Harry Sims’ Post

How do you build from 0? Over 800 people signed up to hear 🐰 Jen Igartua, ✌🏽Dorothy Huynh and me talk about building GTM from scratch tomorrow. 2pm EST, Live from Clay HQ. We’ll cover: MVP outbound, Ops, how to make friends with Ops, etc Aligning on vision and early expectations (this starts in the interview) Common problems and pitfalls we’re trying to avoid Experiments, efficiency Tight targeting Compelling offers asks Keeping score Tactics to try first Probably a bunch more. Can you guess where the link is?

Clay is the most exciting piece of outbound tech I've seen in my career. This should be a great convo on building from scratch with my friend ✌🏽Dorothy Huynh

Thanks UserGems 💎 Champion Chasing with your data is the most efficient TOFU play I've ever tried. Expect 50% realreply%, +20% account to meeting conversion%, big velocity improvements downfunnel and sellers loving outbound again. AND if you've mountains of product data (self-serve $, usage etc) it’s highly likely you've got a bunch of hidden champions who've used you in the past, been promoted and moved to good fit orgs. High-recommended. No I was not paid to post this. If anyone has questions about it ping me.

When Spotify finds a old classic for me in the gym I get the same buzz that I get from booking meetings. Who remembers this one?

Great offer here from Chef 👨🍳 Elric Legloire

The big efficiency and performance levers in outbound are not your subject line, CTA, script, channel or the SEP you use… yet that’s what 94% of what you read on here is about. Most SDRs aren’t even allowed to change them. So what are they? How you think about the game. See Dale Dupree and Kyle Coleman - they have a strong vision, philosophy that seperates them from everyone else. It delivers a different buyer experience. Who you target, when and why. See Jed Marhle, Florin, Saad Khan (signals) and Ryan Reisert - the list is your strategy. If you know me, I like to fish in puddles not the ocean too. You could add offers and asks in there too. I’ve wasted years (yes I’m old) stressing over tactics. It’s honestly the least important part of the game.

Great role SDRs Kaleb Batman is good dude

I've been quiet on here but busy. Outbound Basics is coming soon. It's not a course, a cohort, or a playbook; I want to share how I think about outbound, the AHA moments, the stories that conditioned my thinking, and the basic building blocks of an outbound play. Little preview. "I started narrowing down what I did differently about five years ago. I’d just been fired from MongoDB, where I had worked for less than three months. I hadn’t even finished onboarding. I spent longer in the interview process than I did employed. It was the only big company that anyone had ever heard of and for which I’d ever worked. I still have PTSD about big companies to this day. They gave me three months severance, but I was down in the dumps, embarrassed, wondering whether sales was even for me anymore (you will go through this too - trust me). So, instead of jumping into interviews, I played Golf every day while I did some soul-searching, which in California means getting stoned. I’m sober now, so I can say stuff like that. After a couple of weeks, I got bored and posted on LinkedIn and some of the groups I’m in to offer free outbound coaching to SDRs. Over three months, I spoke to about 50 different SDRs, from tiny companies to big scary ones—fresh SDRs to people who’d been doing it for years. Two patterns played out over and over again on those calls. First, the SDRs weren’t getting good training or coaching from their Leaders but were desperate to improve. If they got any, it would be team training once per month or with a sales enablement person who hadn’t done outbound in a decade. The bigger lesson. Nearly every SDR I spoke to wanted me to review their email copy and look at their cadence or call script—their tactics. They were convinced that a better subject line or opener would unlock better performance, promotion, and the president's club awards. But they all sold different things, so I had no context to give them good advice, so I’d ask a few simple questions on the calls before diving in. Over and over again, the patterns would repeat themselves. It made reviewing their script, messaging, or cadence almost impossible because they were diving into tactics, copy, script, channels, and cadences without a foundation to build on. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have the context - they hadn’t even thought about it. It’s like building a house roof first. It started to hit me… this is the difference: I think about all this stuff before I think about tactics. Thinking / Vision informs everything. Targeting informs your offers and your asks. Your offers and your asks inform your measurement.  Without all that, you can't build effective tactics. BUT there was hope. As I started to ask the questions and dig into some of the answers on the call, the SDRs began to realize the problem and spot their areas for improvement—they started to get it, too." P.S. If you can tell me who and what inspired the cover art in the comments, I'll send you a free copy.