B2B sales has changed more in the last five years than in the previous twenty combined. Some of that is buyer behaviour. A lot of it is the infrastructure now available to any sales operation willing to build it, infrastructure that produces genuine results when it’s built on the right foundations.
The vocabulary has shifted too. GTM engineering. Revenue operations. Signal stacking. Waterfall enrichment. These terms aren’t all noise. Some of them describe real capabilities that serious sales operations are running right now, capabilities that didn’t exist in any practical form a decade ago. The challenge for most founders is working out which parts of this actually apply to their business and which parts are solutions looking for a problem.
What GTM Used to Mean, and What It Means Now
Go-to-market strategy, in its original form, was a serious analytical exercise. Who you’re targeting, how you’re reaching them, what friction exists in the market, how sales, marketing, and operations work together to deliver the service. Get it wrong and you pay for it across the whole business.
That analysis is still the foundation. What has changed is the execution layer sitting underneath it.
When I’m scoping a new market segment with a client now, we’re not building an ICP document and a target list in a spreadsheet. We’re pulling data from multiple sources, enriching contact records with technographic and intent signals, mapping org structures to understand who the real decision-makers are versus who appears in the CRM. Clay is a regular part of that workflow for me. So are AI tools I use to find patterns in existing client data and identify where the highest probability opportunities actually sit. The sophistication available at the technical end of prospecting is real, and it compounds when you know what you’re building toward.
The term GTM engineer emerged out of this shift. Clay effectively brought the job title into existence as a community of operators built their practices around its enrichment and sequencing capabilities. Done well, this work is legitimate and valuable. The question worth asking any practitioner operating in this space: where have they deployed this in a real sales environment, at what stage of business, and what did the pipeline look like before and after? A tool configuration is not a sales strategy, and anyone presenting it as one is selling you the wrong thing.
Lead Gen Agencies: A More Useful Frame
Most of the founders who find their way to me have been through at least one lead gen agency. Some of those experiences were fine. Some were expensive.
The honest assessment is that agency-led outbound works in specific conditions. Shorter sales cycles. Broader addressable markets. Products or services that don’t require deep trust to evaluate. The model also works better when there’s strong internal sales capacity to handle what comes through, because most agencies’ remit ends at the meeting.
Most SME B2B service businesses don’t operate in those conditions. Your buyers are making decisions based on reputation, referral, and their read on whether you understand their situation. A cold sequence starts with a trust deficit. That’s not insurmountable, but it requires a different kind of message than most agencies produce, and a different kind of follow-through than most agency-managed sequences provide.
When I’m evaluating an outbound agency with a client, I’m looking at specific things. What does their targeting methodology actually look like at the signal level, not just the category level? What’s the ratio of volume to personalisation in their sequences? Do they have experience selling services comparable to yours at a similar deal size? Can they show you reply rates and meeting rates broken out by industry and persona rather than blended averages?
The proposals all look similar. The operational rigour underneath them varies considerably.
When More Technology Isn’t the Fix
There’s a pattern I see often enough to find it worth naming. A founder comes out of a failed agency engagement and goes deeper into the technical layer. More enrichment. Better sequencing. AI-powered personalisation at scale. The theory being that the agency failed because it wasn’t sophisticated enough, and more sophistication is the fix.
Sometimes that’s true. More often the problem was upstream. The targeting was wrong. The value proposition didn’t differentiate. The message didn’t show enough understanding of the recipient’s actual situation.
I’ve run Clay-powered sequences that performed well and ones that didn’t. The difference was in the quality of the targeting logic and the specificity of the message, not the tool configuration. Volume-based outreach underperforms not because email is dead but because buyers have pattern-matched on templated sequences. They can identify it in the subject line.
Shorter lists, more specific targets, messages that show real knowledge of the recipient’s context: these shift response rates. Technical infrastructure can help you execute that faster. It doesn’t do the thinking.
Evaluating the Practitioners
The space around GTM engineering and sales technology has attracted a lot of practitioners in the last couple of years. Some are doing genuinely good work. Some are a few months ahead of their clients in tool knowledge and presenting that as experience.
I’d apply the same scrutiny here you’d apply to any commercial advisor. What environments have they actually operated in? What were the deal sizes? What happened when something went sideways? The practitioners worth talking to have specific answers to those questions. Not category-level claims about methodology, not case studies without numbers, not LinkedIn content optimised for reach.
The volume of output being produced in this space is large and most of it is built for visibility. That’s not unique to sales technology but it’s worth keeping in mind when you’re weighing what sounds credible against what has actually been tested in conditions resembling yours.
What Good Looks Like When You Put It Together
The clients I work with who have the healthiest pipelines are integrating technology into a well-understood sales process, not building their process around the technology.
They know precisely who they’re targeting and have done real work to understand what’s driving those buyers’ decisions, which means they’re working with intent data and signal monitoring rather than static lists. They’re using AI to cut account research time so that the first human conversation is better informed before it starts. Their sequences are short and specific because the targeting is good.
They also have referral infrastructure that works, because no amount of outbound tooling replaces a warm introduction from someone the buyer already trusts. The technology and the relationship layer run in parallel. Neither replaces the other.
The diagnostic I come back to with founders: if you stripped out everything you’ve added technically in the last eighteen months and kept only the judgment and relationships, would your pipeline be better or worse? It’s useful as a pressure test. Not because the technology isn’t valuable. Because the answer usually clarifies where the real leverage is, and what the technology should actually be doing in service of it.
Where to Start
The starting point is the targeting logic. Who specifically, what signals tell you they’re ready for a conversation, and why would they take that conversation with you.
Get that right and the tools available right now are extraordinary. Account research that used to take half a day happens in minutes. Intent signals that required an enterprise data contract five years ago are accessible on a modest budget. AI can surface patterns in your existing client base that most founders have never had bandwidth to look for.
Stay clear-eyed about the gap between tool capability and practitioner quality. The technology is maturing fast. The community of people who genuinely know how to deploy it in a real sales environment is smaller than the LinkedIn volume suggests. Evaluate the operator as carefully as you evaluate the platform.
The efficiency available to a well-run B2B sales operation today simply wasn’t possible a few years ago. That’s worth being genuinely optimistic about.
