of the hierarchy helps you narrow in on the prospects who are most likely to need and purchase your product at a specific time:

• Level 1: TAM – identify the broadest definition of the target market for your product.
• Level 2: firmographic disqualification – layer on company data (often found through tools like Clay) to further refine your target audience.
• Level 3: identify the triggers that cause your target audience to purchase – something must become true for a member of your target audience to suddenly become ready to purchase your product. Regularly revisit the prospects on your Level 2 lists and initiate outreach campaigns once a trigger becomes relevant.

Use the voice of the customer to identify triggers – the only way to understand triggers is to talk to customers and ask insightful questions. For example, when a prospect shows up to their first meeting, ask why they decided to take the meeting. Other qualifying questions include:

• What made you decide to take this meeting?
• Can you tell me about the problem you have?
• What are you doing to solve the problem today? (Note: if they aren’t spending money today, it will be difficult to get them to spend money on your solution)

Use AI tools to discover triggers from recordings of customer demo calls – tools like Fathom can analyze calls and provide a list of potential triggers that your sales team and even customers themselves might not be aware of.

Outreach

How would you create and execute an initial outbound experiment?

Step	Example
Form a thesis about why your target customer will want to purchase your product	“I think hiring managers who have just hired a person for X position has a problem that we can solve.”
Create email content for that thesis	“I noticed you just hired a X…”
Generate an outreach list	In Clay: • Put a segment of your target audience into a Clay table • Add a column that finds each prospect’s LinkedIn profile • Enrich their company data based on that LinkedIn profile • Identify all the companies on your list that have hired a variation of this role lately • Find email addresses for those new roles
Send cold emails	Use an email sequencer to send your new campaign to your outreach list.
Compare and optimize	Compare performance on this test to performance on your other campaigns. If performance is better, set up the trigger to run on autopilot.   Note: the process of testing new campaigns is never done – once the new campaign is set up, start testing something new.

Cold email is a low latency way to conduct A/B tests – email campaigns provide data-driven insights within a week, whereas it might take an entire sales cycle to get verbal feedback from a sales rep. While cold email is an important outreach strategy, it can also be an always-on tool for testing new triggers and messaging strategies that your sales team can leverage during later conversations.

What are best practices for running a cold email outreach campaign?

Use trigger-based outreach instead of generic campaigns – the most effective outreach is triggered by specific qualifying events or signals rather than a blanket list-based campaign.

Create separate campaigns for each trigger – triggers require unique messaging that feels relevant to the trigger itself. For example, if a prospect’s trigger is an upcoming product launch, the outreach email might mention how your solution has supported X successful product launches in the past year. Using separate campaigns ensures that your messaging is relevant and not repetitive if the same prospect triggers multiple campaigns.

Keep email sequences short – a 2-email sequence—an initial anchor email referencing the trigger followed by a concise bump email—is most effective for trigger-based outreach. This approach ensures that you won’t become a nuisance to prospects who trigger multiple campaigns.

Stick to a simple 4-sentence anchor email structure – writing good copy is hard. Don’t let that bottleneck your experimentation. Use the following trigger-based email template to rapidly iterate on trigger campaigns without sounding like a brochure or a bot:

• Trigger: “Noticed X” – name the trigger
• Problem: “Usually that means Y” – articulate a problem that the trigger reveals
• Solution: “We can solve Y by doing Z” – demonstrate how your product solves that problem
• CTA: “Have you tried anything like this?” – ask a question that gets them to reply. Do not ask for a demo. 

Multichannel to multiply response rates – campaigns that use more than one channel always do much better than those that use one. Cold email is the easiest to scale, and you can use it to email a few 1,000 people. Grab the top 100 from that list and send them a LinkedIn request, then call them to reference your email and LinkedIn. Another benefit of the 4-sentence anchor email copy is that it also works well as a cold calling script.

Overall

How does the role of Marketing/ Sales change when these tools are in place? Where should they use their increased capacity? 

Sales representatives should maximize the time they spend helping people – according to apocrypha, when Michelangelo was asked how he created the statue of David, he said, “it’s simple. I just removed everything that wasn’t David.” Building a world-class go-to-market organization is the same: remove everything that isn’t sales.

Modern GTM tools and AI automate the tasks that don’t involve direct human connection — automating activities like research, data entry, and reporting frees up time for reps to focus on what matters: helping customers solve real problems and creating value for the business.

AI should be used to scale up the tactics that work – as a gut check, imagine that your total addressable market was just 10 companies. How would your sales strategy change? You’d likely spend more time crafting personal, meaningful, and human interactions–and that’s the right instinct. The best use of AI is to scale those types of interactions to reach more people. Well-leveraged sales software takes the non-sales tasks off your team’s plate so they have more time to think creatively about how to serve customers better.

How do you measure the success of your GTM Tech stack?

Key metrics that are tracked through CRMs include:

• Volume (deals per month)
• Velocity (how quickly they close)
• Value (deal size)
• Close rate (percentage of opportunities converted)

Sales yield is the north star metric for GTM tech stack optimization – the fundamental goal of GTM tools is to increase the incremental profit that your sales team generates relative to what they cost and spend. GTM tools increase sales yield (and therefore make scaling more profitable) by making your sales team more effective. How much money are you spending on your sales team in a year, and then how much incremental profit are they generating for the company?

The goal is to reach repeatable, scalable unit economics on GTM spend – you want profitability on each incremental dollar of GTM spend. The goal of using GTM tooling is to make improve sales yield efficiently.