(40) WTF is GTM Engineering? Everything You Need to Know Before Hiring One in 2025 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cb0k-CITnE

Transcript: (00:00) when you're using chat GPT, you know, you're putting in your prompt, right? It's very similar to that. Um, except for you you find instances where there's reusable tasks. (00:13) So, tasks where you're going to be running this over and over again, like if you're an agency and you're reviewing for every one of your clients all their nurture email sequences, right? Well, it would make sense to make a custom GPT, which is just uh a set of instructions you give chat GPT, so that when you paste in subject line and the body content of an email, it goes through and says, "Hey, here are the nine criteria that I want you to look at this email through the lenses of and I want you to provide feedback on how we're doing in those nine areas and then give actionable feedback on on what we should do next with this email. Is it good? Do we need to make improvements?" And so it's just an instruction set for the GPT to kind (00:43) of um give a frame of reference of the requests, right? And so it's it's really powerful when you have these reusable use cases within your teams. Yeah. So spending some time like building that out for our team internally and also for our clients uh as well of like what can we share with them. All right. What's up everybody? How you doing? Also told me there was 90 something people here before we started. (01:12) So people are people are here early which is awesome. My name is Dave Ghart. I am the founder of Exit 5. I was going to make up some I'm the founder, the president, the CEO, uh the chief meme officer. I don't know what it is, but my name is Dave. I'm the founder of Exit 5. (01:32) Uh Exit 5 is the top B2B marketing community out there for marketers like you and me who want to grow our careers in this crazy time of AI. It is like unbelievable how fast things are moving and and what's happening out there. And so it's a great time to be uh creating content here at Exit 5. It's a great time to be a marketer. I think I'm choosing the optimist view here. (01:50) Um I I think it's easy to be negative. I think it's easy to think that the robots and the AI are are going to take over the world and ruin our jobs and creativity is done and all that. But I'm going to choose the optimist view. And I think there's a lot of cool potential and use cases for for AI and marketing. (02:03) And uh I've been saying behind the scenes to people that I I maybe went for I've been talking about this stuff for 15 years now and uh I went through a period of a couple years I was kind of burnt out on it. There's only so much you know ABM and direct mail and B2B marketing isn't boring. I promise you that you can talk about but lately I'm feeling fired up. (02:21) I'm feeling energized about what's possible with with AI and it's given a fun rebirth and a new challenge in marketing. And so I got more energy than ever. I'm starting to get a little tan up here in Vermont because we got some sun. And uh I'm excited to be hanging out with you all today. (02:39) And uh a great feedback, a great signal that we get is when we put out one of these uh live sessions that we do, don't call them webinars. They're not. They kind of are. Uh when we do one of these live sessions, we we we do sometimes we have to do more promotion, sometimes we do less. This one we sent out like two emails and did two LinkedIn posts about it. And we have almost 1,200 people registered for this. (02:55) And that is because I think that this topic WTF what the frig because we don't cur I curse a lot. My mom told me she said she listened to one of my videos. She said I curse too much. So um what WTF is GTM engineering. I think this this topic just clearly struck a chord. There's a lot ofuh questions out there. There's a lot of people who want to understand this role or maybe question this role. (03:14) And so we have an awesome crew from Compound Growth Marketing and others here to join us today and we're going to have an awesome discussion. Uh all of these sessions uh exactly Nick's not a webinar. 100% definitely not a webinar. All these sessions are recorded. We'll send that all to you later. (03:33) The best part about these before I I welcome in in in our guest Allison behind the scenes. The best part about these sessions though is that it's all marketers in the chat. It's all people like you and me who are doing marketing, have done marketing. And so it's not just about what we say on on stage here. It's about the chat. And so I want you to, you know, be an active p participant in here. You're obviously here for a reason. (03:50) If you took an hour out of your day today to come rock with us in one of these things, like that means there's something you care about. So, be active in the chat. Help each other out, uh, answer questions. Then, if you have questions you want us specifically to answer, you can put them in the Q&A. (04:03) Okay, without further ado, if you can hear me right now, everybody's already writing in, but let me know. I want to know in the chat before we welcome up everybody. I want to know who you are and where you're from, but I also want to know why did you come to this? Why come to this GTM engineering session? What do you want to know? Um, why did you decide to to to come to come from this? Victoria is in Boston. (04:21) Christina is in Vienna. Vienna waits for you. Uh, Dylan is in Austin, Texas. Shout out to you. Li's in New York City. Cameron's in Atlanta. Johnny's in Vancouver. Allison, my homiey's in Asheville, Quebec City. We got Toronto. Stand up. Jersey. Jersey via San Diego. Nobody's told me why they want to be here today so far, but uh, all right. Here, Liz. I'm Liz from NYC. (04:45) Curious about GTM engineers. and if I need one on my team. Um, want to know uh, working with cold IQ GTM engineers. I want a better understanding. Okay, awesome. All right, good. We got the right group of people here. Alison, why don't you send send up our send up our crew? What a response. Holy smokes. Adam says, I think I am one. Definitely. (05:03) I'm a GTM engineer, too, right, John? Uh, no, I don't know about that. Toronto want to know what the hype is all about. Man, this is crazy. All right, awesome. All right, so real quick, let's do um let's do a round the horn. uh tell me who you are, what do you do for work, and uh that'll just quick intro to set context for our faces and our voices, and then we'll hop in today. Uh John, our fearless leader over here at CGM. Um kick us off, sir. (05:28) Great. Yeah, I'm John. I'm the CEO over at Compound Growth Marketing. Uh I spent the first decade of my career inhouse. Um what what's that that Dave? In-house. Huh? Can you hear me? Oh, I spent the first decade of my career in-house uh building out performance marketing teams and then started Compound Growth Marketing. Cool. All right, let's go. (05:53) Let's go around the horn. I'm Tammy. Uh I'm chief customer officer here at Compound Growth Marketing. I uh I come from a uh a zero to one tech startup inside of a series B services startup. Um so Atlas was the name of the software. It's a network-led growth product. (06:17) Um, and before that I spent about 15 years at a global ad agency actually uh mostly doing BTOC uh marketing. And so I've sort of spent the gamut on either end of the spectrum doing large kind of consumer uh real like advertising campaigns down to like zero to one wearing every single hat developing uh you know endto-end customer experience from go to market all the way down to um actual consumer experience on the on the CS side of on the CS side of things before uh before joining the team here. Really excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, good to have you here. Justin, what about you, sir? I'm one on the call (06:49) that's not part of the compound growth team. So, my name's Justin. I'm head of marketing at a company called Kexpay. I'm coming to you from Central Florida. Um, I'm actually in my first marketing role uh in in this capacity. So, I come from a life of product. (07:05) I've been in product for a long time, both as a you know, creative director, designer, managing managing product teams. So, um that's my background. Always been in B2B SAS, um new to payments, but big fan of the Exit 5 community and happy to be here with you guys. Appreciate that. All right. Nice to see you, Dan. Hey, everyone. My name is Dan. I am a GTM engineering lead as you can see on the screen. (07:27) Um, I have a background in RevOps and I actually got this role through uh Exit 5. So, uh, quick shout out right there. Um, me and John connected on Exit 5 and and the rest is history. All right. Uh, John, do you do you do you have a direction you want to send us in first or do you want me to do you want me to lead? And I I have some ideas of where we can go, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to have the ball first. Um, no. (07:46) Why don't why don't you lead the way? All right. So, um my my question straight out of the gate is can we can we try to like back this up first and and and there's been this rise of uh GTM engineering. I'm going to let you with this crew here try to try to define this. Let's let sometimes people get mad. We'll do a webinar. Not I said webinar. (08:11) We'll talk for 40 minutes and then someone be like you never defined a Let's let's come out of the gate and say what is a GTM engineer? What is that role today? And then I want to kind of get back a little bit and talk about where how did this role come from? Isn't this just marketing ops? Marketing ops. First there was marketing ops then and don't yell at me. This is my opinion. (08:28) First there was marketing ops then marketing ops became revops and now revops has become GTM engineering. Am I understanding that right? What's the role of GTM engineering today? Let's start there. Yeah. So, um, I I want to pass the ball over to Cammy pretty quickly, but I I want to recognize that we're in an upgrade cycle in the economy and and what that means to us. (08:53) And when we think about that at Compound Growth Marketing, we're seeing increased uh new technologies come onto the scene that are enabling new products to come into the market faster and find scale and offer new capabilities oriented around artificial intelligence. So that is one key thing that's happening. As a result of that, we're seeing fragmentation from like where you used to be able to do everything inside of HubSpot or you had some major service providers who are providing utilities in certain ways. (09:28) We're seeing a lot more tools come onto the market which is requiring teams to connect systems together in order to work efficiently efficiently with the best technology out there. I also think capitalism works in really interesting ways where um one of the killer use cases of artificial intelligence is its ability to make engineering teams more efficiently. (09:51) So at the same time that we're all kind of starting to be concerned about our jobs, we're concerned about what's going to happen with with engineering jobs on product. there's an incredible amount of uh of flow of of talent uh coming into the market who are looking for opportunities in different places than they originally were. (10:15) They may have been working on on product uh initially at at Facebook, but now they can take a lot of that engineering and systems mindset and bring it into other capacities inside the organization as well. And so I think there's a lot going on, but you know the kind of driver of this is significant technological change and a uh rebuilding of the marketing technology stack. (10:40) Kim, you want to build on that? Yeah, I think um yeah, so I think that's a really good a really good preface as to like what's happening at the widest scale. I think drilling down to the role itself. For me, I think about like the the actual definition of like the back end of the of the role is the signifier of operations versus engineering. I think about operations as someone who exists inside of uh existing systems, who's operating inside of existing systems, whereas an engineer can exist inside of existing systems, but is usually building systems. And then um I don't know did you see in the chat by (11:14) the way had a good comment to build on that which is like a revops adds and integration gt uh gtm engineering built one ex exactly right so like if you think about existing systems versus building them that's usually how I think about operations versus engineering so I think's right I think about the um the front end of those of those uh job sort of titles as the fluency of you know the language that you speak. (11:45) So revenue I think you skew more sales like you're right there was probably a a it started as mark ops and then you know you sort of became uh revops because you had to be fluent in both sales and marketing and I think the expectation of a goto market fluency is really end to end the motion itself is your uh are you productled versus salesled if you are uh a productled you know if the if the if the business motion is productled you have to know that you can't just uh rely on uh sales. You have to Okay. Okay. All right. I'm I'm vibing. I I understand. Uh before I keep building (12:19) on this, Dan, Justin, anything worth worth adding on this before we go go deeper into into GTM engineering? Yeah, I I love how you said marketing ops to RevOps to GTM engineering because that that's literally my career path right there. Um just riding the wave there. (12:38) But I guess the big difference and and I feel like a lot of people are confused where RevOps ends and where you know GTM engineering begins, right? Yeah. Just my ne just to build on that while you not to interrupt while we build on this like the question in my head is like so if I'm the CMO am I going to do do I now need both of these things like or you just have you just evolved into that role right Dan? Yeah. (12:56) Yeah. I and and when I was in RevOps like the thought process I had is how can I enable everyone right like how can I give them the data they need the processes they need to do their jobs um actionable data that they can use to to be a little bit better so getting everybody up to that 100% mark right and in this new role in GTM engineering I'm kind of thinking okay what can I do to give us a competitive edge not entirely a support role for everyone but what competitive edge can I give us um in our go to market um you know motion and and um how can I get us above that 100% line (13:25) So is this like um are we going back to like the era of like having a growth hacker on the marketing team? Is it is it closer to that? I think I think it's similar, right? Like I think that's you know there have been like large teams that have spurred in in in organizations where they they have brought engineering into marketing before like this isn't a new concept per se but it's just something that you couldn't do at a at a smaller or right and now with these new tools coming up it enables that kind of mindset again (13:55) right we I feel like sorry go ahead well I was gonna say so I agree with everything you guys have said for sure um came when you were talking about the you know the engineering like the second half of the title being indicative of where time is spent. The two words that keep coming up for me when I think about the engineering side of um go to market is like architecture and scale. (14:13) And so for like for a marketer thinking about being able to zoom out and come up with that strategy for connecting disparate systems with all the new tools and the new ways that we have of doing it now, it's more much more of an architecture mindset. Uh I think and then um being able to scale that like anything that we do now has to be able to scale rapidly and almost lean more towards like personalized ABM marketing where before that was a really separate initiative but now you can kind of skirt the edge (14:39) of that just with better tooling. So those are the things can you all try to can you all try to take me a level deeper on this here? So, like one of the one of the thing one of my questions is like, okay, I got it. Um, you got a GTM like I I can understand why you might want to have a GTM engineer on the team, but what's different now than like 10 years ago? Because I haven't been a marketing leader in a while, but in a future in a past life, we hired an engineer to be on the marketing team and her job was to like, you know, hack stuff together and have development (15:11) skills that we didn't have in house. And we've also had, you know, everybody's seen the Martekch, you know, landscape. There's already been 30,000 50,000, you know, the SAS tools for for marketers to use. And so, what is it about AI specifically that makes this GTM engineering thing more relevant than than ever? Maybe there's something to build on with where Justin was going with the infrastructure and architecture and scale, but I want to try to drill into that and you know understanding that like maybe not everybody on this call is an engineer. (15:46) So what what is it that's happened with AI in the last year or so that makes this different than like yeah we already had 50,000 software tools like I needed someone to integrate that and I needed someone you know marketing has been tech- enabled for a while now. I've always needed somebody to be able to write code. (16:05) So so what's different now? Yeah, I think I think it's actually I think it goes back uh for 14 years ago. So So we're on we tend to be on seven-year cycles. So there's like um what was it 14 years ago it was it was big data. Big data was the thing like Clive Humbly said that you know data was the new oil and then seven years ago it was machine learning. (16:26) We were in the era of machine learning and so there was like oil refinement, right? Yeah. And then now it's all about we're in the AI era where AI is now universally available to everybody and so we no longer need data scientists to make sense of all the data that now like everybody is their own data scientist. And so what that means is that like now product is no longer a moat because literally anyone in their mom can make a product. (16:53) So what that now means is that your moat is network effects. So the person who wins or the the the company that wins is the fastest to get the first customer on because the first customer on means the second customer can get on and the fourth customer get on and the eighth customer can't get on and so your network effects can start to take effect. (17:12) And so that means that you your product has to be as simple as possible to buy and your that means that your go to market motion has to be treated like a product. And what makes that different is that the products available. So what's different like the go to market engineer now different than the revops person before or the like the growth hacker of your than be in in that kind of capacity as you were kind of calling it Dave that what's different now is the software is just different and so software is not clunky anymore. It is it's not going to be clunky in the (17:44) future. It is going to be incredibly easy to adopt. you won't have the same switching costs to you know uh employ implode the the entire organization and something is you know better faster cheaper and so I think there is just going to be so much more available and you can actually just work towards outcomes and rather than adopting all of these sort of like complex workflows that take a team to hack together or you know incredible experts with like in crazy you know degrees to hack together and so I think it's really about um (18:18) people who are just really really focused on increasing the revenue per employee both from two angles. One is getting your sales team uh more you know essentially more enabled as Dan was saying getting them plus 100%. And then two getting uh revenue per employee down be trying to reduce headcount in the in the org. (18:39) So for for the marketers here like since this is a marketing focused session like I get a bunch of it about you know products are getting built but what are what are you all seeing on the I think for for most people here this role would sit on the marketing team. (18:56) So what are some specific examples uh maybe you're seeing from customer other people in the world that like GTM engineers are I I still don't really know what they're doing like they're just there's just a lot of there's a lot of big words from all of you about uh you know infrastructure and integration but like what what do they what do they do? Do they, you know, is it like what Tom Wentworth did, which I saw this week. (19:15) He's the CMO of a cyber security company, their developer tools, whatever they do, something I don't understand. And um they made like they did like a custom ABM campaign because they want to get anthropic as a customer and so they made some like, you know, they growth hacked or GTM engineered some some video game and that's a cool play. (19:33) Is is it that stuff? like I I I need more specific examples otherwise I'm just going to leave this call thinking like yeah this just another this is just another buzzword or someone in the chat said like is just is this just clay trying to like create a category around GTM engineering. Yeah, I I I think that's a great point. So I' I'd love to kind of go into some of the examples that we've built. (19:55) Uh we're we're big fans of Tom here and uh um uh so you know that that's one of the campaigns that that we've actually had the opportunity to work with him on and a good example too of how I think a go to market engine. Wait, you guys did that with him? We're working on the ABM campaign with with Incident. Yeah. Cool. (20:17) Um and so it it's a good I mean Tom is the ultimate uh go to market engineer. I think he was one of the first people to build on top of the the Drift API and and really think about how to use the tool in different ways. Um, you know, I I would look at if I were a company today, I'd look at breaking out the go to market engineering into different functions inside the funnel to think about like the mid- intent funnel. (20:42) What are the different offers that we could build using Lovable and some of the other tools out there to capture customers when they're in pain? How can we get in front of those users and build a really strong engagement point for them? Uh I think another interesting use case is we now have so much scale. (21:03) We we've been recording calls using Gong, Chorus, Fathom, all the call recorders recently. And so another interesting use case that we've been digging into and and even seen um some of our customers using is how do we analyze call data to understand um intent but also how can we start to um use that for attribution self-reported attribution. Okay, we're getting warmer here. I'm taking notes. (21:38) John, you've always been an advocate of this mid of mid this midfunnel stuff, which is like for anybody that hasn't listened to me and John's conversations over the years, which I don't know why you would have. Um, maybe 200 of you that that have been around. Um, but basically like you know John's always kind of advocated for this like if you especially in the world of B2B you you hit a B2B website and typically the the main action on the website is to drive someone to get a demo, contact sales, get pricing, request a quote, right? And like those are things that are much further down the funnel. And like when (22:11) I'm ready to buy, that's when I'm going to contact sales. I'm never like, you know what, I got I got an afternoon to kill. Why don't why don't I contact sales for this piece of software I'm thinking about buying and see what see what it can be. And so, you know, we've talked a lot about um companies that have been built great tools and basically built products as marketing over the years. (22:34) So, things that come to mind and feel free to put your ideas in the chat, but like HubSpot's website grader is like the OG example of this, right? They sold SEO software and they created this amazing tool that if you'd put your website in, it would tell you all the things that were broken and wrong with it and how to fix them. And then like behind the scenes, they now know that the person that built that out like has an SEO problem and they can help them. Another one was Optimizely. (22:52) They used to have a way to, you know, preview AB tests on your website, right? Uh at Drift, we built a way to test the bot on our website. And so that's a cool that that that's kind of cool now where you're like, okay, if I got an engineer in in, you know, if I got a GTM engineer on my team instead of, you know, gated content and ebooks, like we can really build some like high high intent like midfunnel tools here and we're all sitting on this gold mine of like all these sales calls and customer calls that we have. It's not just like V1 of (23:21) this listening to Gong to understand pain points. It's like I can now take all of this data and use it, you know, use an LLM to basically understand trends and understand topics and key objections and then we can have a GTM engineer like build some experiences around this stuff so we can get people to interact with our stuff. (23:42) Is it going in? 100%. Yeah. So I think part of the role here that we're talking about is there's like an element of R&D. I think Justin said that last week when we had a conversation about this, but there is a a piece of, you know, we have tons of of unstructured data that we're now figuring out how to structure in order to pull insights from it. (24:08) So, you know, I I think Dave, you've been a proponent of, you know, we don't need to measure everything. We we just kind of intuitively need know that things are working for us because they're different. But you know there are ways now that a go to market engineer can scan through gong calls to even listen to the messaging that of how customers are talking about a product or a category to understand how certain companies are having a uh influence on the market. (24:39) Right? Thinking back to the drift days, you guys had a conversational marketing. So, it would be interesting if after you had launched that um to listen to the sales calls and see how many times that the prospects who are looking at purchasing Drift were using that in the conversation versus using some of the language that maybe um uh your your competitor at the time, Intercom, was was using in their marketing messaging. (25:14) And so like I think there there's a customer feedback component to this of we can take this call data. We can route it into air ops or we can route it into clay. We can use it for messaging and helping us improve our ad copy. we can use it to help us build a persona GPT for our customers so that we can you know understand how customers are thinking about this and even simulate the um the objections that they may have um in the sales process or to some of the messaging or ads that we put up across the internet. (25:50) We can we can use that GPT to get feedback on how they'll respond to the website copy. So there there's a ton of use cases that we can use just from that one prospect and customer feedback uh cycle. Dan, Cammy, Justin like we use anthropic. So I've got Claude set up with a couple different projects. So, I'm trying to centralize like I think part of this engineering process is training your AI with the absolute best information that you can and organizing it incredibly well for um for future use. (26:25) Not just by yourself, but like as your team grows, I I don't know what it would look like to open up Claude to a sales team. I don't think many of us probably want to think about that necessarily, but like if if people could go crazy with content, but have it all be centralized to your uh to your product brain that's really well constructed for constant output and iteration. I think that's a big part of the engineering role, too. Yeah. Whoever's typing, I'm going to smack you. (26:50) Go on mute if you're going to type pink shirt. So, so this is super So, so like this is okay. This is a perfect example. Matt's messaging on the side of my team. I'm all fired up because this is the stuff when I'm like, "Yeah, this is what's fun. This is like what we can make fun with marketing and this where we can build great things. (27:07) " It was like in the past it was like, "Let's let's make an ebook and you're going to download it and then sales is going to call you." But now, what if we can take all this data and actually build a meaning because I I still think that the best way to help somebody, the best way to get somebody to buy something is to help them in in whatever capacity. (27:26) It's like, you know, whether you're a real estate agent and you're going to have, you know, make an amazing drone flyover mockup of the house and like picture yourself at the house, like I need to, if I'm going to go spend $100,000 on a B2B product or 100, you know, whatever it is, I need to I need to feel good about that. (27:43) I need to feel like that company helped me, that company understands me. That's going to happen later on in the sales process. But upfront, man, if I had some tool, if I used your tool to like improve some process of mine, like I used, you know, Optimizely, you know, website conversion tool back in the day and like they helped me out for free and gave me a bunch of opportunities here and now I have to upgrade and talk to their sales team and buy the product to get the full thing. (28:08) Like that's where the that's where the gold here is is like we can get back to doing really good marketing stuff. And then as the copywriter storyteller nerd in me, I love the stuff about um like using the the the customer all the customer calls. John mentioned this um persona GPT. Basically, you're missing out on a huge opportunity today if you don't have your your you know ideal customer profile and your customer persona is like nailed and then you know whether you use claude or chat GPT or whatever and you're constantly writing and iterating copy based on that and and you have this kind of brain that really understands your customers. Imagine (28:44) being able to go and say hey what are the most common objections for the last six months on our sales call and I know that as a marketer and I can address some of those things you know um heads up going in. uh question for our uh this this question is in the chat. I'm curious to hear this from our from our panelists. (29:03) Um everything that we're talking right now uh and I Christine I'm not this is not who I think you are. I'm just kind of this is how I read this like but isn't that just PLG? How do we answer that? What isn't what just PLG? Everything. Hello. everything we've just been talking about like the this like marketing stuff creating marketing tools like in that example like these midfunnel tools isn't that just PLG or are we just going to have a silly debate about like names what do you think yeah I mean I I've seen the isn't this just for a lot of things so we're isn't this just ABM isn't this just good marketing (29:32) isn't this just revops with AI like I and and like so I think partially it's it's a challenge to kind of answer all of those at once and and have everybody ask these like different questions but then you know we're kind of looking at it and I've been asked isn't this just five different things and now we have the ability to put this all into one function so I think I think my my read on that is like on on PLG and this is not to get into the nuance of definition but like PLG to me is like um if the true definition of productled growth which is (30:07) like you you have Slack and then Slack has a free plan and you try to get people in the free free plan and upgrade them. I see this more as like we're using data and and design and creativity and engineering to build tools that accelerate the marketing funnel. (30:25) And you might this GTM engineering concept you might not be a PLG company at all. You might sell something that is like super hightouch like PLG also means like really uh touchless, right? Like I don't I don't have to talk to somebody. I don't have to like do this crazy onboarding. It it's very, you know, uh low friction. (30:44) But you could sell a a really high-end, you know, infrastructure type of product that is not PLG at all. But what we're talking about is using this new kind of role in marketing to create to basically have the power of a developer on your marketing team to to make more interactive and engaging marketing content than kind of just the standard content playbook. Yeah. (31:03) And and one thing I'd call out is when I was working with the PL when I was working inside PLG companies like when I was at workable and I was at yeswware and I was at log me in sometimes that funnel is limiting because you're looking to drive a user in when they are looking to access their when they are looking to set up email tracking or they are looking to build an integration between Gmail and their Salesforce instance in Yeswware's case. (31:34) So I was sometimes limited by the funnel and the lens that I could bring users in to the product and ultimately drive them in. So in order to expand the opportunities to engage with those customers, that's where I would create a mid-intent funnel in order to get users to start to understand. (31:55) So in Yeswware's case um we knew that when somebody was in market they were looking for email tracking or they were looking for ways to connect their inbox with Salesforce automatically but before they had that use case they may be looking for email templates to share across their sales organization and so we built out a mid-intent offer for free email templates and so I think the mid-intent funnel is not meant to be PLG It is meant to expand the breadth of uh helping you identify customers who are coming into market and ultimately um you know going to be looking for a solution like yours in the near future. And I think the same was true with um with (32:36) test drive at drift Dave when when when uh we when you launched that and then we came on board and supported working for a segment of your audience and you had a part of your audience that needed to build the case internally in order to get drift to the table and and be able to have a conversation about it. (33:07) And so I think in a salesled motion sometimes you do want those high engagement great brand moments to uh ultimately push users down funnel and generate that velocity velocity. I also saw something that um Iran just put in the chat in terms of you know PLG companies usually need a free or a light version of their of their software. So coming from a salesled organization, I guess the way that I I look at it is, you know, for for a productled company, they can pull somebody into the story into the brand story sooner by getting that um buy in on trying it out on a on (33:39) a temporary basis. But for for salesled companies that have like longer buying cycles and the threshold is higher, I think it's I think it's a way for us to tell a better story before somebody starts becoming engaged with the brand. So since we don't have that opportunity for like a light or a free version, it's how much of a better story can I surround my product with, my user stories with all of those types of things to get them engaged in the brand rather rather than the the free model. (34:04) Nice. Anything else before my big mouth keeps going? No, I I there was a good question in the chat about the revenue per employee and thinking about um shout out to come back to Camm's comment on revenue per employee. This feels like a core deliverable for what this role is focused on efficiency is the role. (34:29) No, I love that that call out and I think that's that's a good kind of uh good area to dive in a little bit deeper because I do think there are KPIs associated. Let's first explain let's first explain just like the the like the metric of revenue per employee. Yeah. (34:52) Um and also in the context of marketing like why why do I care about revenue per employee? I'm a marketer on the I'm a marketer at the company. My job is to generate pipeline for the for the company. Like that's revenue for per employee. That's like the CEO and CFO's job. I'm going to run campaigns to to build pipeline. I don't understand. I mean maybe agree to disagree on that Dave because I think that revenue per employee is absolutely something that um go to market and with marketing within that uh should be either contributing to if not directly um attributing to because there are three levers that go to market can control. one is um volume (35:26) of sales uh like so pipeline right like one is uh velocity and also contract size. So the other um I think where where go to market engineering is really helpful in terms of driving efficiencies is like what data flows where to what taxonomy and um how are you thinking about uh you know who who needs to see what where and how and if like sales enablement is a core component of how it is that like go to market engineering is uh thinking about their job and and and what it is that they're um effectively (36:04) trying to do then the salespeople who are responsible for looking at the CRM and helping and and and and all the intent signals of their key account lists. I think it helping to drive any one of those those levers at a at a higher velocity is absolutely contributes to revenue per employee. (36:29) So you're trying to get them to either close more deals faster or at higher contract values. And then the other way to look at revenue per employee, even if you don't drive more revenue, you can reduce headcount. So you can make that headcount more uh you can make the company more efficient. So revenue goes up per headcount. Well, your marketing function can reduce the headcount. So you would just be slightly more efficient. (36:54) So you have so instead of having multiple people on the team, ideally you can have a GTM a GTM engineer who's able to basically be like a the concept of like 10x engineer but for someone on the marketing team to be one person with AI and tools to do lots of stuff. Got it. And by the way, I wasn't uh I wasn't disagreeing with you like obviously revenue per employee is super important. (37:20) I'm just trying to like put myself in the shoes of like totally the average marketing manager at the company. Like I get there's a this like I see people write about this on LinkedIn and it's like you know SAS marketing sucks and it's broken. Like the marketing team doesn't care about you know CAC and the profitability. (37:39) I'm like do you think that the average 24 year old marketing manager at a SAS company has like the the fingers on the controls of the profitability of the company? Like they don't. They're going to execute. I'm not saying that's a that's a good thing. I'm just saying at most companies it is not they don't have the breakdown. And so like we shouldn't be yelling yelling at marketers about this. (38:06) It's that is absolutely and that that's usually the crux of the the issue in in marketing is like so many things come down to like what is the company strategy? What are the company goals? Okay. huge, you know, like huge, huge. Everybody's on me in the chat right now. (38:23) We got to get Dan in the mix and he's he's hijacking the chat. He's doing a great job. People just want to know like, look, he brought Dan on this thing. We haven't even let the guy talk. They want to know what he does all day as a GTM engineer. So, Dan Dan was Dan already signed himself up for an Exit 5 AMA on this, so you better bring the heat right now, my friend. Yeah. (38:42) No, I actually came to this event to figure out what I should be doing all day. So, um No, I'm just kidding. That's great. Great. Um, I think to preface tried Have I tried Claude? Not yet. Not. No. Uh, to preface the answer, I think if I'm doing the same thing in six months that I'm doing today, I think I've failed as a GTM engineer. (38:58) Like I think stuff is about to change in a in a big and meaningful way. Um, some areas I'm I'm spending a lot of my time in right now is is and I know people clowned on this like uh you know, Clay and Unifi and tools like that, testing them out, seeing what I can do when I pull like create tables of target accounts, existing customers, what data points we can pull in, what actions we can trigger from that. That's that's a focus right now. (39:22) Um I I spent a good amount of time trying to upskill um our our internal employees on how to use tools like chat GPT. And what I found is some people have a really hard time with prompting. So I kind of shifted that a bit and spending some time building out like a library of custom GPTs that kind of enables our sales team. (39:42) And and I think this is going to be something we're going to see a lot of of people like kind ofing some of their their custom GPTs for people to kind of look into and and you know pick and choose and bring into their own companies and and adjust them to to make them more relevant to your use case. Can you explain um for for for people on here who might be like the average, you know, lightweight uh chat GPT users, can you explain custom GPTs, what they are, how they work, and how do you share them with the sales team? Yeah, for sure. (40:08) And it's it's very similar to um you know, just when you're using chat GPT, you know, you're putting in your prompt, right? It's very similar to that um except for you you find instances where there's reusable um tasks. So tests where you're going to be running this over and over again. Like if you're an agency and you're reviewing for every one of your clients all their nurture email sequences, right? Well, it would make sense to make a custom GPT, which is just uh a set of instructions you give chat GPT so that when you paste in um you know a subject line and the body content of an email, it goes (40:36) through and says, "Hey, here are the nine criteria that I want you to uh look at this email through the lenses of and I want you to provide feedback on how we're doing in those nine areas and then give, you know, actionable uh um feedback on on what we should do next with this email. (40:54) Is it good? Do we need to make improvements?" Um, and so it's just an instruction set for the GPT to kind of um, give a frame of reference of the request, right? Um, and so it's it's really powerful when you have these reusable use cases and and within your teams. (41:12) Um, but yeah, so spending some time like building that out for our team internally and also for our clients uh, as well of like what can we share with them. Um, and then I think there's this kind of third area where I'm kind of dabbling in now and I think it's it's more exploratory now, but I think um, somebody brought up uh, MCP and chat model uh, context protocol. Um, and this has kind of been hot in the streets uh, recent. Yeah. (41:30) Can you explain this to me? Like my second grader, everybody's talking about MCP. Every time I open LinkedIn, oh, you guys need an MCP server for this. And I'm like, I think there's a lot of people talking about this, but they don't actually know really what it is. I don't know what it is. Well, I'm just a thought leader guy. You know, why is Tom Wentworth asking tools that he uses to to build their own to let him build their own his own MCP server? Can somebody explain this to me like I'm a I'm a I'm a child. So, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I think it's an MCP (42:02) server. Um it's basically an instruction set for LLMs um for tools like chat GPT um to interact with tools and pull data out of it with context. Right. So right now use an example while you explain it like a popular tool that marketers use. (42:21) I'll talk about uh HubSpot because they just came out with their own like firstparty MCP server. Um, so basically HubSpot, you know, before they came out with their MCP, if you were had an LM and you wanted it to pull data from HubSpot, it' be using the API, kind of like how how most uh tools interact with HubSpot. Um, the MCP server uh creates, how do I simplify this more? It creates instructions basically where it's like hey if you get a request that's like hey give me all like my top 10 contacts like it it shows it how to pull all the contacts and then pull the information it needs to to um give the right output (42:55) to the end user. So it's just more instructions on how to use the API for the LLM basically is is a really um simplified way of saying it. And so that's where I think um right now I'm testing a lot of agents right now. Zapier agent I'm I'm looking at because they have a nice free tier and I'm doing some stuff and I'm I'm not entirely happy with the output, right? Like it's and it's because it doesn't have all the data it needs to like when it talks to HubSpot right now. (43:19) I don't think they've adopted the MCP yet. And so like I was like, "Hey, give me this contact and tell me all the recent activity on the contact and summarize it." So before I hop on a call. Um and it didn't do a good job of pulling the activity associated with contact. That's because it didn't have any instruction on how it would go about doing that. (43:38) So that that's where I think as more tools come out with MCPS like agents are going to become a lot more powerful. You're going to have marketers who you know have agents that every day look at all their campaigns in LinkedIn and and call out any ones that are you know eating up budget but aren't you know performing any results. (43:55) Uh and and you know it might message you in the morning and say hey these these campaigns aren't working really well. Do you want to remove take budget away? And if it has right access you know you could say yes take budget away. and then it will like turn off the faucet for those. So that's kind of an actionable thing that I don't think we can do right now, but as these MCPs um become, you know, more prevalent. (44:15) Um agents are going to be and and that's where I think in six months I I hope that I'll be spending a lot of time on is how do we enable people through agents? Cool. The agents, the agent examples are the agent examples are great, which is like, oh my gosh, there's so many things that I could think about right now that are kind of daily, weekly rhythms and routines that we do in marketing, whether it's website analytics or monitoring social or monitoring ad campaigns. (44:38) We all work out of Slack like to just have a bot that could basically send us updates in Slack or it's like, "Hey Dave, here's here's a recap." I used um Darm mesh's like agent AI. I sent it to Matt and Dan on our team last week and I was like, "Here's a here's a summary of your most popular LinkedIn post over the last six months and here are the trends and here are the key topics and like stuff like that is super useful." So, would would you as a company I'm I'm a writer, not a not a tech guy. (45:02) Uh, would you as a company like would we at Exit 5 have our own MCP server and like we would connect to all of these other tools and like h that's where all of our stuff would live. you would probably consume NCP servers rather than have your own unless you have like a you know a database where you're storing some data and you want to expose that to LLM. Okay. (45:25) Um I think real quick the one thing I I my example was a good example except for it only touched upon one system. I think where a lot of power will come is when these LLMs can interact with multiple data sources and pull the data together and and bridge that gap. I think that's another really exciting thing that that hopefully will happen. (45:43) Anybody want to build on those on those? Anything else? The use case that I'm looking at just as like another hopefully we can get there soon. Uh I made the comment earlier about you know enabling sales people to go run with a custom GPT for creating marketing materials. Like the the idea of using an an MCP to connect, you know, what I've been building with Claude for my product marketing brand uh you know brand projects where all that knowledge is stored. being able to connect those to a service like Gamma as an example. (46:07) Um, and be able to start having conversations between Claude and Gamma where the the content is going straight from one tool and the other based on a series of prompts and being able to just continue decreasing that time to market so that you can test ideas faster and get more tailored stuff out there. (46:26) Lot of lot of Dan fans in the chat right now. This is like this was great. They want they want this tactical stuff. They want this specific stuff. I tried last night. I was trying to make I was like, why can't I why can't I just I had to schedule an event on my calendar and it's very cumbersome to click five times into Google calendar and I was like why can't I just go to my chat GPT and write in my (46:51) chat GPT and say uh book a call with John Short tomorrow at 1 p.m. on my calendar and I thought you could do it with Zapier and ChatgPT but I think their their integration was busted and I couldn't do it. I gotta work on that later. But these like mini recipes and that's just a silly one. Like I want to operate as a as my life and a marketer. I'm getting used to and I was listening to Jason Lekin talk about this earlier in the week like software tools are there's going to be a big disruption happening where like we are all getting used to now writing textbased prompts to these tools and getting this amazing output. And so I want to be able to say (47:21) put a meeting on my calendar tomorrow at 3:00 to, you know, and just write a voice command or write two lines of text to be able to do that. Think about all the other things in marketing that we now expect to be able to do that. It's like what there's a world where like why would I ever log into Salesforce ever ever again? 100%. (47:38) Um so I actually we we've been using day.ai as the CRM for compound growth marketing. uh they are are starting to play around with agents and so we have those capabilities inside some of the tools that we're using already. Um the the one thing that I I would kind of underline there is in order to be able to write those prompts and have it um connect with Salesforce and have Salesforce talk to HubSpot and then have HubSpot collect data from Clay. (48:12) um you you need to have the proper wiring set up inside of your business. And so I think marketing is moving towards this state state of simplicity where there's going to be less need for specialists and more need uh for generalists who can do a lot of different things and a lot of different ways. (48:32) And so, you know, that prompt, I think, is a great example of why we need to focus on building systems that or building software into systems that talk to each other and allow you to spin up a campaign by writing a prompt and and having it talk to Canva and HubSpot and and all the different platforms. Yeah. (48:55) Actually, I saw in one of our notes that I meant to get back to there was a a Justin a note from something Justin did with uh like Claude and and Gen Spark. Is that is that a a or gamma maybe? Did you build something like that? So, well, we had somebody on our RevOps team build a so an onboarding application is a big part of our process. (49:12) Somebody in the com in the chat was talking about um you know, time to revenue. So, for us, that's something that's actually really important. We we send people through this application process for underwriting and we've been leaning on classic form tools like you know Jot Form all the different ones that are out there but one of our guys um on the RevOps team went and used Claude code and built a fully customizable configurable like onboarding workflow for our customers that was just top-notch and being able to do stuff like that like this idea of prototyping (49:42) and bringing things out faster is one of the big things that I'm seeing um add value in a big way. So that's that's an example of like when you get somebody in the pipeline or in in the door, that's another example of how you can get them faster through the revenue. Nice. I like it. (50:01) I I I think there's just a it now to me is the time to question everything. Like I'm trying to even do it in my personal life and and um just like how I would go through and create something in the past is is different now. And so it's like yeah, okay, I could use canva and I'm going to use gamma and I'm going to write this chatbt prompt. (50:17) think it's like you got to force yourself to try to to try to learn some of the these things. And I also think that's how we go beyond the like V1 of this AI stuff was just like AI. There's a lot of AI slop like you know AI generated content and I I love it. (50:35) I think that is I lick my chops when I see that stuff and see people talking about it because I think that for real marketers for people understand the craft of marketing, the art of storytelling and building a brand and positioning and creative like huge opportunity. Marketing is not AI slop. That's just going to be like, yeah, you didn't buy a $200,000 piece of software because that company wrote like a cute listicle back in the day. (50:53) It's it's going to be the same thing. And so it's going to get, you know, it's going to make marketing really hopefully do do meaningful stuff and and matter again. Okay. Um, we have a couple we obviously this this went by really fast. We have a I'll try to get to a couple questions, but I know that the CGM team is good at marketing and they're good. They're thoughtful on this stuff. (51:11) And so we're going to give them we'll give you guys all these Q&As's and John, I'm sure you and the team will probably maybe like write write up responses to these. There's a lot of followup that we could we could do for this. And um by the way, anybody in the chat that was chirping me about, you know, you came to this to understand what GTM engineering is, like you could have just gone to chat GBT and asked what the heck is GTM engineering, like you didn't have to come to this. So that's, you know, we're we're we're all (51:34) here for a reason. Um this question from me, T. Yeah. What can I jump in if um if people could drop the the tools that they're using in their in their go to market engineering stack? Okay. In the chat, I'd love to see like, you know, clay ar. What are you using? What are you What do you What are your GTM engineering tools? Mine is is like I use this great tool by Open AI called Chad GBT. Sick. I I want to hear that. (52:07) And I also feel like I this this group is a good group to ask the question of like there seem to be some really big feelings about go to market engineering. I want to know what those big feelings are. What are the big feelings? I think I think my perspective on it is that the big feelings come from people just roll their eyes whenever Mark like whenever we create more new you know it's just a rebrand and that to me is just LinkedIn like perfect LinkedIn fodder for like marketers to yell at each other about and I think we as marketers you like I tell my wife (52:38) about these things she's like who cares she doesn't work in marketing I think there's just something about marketers being marketers arguing about well no that's always been ABM or revop so I I don't I don't think it's anything other than that perspective on that. And I I I love when there's a rebrand. (52:58) And the reason why I love it is because I think that it's a signal that the former brand has been diluted that calls for a rebrand. So like there's this like founder mindset that like there's this need for something new about the role. And I think that go to market engineering is like a call for there's a um what was what was formerly known as revops has been so diluted because you're working these in these uh existing systems. (53:24) And if you're if you're anything like me, like you you know a person like Dan who is a representative of someone in RevOps who's really good and you've worked with some really sucky RevOps people and that big swing of like Dan and Sakucky is that that that is indicative of what we've all worked with. (53:49) Now there's this opportunity to like when you post a a a job posting for a go to market engineer and RevOps, you're going to get two very different profiles of people. You're going to get all Dans when you post a go to market engineer versus when you post RevOps. So I think that's like to me that's an indicator and I I don't know. I like these brands. Yeah, I think it makes sense. (54:12) It's like I'm thinking when I think of RevOps, I think of a partner of mine in a previous company and their job was much more like on the reporting side and managing the like SLA between marketing and sales. And the GTM engineer to me is more of like growth hacker creator, you know, making making landing pages and tools and webs, you know, that just just doing stuff. Yeah. A little more. Yes. Okay, that's really good. (54:36) Uh, John, do you got you got the the chat blew up with a bunch of tools. Um, some really some some good stuff in there. Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of air ops. Uh, Jasper just came up, a lot of the LLMs, ChatgPT, Claude. Um, some that I need to look into like Room.io. Oh, Justin, you dropped that one in there. Um, I'm just going to make a name right now. Snake, triggery, common room. (55:04) um that whole class is is really interesting right now. So yeah, thanks for um Okay, let's let's wrap on let's wrap on this and then we before you leave, we have a poll. We need to do a we need to do a our AI agent is going to ask you to rate this session. Uh and the feedback really really helps. But um just kind of synthesizing a couple questions. (55:22) Is there a right somebody who's listening to this who who kind of gets what the role is and maybe believes in it. Is there like a stage or size of the company or time that it makes sense to bring this? Is this a early stage? Is it later stage? like when do you think about hiring this this person? Yeah, I I'd be looking at bringing it in in the first five marketing hires at the very least that you're bringing into the organization. (55:46) Um, we got an interesting question a couple of weeks ago from somebody who we're talking to who works with a lot of different businesses and you know they were trying to figure out uh when the right time is to start building AI integration into their business and and um and specifically into the marketing stack and and they wanted to build a a base layer for marketing before they started really investing in AI. (56:15) And and I I I ju it you can't get too early here. I think you want to be thinking about how you can grow as efficiently as possible and um and how you can be reducing the cost to acquire a customer and how you can boosting boost the revenue per employee. And so I think having a really strong systems thinker, no matter what you want to call them, having a really strong systems thinker in the organization who can help you scale how you use artificial intelligence to create content to, you know, support product marketing with getting feedback from customers and and automate those workflows is going to be really (56:55) important uh for any business. So, it's one of the first three to five roles that I'd look to bring on in any organization. Also seems like one of those like you know when you know if you're interviewing someone and they're listing off all these tools and they're telling you about things that they built, you know, that's that's your GTM engineer. (57:13) Okay. Uh please real quick go to on the uh the top there's like a polls tab. Go to polls and we ask you to please rate uh please rate today's session. Not a not a webinar uh on a scale of one to five. Leave us some feedback. But hey, I had a blast. Like, this was fun riffing with you with you all. We got some great comments and feedback. (57:34) Um, the the chat was I'm going to give it up to the chat today. Our panel was great, but I'm going to give it up to the chat. We had that was electric. We had 260 people in here today and like clearly passion. I think we got to do more of this. I think people want to hear real specific examples. We got to we got to keep keep relying on the chat. No slides, no promo. This was this was lovely. (57:53) Good job all around. Uh Dan, Cammy, Justin, we'll see you all on LinkedIn and in the Slacks and emails and around. John, good to see you.