The GTM Engineer: Why Automation Is Eating RevOps

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video. Speaker labels are not included and some names and product terms may be transcribed phonetically.

[0:00] I've learned that the best founders are always selling. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast hosted by Rick Kleta. We uncover the strategies, the pivots, and the breakthroughs turning startups into giants. Let's crack open the vault and find out how. Welcome back to GTM Vault, where we decode the fastest growing go to market systems in B2B. Today's guest is Michael Sujia, the number one clay GTM adviser in the world and the architect behind a new breed of revenue operator, the GTM engineer. Michael has trained over 600 operators, built enterprise workflows for scaleups and fast enterprise companies. In this episode, we dive into what a GTM engineer actually is and why every founder should care. How Clay is powering the next wave of outbound workflow orchestration and revops. What pipeline creation looks like in a postplayworkbook world. If you're building, selling, or scaling anything in B2B, this is one you don't want to miss. Let's get into it. Let's start off

[1:11] with the basics. What is a GTM engineer and why is the role exploding right now? Hey Rick, thanks so much for the introduction first of all. And go to market engineer actually I guess is the term that uh now it means a lot of things I guess but I think is that professional who combines different AI go to market tools put them together and basically augment what is a company workforce so that you can basically produce more with less and you can increase the productivity of the company and ultimately I guess more revenue per employee more a bit this is their real definition. Maybe it's a definition that nobody is using, but at the end of the day, the real outcome, the real end goal, at least on my point of view, it's really this uh what does it mean? I think we can basically bring this definition more revenue per employee and it can actually make sense in every function of the organization, right? For example, in outbound it means that instead of having five STRs maybe you have a couple that but they are more efficient right with better data with

[2:21] better processes with better greater number of conversation per day. In inbound it means having more traffic better traffic having a perfect routing to the department. In HR, it means having few HR reps that are working faster, that are more efficient, and ultimately can actually drive less expensive Lexus because there's a lot of tools inside of a company that are duplicated and with clay you can actually unify all of them in one. Secondly, you can drive actually more revenue because you can take the processes that are already inside of an organization and scale them with less people and increasing revenue. Basically, this is what GTM engineer is basically. How did your journey with clay begin and what made you double down on this ecosystem so early? Sure.

[3:11] Everything started when I got my first job in tech. I was working in a startup, a s in Italy. I'm Italian by the way and I was working my 9 to5 there. Actually was way more than 9 to5. I don't even know why I call it like that. So at the beginning of a company of course when you are in marketing you are doing a little bit of marketing a little bit of sales a little bit of everything like in every little startup I guess and even if at that time it was like 100% impossible to actually sell what we were building but at least I had the freedom to put together a lot of the pieces that I'm using right now. So I started using a little bit of smart lead. I was using a little bit of C automations. I put together some pieces. I got confidence in myself and I was like wow this really really works right and I got to a point where I was basically producing more than the rest all of the sales team and I was alone. So definitely there was something there. Now maybe it's called the GTM engineering. back in the days was just me putting things together and try to figure out how to make things work. After that, basically what happened is that of course I got

[4:26] confidence. I was super excited it was working. And at that point I said okay by the fact that I don't really like this 9 to5. I'm very limited from the choices of my boss. I'm very limited. There are processes. I can do whatever I want. I can put inside the best tech stock. I feel really like in a cage basically. So I said okay let's try let's jump and I started my very little outbound consultancy. I changed a little bit tech stock. Back in the days clay wasn't a thing right because it was a little bit early or maybe it was very small from outbound. Then I transition into clay then I positioned 100% into clay. That in my opinion is probably the only real u go to market engineering software. But in general one of the fastest growing goto market technologies in the world not outbound not cold email among any department of go to market and I think it will go you will become as big as outspot or salesforce I truly believe that and you've trained over 600 clay operators what's the best way to approach clay for a company or for an

[5:36] individual because I think it's very different and I will maybe give you both of the explanations for a company. So first of all I guess for some reasons people really associate clay with outbound and cold emails. Okay, clay is not cold is not an outbound tools. So it's not something that is extremely useful for startups or seedstage startups or small companies only. Yeah, it's useful even for them because they are small to grow fast and when you're small with limited budget, you don't have many other channels to leverage. But I even believe that when a company grows and it go past the 50 mil in revenue, it's even more interesting because you have way more assets where you can extrapolate business value, coordinate and activate the sales department to actually make it more efficient. To start, what I would do, especially in a big company environment, I would assess what are the highest ROI use cases where you can have an impact in the organization faster. And you have to be good at finding them, assess them,

[6:48] put them into a timeline, start from the first one and show to leadership with real values and KPIs that you are actually driving value. Okay? And uh it really depends from company to company I guess because in some companies some use case is better and other companies and other use case is better. So you have to be good and you really have to have like very good knowledge business knowledge in general and expertise in the in revops in general to actually understand this and then you have to speak the language of decision makers. This is for a company level right for a personal individual practitioner level basically I don't know how to call this the best way is to practice the best way is go to clayoperator.com subscribe to the newsletter and copy my videos so start with an account open clay by the explorer plan connect some APIs and start building something the first would be open my videos put your screen here put uh on the other monitor or in another tab like the YouTube uh video and just copy what I am doing. Copy for 3 hours for four hours, 5 hours and you will get good and then try to apply to

[8:01] your day job. Try to apply it to your side also. Maybe if you need someone get a mentor so you can move faster and you can make money faster. What is the practice that actually move the needle I would say? And in your view how does GTM engineering differ from traditional rev ops or sales ops? Yeah actually um it depends where you position it and I think it's the evolution of revops and it will take the place or revops uh the real difference is this when I talk with revops people they are good but uh most of the times they are far from a marketing and sales accumul They are good with systems with data. They are very technical but they don't speak the copy language. They don't speak the revenue language. They don't speak a language of uh and really put themselves in the shoes of sales people. Why go to market engineering? I think is more broader. You use different tools especially position into clay. But Clay, yes, you can activate the SIS

[9:10] department, but you can even connect automation tools where you have to write the copy, where you have to test what generate pipeline, where you have to test how to get those meetings, where you really have to work one-on-one with the sales people. It's an overlapping sometimes, sometimes an evolution with AI and more uh a better eye on revenue, I guess. But this is how I would position it and this is how I sit in the ecosystem. And what are the core skills every GTM engineer needs to master in 2025 and beyond? Uh technical and business one basically. So technical clay first. There's not really another competitor at least at that level. Then clay of course is a lot of things can be clay outbound deliverability messaging other tools connected to clay. This is the technical one basically. maybe connect a little bit of APIs, web hook books, HTTP APIs. It's pretty cool if you know them. It's pretty fast to learn them. And on a business level, this is where the majority of people actually have a problem because a lot of guys that maybe they are very technical, but they are very very stupid about business and systems. They like complexity. I don't like complexity, but they love

[10:26] complexity because they are technical people. So instead of building something that move results, they build something technical because it's technical and that's a problem. So on the business level, you have to understand that there are goals inside of an organization. Every organization is different. And at the end of the day, it doesn't mean it you're making something complex. You have to drive pipeline. You have to drive KPIs. You have to save money. You have to drive more revenue. And there's a huge gap between what are today GTM engineers and what is the language of a chief revenue officer. If you put together like a chief revenue officer, senior pe senior uh maybe 40 plus years old and a junior GTM engineer 99% are junior. So you put them in the same room and they talk they can't speak each other and that's a problem because of course the growth comes from the collaboration between these two guys.

[11:21] But they are so far in the space that it's it's very tough. This is the real problem I see today. How are modern JTM teams shifting their headcount strategy now that technical operators can replace full marketing or SDR teams? Yes, I don't think they can. Um, it depends. Sometime you can replace them, sometimes you can drive better, you can drive automations basically. But uh what I believe is okay most of the times inside of an organization you have too many sales people right and you have too many people in general and many of these are not reaching quot okay and I don't know why but there's the belief that the more sales people you hire the better revenue the more revenue you will bring which is true but uh if you think about a unit economic profitability standpoint it's a huge problem okay so instead Instead of hiring five SDRs, you can hire or five AES, you can hire three or two and you get a go to market engineer that brings more revenue per A. So instead of having 5 A, you have two that produce twice. So it's not really automating their job.

[12:33] It's just making the one that you already have way more efficient. How? It's very easy because let's say that you have two AA. These two AA don't have lists. These tra to prospect. They have bad sales data. They have zero signals. They have zero warm outbound. It's very difficult to actually say is difficult, right? It's difficult to actually crush that quote. But when when you wake up, you have okay, these five leads actually changed the job and they are past champions. Prioritize this. This is the phone number. Call them immediately. And then you have intent seniors. All new company actually launched three new products. These are the decision maker. call call them with this kind of messaging. I just launched a cold email campaign. I had some replies. Start replying to them. They are open conversations from inbound. I already connected your email in LinkedIn. So you can reach out to inbound leads immediately with extremely fast speed to lead. As you can see these little details when a saleserson when a actually wakes up every morning and he have a bunch of open opportunities instead of literally zero and a guess

[13:44] work on where to where to go. It completely change every kind of pipeline KPI from number of conversations per day, meetings, conversions, revenue. I start everything with the number of conversation you can actually have per day. This is your problem most of the times, right? So revenue generating activities. Which clay playbooks are currently delivering the highest ROI for your enterprise level clients? Not necessarily enterprise. So ideally enterprise, but it's very difficult to work with enterprises. Ideally I work with like scaleups like 50 mil plus maybe 100 mills sometimes. And the best are so I have 12 that I put in a doc that I can mention like very fast but of course when you go inside of an organization uh you will figure out that problems are very specific. So you can start from those 12 and from those 12 you can actually have very good idea on how to get the others. The playbooks are inbound, le outbound, 10 mapping, newslet outbound, social signals, inbound playbook, outbound escape playbook, PLG and free signups,

[14:52] recruitment and HR, CRM playbook, conference playbook, new hires, promotions and open jobs, past champions playbook. From this you can actually drive if you're good at understanding the problems and in uh actually collaborating with multiple stakeholder inside of an organization to actually drive the main KPIs which usually are more pipeline more MQL to SQL conversions more MQLs because maybe they have an enrichment problem and they can't become MQLs because they don't have enough data more revenue ultimately I guess and especially more revenue persisters. What are some common mistakes or overengineered traps you see founders or GTM teams fall into when building automation? First, they do not start uh with the assets that they already have.

[15:41] I mean, everybody's hyperfocused on cold outbound when of course is working less. Why why you have to start with cold outbound? If you have inbound, you have web traffic, you have maybe a net of partners, start there. So basically connect all your digital assets and leverage them in a way that can generate open conversation for sales people and allow sales people to have a list of people that are semi-warm. So they can instead of cold outbound warm outbound basically and of course the bigger is an organization the better the most is possible basically because if you are talking with a small startup they have nothing and there's nothing to do that's why I usually say this usually works very well after a certain level of rev not to mention I mean the data enrichment component right if you don't have the right data infrastructure then at the point you move on into more of a marketing le JTM motion. None nothing's going to work. No, that's a huge problem. That is not something that

[16:48] maybe is very popular on LinkedIn, I guess. But let's say you are having a lot of marketing activities inside of a website because you're good with marketing, but uh data are incomplete, but you're getting free emails, but you're only getting the email. You're getting marketing activities, but they are not MQLs. They become MQLs when they have a lead scoring model. But the lead scoring model is not working because you don't have enough data. And if you ask more data on the front end, you basically have less marketing activities because you're adding friction. With Clay, you can actually solve this because with just from an email, you can get all the data that you want because from a B2B email, you get the LinkedIn profile. From the LinkedIn profile, you get all company information, all personal information from running ads to your job title to whatever you have in mind. and it's available online and from that you can actually turn them into MQLs and they have better data to actually be turned into SQL by the system. What channels or signals will GTM engineers lean into more email intent data enrichment or something else entirely? Yeah. So basically, so signals are in general, right? because

[18:01] they are like a button that vendors created to sell more data that are not accurate and that are very generic and standardized all over many industries. A real uh intent is something that comes from your domain knowledge. So it's not like open jobs. It's not like maybe sometimes yes but usually it's not. Real intent is like you put together like your own data, maybe some proprietary data, maybe some very niche database and you actually find real intent. For example, a client was selling POSOS systems to restaurants. Okay? And we tracked Google News to actually get all the restaurants openings turn them into a company name into a company domain into people into decision maker reaching out saying cool that you open this new cool restaurant in Miami maybe you need a system but as you can see there's not a button inside clay common room or six sense where is open restaurants but it start from your brain saying okay let's really brainstorm how my industry actually works and let's work backwards in turning that into senior data AI.

[19:13] Okay, love it. Yeah, definitely. What are some underrated clay integrations or use cases most operators are sleeping on right now? Yeah, inbound not really integrations but inbound is huge. Data management is huge. Everything that is not outbound because uh it's over an overflow of attention there basically. And yeah, cool. Cool. And uh that's it. I want I want to finish off with one last question here on the future of GTM roles. Where do you see the GTM engineering movement going long term? Do you think every founder will eventually need one on their team or become one themselves? On themselves, not they need someone. It really depends what kind of company you're running. But especially for companies that are 30 mil, 50 mil plus, do it. It's the best investment you can make. If this episode lit a fire under you, go follow Michael and check out his clayplaybooks at clayoperator.com. And if you're building And if you're building a GTM engine of your own, don't do it alone. Join 20,000 founders and revenue leaders inside

[20:21] GTMvault at gtmvault.wiki where we break down the strategies behind today's fastest growing startups. Subscribe, share, and we'll see you next week. Cool, man. Thanks so much tech founders and VCs careers lessons GTM