I help financial leaders generate leads with AI on LinkedIn | LinkedIn Marketing Specialist

I'm Tim Sergev, the COO at Pipeline Upgrade. We help UK IT providers fill their calendars with qualified meetings without the gamble of retainers or hiring SDRs.

We've delivered 2,500+ qualified meetings and generated £10M+ in client revenue by solving one critical problem: getting IT providers in front of buyers exactly when they're ready to switch.


HERE'S HOW WE WORK:

You tell us your ICP (company size, sector, services, buying signals). We find them, qualify them, and book the meetings. You only pay when they show up qualified.

No retainers. No ramp periods. No wasted ad spend.


WE CAN HELP YOU IF:

- You're an MSP, VAR, or IT reseller doing consistent revenue but growth has plateaued. You need predictable pipeline without hiring a sales team

- You've burned cash on retainer agencies (£5K+/month) that delivered reports instead of meetings. You want results you can actually measure

- You want 10-20 qualified meetings per month with IT buyers actively evaluating new providers


REAL RESULTS:

• One client got 80 meetings in 60 days and created a £2M pipeline. 

• Another invested £10K with us and signed a £250K contract.

• Our meeting rejection rate sits below 10% (most agencies are 30%+).


SO IF YOU:

- Are a UK IT services provider doing £10M+ annually
- Sell solutions with contract values £20K+
- Want your sales team calendar filled with qualified IT buyers

Send me a DM, or book free consultation at 👉 https://www.pipelineupgrade.com/

Tim Sergeev

Most marketing agencies sell visibility.

Very few sell outcomes.

Our appointment setting delivers 4x higher ROI than traditional marketing services.

Not because we are smarter.
Not because we are louder.

Because we optimise for the only metric that matters.

→ Qualified appointments
→ Real conversations
→ Actual opportunities

SEO looks good.
Content looks good.
Social media looks good.

But none of them pay salaries.

Appointments do.

And that is why appointment setting is not sexy.

No fancy graphs.
No vanity metrics.
No dopamine hits.

Just booked meetings and close rates.

Businesses do not need more exposure.

They need more conversations with the right people.

Everything else is noise.

---

Tim Sergeev
COO @ Pipeline Upgrade
I make business run smoothly

COO @ Pipeline Upgrade | Predictable Revenue for UK IT Providers 👉 pipelineupgrade.com

Lately I keep coming back to the same thought.

Most service businesses are not limited by sales.

They are limited by operations.

I did not fully realise this until we hit the wall ourselves in 2025.

We were working hard but every new client made the business harder, not better.

That was the warning sign.

So instead of pushing for more growth, we slowed down and fixed delivery.

We've made one clear way of doing things.

Nothing fancy.

However the outcome was astonishing.

With the SAME TEAM, we started handling around 4x MORE CLIENTS.

Thats insane, right?

4x revenue doing the same thing.

That changed how I look at growth.

If operations are messy, growth just amplifies the mess.
More clients do not fix the business.

I genuinely believe this will become obvious to a lot of founders in 2026.

Not because it is trendy, but because the ceiling becomes impossible to ignore.

If growth feels hard, it might not be a demand problem.

It might simply be how your business runs.

---

Tim Sergeev
COO @ Pipeline Upgrade
I make business run smoothly

Othmane Khadri

We help B2B tech SaaS startups build an acquisition funnel that generates leads and not just traffic | Generated over $800,000 in pipeline opportunities for clients | Founder Earleads

(scaling Earleads from $1M → $10M ARR in public)

If you’re reading this, you probably looked into AI SDRs or cold emailing agencies but something felt off "where's the human touch here?..." i feel you, what we do is completely different.

At Earleads we build and manage AI native go to market systems for B2B companies. AI native means we've designed them to maximize both human taste and machine's efficiency. You get best of both worlds without losing credibility in your market. 

What we do is dead simple: 

1) We get your ICP attention with social engineering content 
2) We monitor all signals shown by your ICP to engage with them when it makes sense 
3) We use targeted ADS to drive more qualified traffic toward your offers

We've worked with over 40 B2B companies helping them generate over $15 million in pipeline. We've booked over 1,500 qualified conversations and drove > 20,000 free trials accounts to our clients. 

If you want to learn more about our systems, DM me.

And if you want to follow the crazy road to $10M in ARR, i am documenting the back end of the journey on a weekly newsletter here: https://taap.it/YlAB6v

Head of Staff

The most credible founders I know have never appeared on a "30 under 30" list. 

But they've documented their journey publicly. 

Admitted failures.
Shared real metrics. 
Built trust at scale through transparency.

Your customers can smell manufactured credibility from a mile away. 

They want to see you solve problems in public. 

Not be a LinkedIn pick me...

AI native systems that support your GTM motion

Here's why your Head of Sales hire keeps failing as a startup founder:

They spent 10 years at a company where "building pipeline" meant reviewing dashboards in monday morning meetings and giving direction to 15 people.

You hired them expecting a builder.

You got a manager with no one to manage.

Their whole muscle memory is broken.

At their last company, sales was a machine they inherited. Leads came from marketing. Demos were handled by SEs. Forecasts lived in Salesforce reports built by ops. 

Their job was optimization and management not creation.

At your company there is no machine.

There's a blank spreadsheet, a list of prospects who've never heard of you, and a founder asking "so what's the plan?"

They're waiting for the infrastructure. 

You're waiting for someone to build it.

This is the gap that kills startups.

You don't need someone who ran a 50-person sales org. You need someone who can be the entire GTM function in one person.

Someone who understands buyer psychology AND can set up tracking.

Someone who writes content AND analyzes conversion data.

Someone who prospects AND architects the system that makes prospecting scalable.

That's not a VP of Sales. That's a GTM engineer.

And if your hire can't explain what they'd build in week one with zero budget and zero team they're not it...

I turned 25 yesterday. This year i built a bootstrapped business to $1M ARR and married my high school sweetheart.

I don't have 25 lessons for you though... 

But everything meaningful that happened traces back to 5 principles I follow religiously:

1) Play long-term games with long-term people.

Short-term thinking is a trap almost everyone falls into because the rewards are immediate and legible. But the really big returns in business and in relationships come from compounding. 

You can't compound with people who are optimizing for the next quarter.

2) Be ruthlessly honest with yourself.

Most misery comes from forcing yourself into something that doesn't fit. You can do it for a while but eventually reality wins. The strange thing is life keeps giving you signals about what you should be doing. 

Most people are too busy to notice.

3) Think slow and move fast

This sounds like a contradiction but it isn't. The bottleneck is almost never execution it's knowing what to execute. 

Once you have clarity speed becomes trivial. 

4) Protect your character especially when it's hard.

The test of values is when someone screws you over and you have to decide who you're going to be anyway. Do the right thing because it's right, not because you expect anything back. 

Ironically this is also the most effective strategy long-term.

5) Skepticism before cynicism.

There's a difference between "this is probably wrong" and "I refuse to engage." Cynics feel smart but learn nothing. Skeptics test things. You can question the rules while still playing the game and often that's exactly how you win it.

These principles only mean something because of who I get to practice them with.

Thank you to everyone who helped me get here. 

The best parts of this year weren't the milestones but the people.

More to build. More to learn.

People mocking the GTM engineer role fall into 2 camps: they're selling you AI SDRs or they're sales veterans who don't realize they're the 0.001%.

The AI SDR crowd is hilarious.

They trash "stacking tools" while quietly running a 38-step workflows, a signal enrichment engine, and 6 integrations just to make their product demoable.

They are doing GTM engineering. They just won't call it that because they need you to believe the tool does the work.

The sales veterans are a different story.

They have 15 years of relationships. A Rolodex that opens doors. A product so good it sells itself. And the pattern recognition that comes from 10,000 conversations.

They'll tell you "just pick up the phone." What they won't tell you:

They're the exception. Not the playbook.

Most founders don't have a warm network of 500 decision makers. Most startups don't have a product buyers already trust. Most SDRs don't have the gut instincts that take a decade to build.

What they actually misunderstand is the "engineer" in GTM engineer doesn't mean "uses a lot of tools."

It means finding the most robust, efficient, and outcome-driven way to achieve a result.

Think about it.

Companies always end up hiring engineers with infra skills. Not because they need someone to write code. But because they need someone who understands architecture. Who can build systems that scale. 

That can be used by anyone on the team. That doesn't break when one person leaves.

A GTM engineer does the same thing for revenue.

They create systems that are independent enough to run without them. Interdependent enough to feed each other. And anti-fragile enough to survive when a channel dies or a tool gets deprecated.

Here's what your GTM engineer actually does:

1) Figure out why your outbound gets 0.5% reply rates and fixes the system, not just the copy.

2) Understands every reason an SDR fails to hit quota because they see the data across the entire funnel.

3) Builds systems that don't require them to babysit every step.

4) Designs feedback loops where every action creates data, every data point improves targeting, every targeting improvement increases conversion.

5) Makes your sales team dangerous not by giving them more leads, but by giving them better ones at the right time.

That's not "stacking tools." That's engineering revenue.

And if you still don't get it, you're probably selling something that doesn't need you to.

13 days in 2026 and Earleads already on fire:

- 90% Retention from December
- 3 of our clients bought up-sells 
- 5 proposals sent waiting for approval
- 12 new calls booked in 8 working days

We’re building our way to $10m ARR. 

Brick by brick. 
Client by client. 
Proposal by proposal.

That's 10X from where we're at. And we're not gonna do it alone.

WE’RE HIRING. 

If you want to join a fully remote team, work with A players, learn a ton, have a very competitive pay, infinite growth opportunities and more importantly:

Build the right thing at the right point in time.

Check the links in the comments.

This smile?

It's what happens when a client says:

"Hey Othmane, we're looking to spend an extra XX,XXX$ in Q1 on our GTM. What do you think you and your team could take the lead on?"

That's the best testimonial we could get.

When a client's first reflex isn't evaluating other providers but asking how they can spend more with you?

Keep building in that direction.

The road to $10M ARR is gonna be long, but we'll keep stacking wins like this one along the way.

10% there.

What does GTM engineering actually mean?

Here's your 4-layer playbook for 2026:

Most B2B companies are still running the 2019 playbook.

Hire SDRs. Buy a database. Spray emails. Pray.

That model is inefficient.

The companies winning now focus on a very clear ICP, a killer value proposition, and a go to market system that intelligently mixes content, advertising, and outbound. 

GTM Engineering is the convergence of:

→ Engineering rigor (systems that compound)
→ Marketing craft (attention that converts)
→ Sales methodology (signals that matter)

It's not growth hacking.
It's not buying another AI tool.
It's not adding headcount to scale linearly.

It's building revenue systems that learn, adapt, and compound.

This is the exact framework we used to add $600k ARR in 60 days.

And the exact framework that led to $15m in pipeline for our clients in 2025.

Swipe through ↓

P.S: Want to implement the same system? Connect with our team on earleads(.)com

GTM Engineering 101

Earleads crossed $1M in ARR in 2025. 

Our goal is $10M in 2026 and we’re hiring.

We’re building a new category of company at the intersection of agency and saas. 

We deliver a service but we build automated systems and agents to support us. 

We’re in the top 1% of what is done in sales, marketing, and AI. 

We’re bootstrapped, profitable and Lean (6FTE). 

We’re currently hiring for 2 roles:

1) GTM engineer 

You know how to orchestrate systems. Connecting Clay, CRMs, LinkedIn, and AI tools into intelligent pipelines that actually work. 

You understand how data flows, where signals live, and how to turn scattered touchpoints into systematic outreach that scales.

2) Tasteful content writer  

Most writers focus on producing more. You’ll focus on choosing better. You understand that taste is knowing what NOT to say as much as what to say. 

If you naturally curate the best tweets, emails, or articles and think "I could've written this better," we should talk.

Both these roles will work closely together because of the structure of our offer: Allbound. 

Content → Attention → Signals → Outreach → Revops. 

We’re working with some of the sexiest startups/scaleups in AI. 

This job will change the trajectory of your career.
The comp is uncapped. 
And fully remote.

Links to apply are in the comments.

Ps: Trying to get this in front of the right people. If you can like or comment, it'd genuinely help us find our next hires.

How we added $600k in ARR in 60 days running this Allbound system:

Most B2B companies only invest in cold outreach

We added content and ads through LinkedIn.

When you rely only on outbound:

1. Most of the time you’re nobody. 
2. Your leads are on the defensive when they book. 
3. You have limited touchpoints before they hate you.

Whilst with content and ads you either:

→ Get inbound leads ready to buy now
→ Book faster on outbound (they know you)

Here’s the exact 4-step playbook we run: 

- - - - - - - - - - -
1. LinkedIn organic content 

We test new formats every week. 

We monitor the best content and repurpose it. 

The tools we use:

- Claude for post selection
- Clay for content monitoring 
- Notion as our organization tool

2. LinkedIn Ads to our TAM 

We take the best organic posts and promote them. 

Not to anyone, but to the exact list of ICP contacts at the companies we know need our services. 

The tools we use: 

- LinkedIn campaign manager
- iClosed as our meeting scheduler 
- Plausible Analytics for website traffic analysis

3. Signal monitoring and qualification 

Attention creates signals that we can act upon. We monitor profile visitors, post engagement, failed requests to book a meeting, and website visits. 

We then automatically segment and qualify who’s ICP. 

The tools we use: 

- An internal tool for profile visitor intent
- Knock2.ai for website visitor intent
- Phantombuster for social intent
- Clay for qualification

4. High value outreach 

Based on the qualification above we route to 2 different actions: 

- Automated outbound offering resources 
- Manual outreach that is actually personalized

The tools we use: 

- Clay for enrichment
- HeyReach.io for sequencing 
- Breakcold as our CRM

In 2025 this system generated for our clients:

- $15m in pipeline opportunities
- $2M in closed revenue (so far)
- 3 new fundraising rounds ($20m total)

This is the n°1 go to market strategy to put in place for any B2B company in 2026.

The organic content creates exponentiality and trust.

The ads ensure you’re being read 24/7 by your ICP.

The intent monitoring maximizes your pipeline. 

The 2-path outreach creates conversations. 

And the beauty is that once it's set up, it keeps learning and refining itself.

P.S: Want to implement the same GTM system? Connect with our team via our site and we'll show you how :)

Most B2B teams are stuck in output mode.

More emails. More calls. More "touches."

Meanwhile, they're burning through leads that were never going to convert.

That's because they're trying to guess their go to market.

And in sales guessing is the most expensive habit you can have.

We solved that with feedback loops.

We track every signal (website visits, ad clicks, profile views) and feed that data back into the next campaign iteration.

One of our clients (YC B2B SaaS scale-up) booked 40 calls from 800 leads in 50 days.

It was the 5th campaign we built for them. It happened because of the previous iterations we learned from.

Outreach have changed in 2025. Adapt or die.

I will transparently show everything in a one-shot 120 minutes live webinar (with no recording). 

Only 50 spots available. 

Like this post, add me as a connexion (important!) and comment "feedback" to receive the webinar link.

I have been quietly building a private clay operators database for YC backed startups. If you know clay deeply this might be for you:

30+ operators listed. 

Real workflows. Real pricing. Real availability.

This is for operators who understand:

- ICP qualification
- Enrichment and signal monitoring
- RevOps integration (CRM, APIs, webhooks)
- Multi-channel, intelligent outreach orchestration

We are not opening this publicly.

We are adding a few profiles manually.

If you want to be considered:

1. Comment CLAY.
2. Make sure we are connected. 

I'll DM you the link.

This list is meant to stay small.

Once at 50 we’ll close it. 

Forever. 

PS: This list is shared privately within VC-backed startup communities hiring GTM engineers.

Marketing generates leads.
Sales says they're sh*t.
What's the solution?  

This is the never ending cycle B2B teams have been enduring for almost 10 years now.

2 departments that need each other to justify their existence yet always at one inch to throw hands during meetings. 

I don’t blame them.

This war runs on 3 root causes:

1. Opposite incentive structures

Marketing gets judged on volume and cpl. 

Sales gets judged on closed deals and revenue. 

So marketing optimizes for quantity (cheaper CPL), sales screams for quality (higher close rates).

They play different games with different scorecards.

2. Attribution is a lie everyone agrees to believe

No one actually knows what "worked." 

- The cold call? 
- Was it the webinar? 
- The LinkedIn post they saw 6 months ago? 

So marketing claims credit for everything that converts, sales claims credit for everything they touched. 

Both are partially right, both are mostly full of sh*t.

3. Different relationship to time

Marketing thinks in campaigns, quarters, and pipeline build. 

Sales thinks in this month's quota and next week's commission check. Marketing says "we're building brand." Sales says "I need meetings today." 

Both timelines matter. 

Neither wants to admit the other's matters more.

This dysfunction persists because we designed it into the org chart.

Sales and marketing report to different people.

- Use different tools.
- Measure different KPIs.
- Speak different languages.

Then we act surprised when they don't collaborate.

Workshops or shared OKRs won’t fix this.

Having someone who owns the entire revenue engine yes.

A GTM engineer who:

- Designs campaigns sales actually wants to work
- Builds systems that track the whole buyer journey
- Gets incentivized on healthy revenue growth

One brain. One budget. One number.

That's how you reconcile sales and marketing.

You stop pretending they're separate functions.

Pitching GTM engineering to sales:

"Hey we’ll build you an intelligent outbound systems that catch buyers at the right moment, backed by content and ads that warm them up first."

"Yep I'm in"

Pitching GTM engineering to marketing:

"Hey we’ll build you an intelligent outbound systems that catch buyers at the right moment, backed by content and ads that warm them up first."

"Yep I'm in"

Pitching GTM engineering to founders:

"Hey we’ll build you an intelligent outbound systems that catch buyers at the right moment, backed by content and ads that warm them up first."

"Hell nah I'm cold emailing everyone in the whole planet”

2 weeks later: "It's almost working 1% opened my emails.” 

2 months later: "0 meetings so far but 2% opened my emails i am on the right track i can feel that”

6 months later: quietly hires an agency that knows what they're doing… 

how do i know? 

it's us. we're the agency…

I don’t think there’s room for debate: the best decision any B2B startup can make pre-PMF is to hire a full-time GTM engineer. Even better than a founding engineer.

Let me explain.

Most people confuse GTM with “demand gen,” “growth hacking,” or “SDRs.”

But a GTM engineer is a completely different species.

They don’t run campaigns.

They engineer the end-to-end motion:

1) Testing hypotheses about ICP, messaging, and channels.

2) Defining KPIs that actually matter in early traction.

3) Building the logical reasoning behind every go-to-market decision, instead of blindly copying playbooks.

Pre-PMF this is life or death.

In 99% of cases your product doesn’t need “deep” engineering yet.

Your CTO is enough to get a working version live especially with AI accelerating the coding side of things.

But what AI doesn’t do (yet) is engineer your go-to-market.

It can’t define your ICPs.

It can’t craft a narrative that closes your first 10 customers.

It can’t orchestrate the loops that finance product iterations with real revenue.

That’s where a GTM engineer becomes indispensable.

I’ve seen it firsthand, working with dozens of YC and pre-seed/seed startups:

Every founder faces the same three choices for GTM:

1. Do it yourself as CEO (if you have the knowledge, skills, and time).
2. Hire a GTM engineer internally (high-agency, high-ownership).
3. Partner with Earleads (because #1 and #2 are brutally hard to put in place).

The startups that accelerate their path to PMF are the ones that treat GTM engineering as core not auxiliary.

Because if you build-first and sell-later you risk months of engineering waste.

If you build-just-enough and sell-immediately you validate traction, iterate on reality, and actually move toward PMF.

That’s the leverage a GTM engineer gives you.

They collapse the distance between idea, market feedback, and revenue.

And in an era where AI makes building products easier every day, what’s scarce isn’t code.

It’s the ability to sell while you build.

That’s why my conviction is simple:

If you’re a B2B founder pre-PMF your most valuable early hire isn’t another engineer.

It’s a GTM engineer who can own the messy middle between hypothesis and traction.

Product without distribution dies quietly.

Distribution without product still keeps you alive long enough to evolve.

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The Battle

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