Brendan Short

The Signal (.club)

• Separating the signal from the noise—a weekly newsletter on all things GTM tech
• Subscribe for free: www.thesignal.club

Founder

GTMfund

• Limited Partner alongside great GTM leaders in the GTMFund

Limited Partner (LP)

Apollo.io

• 1,800 meetings/quarter, fully automated, using Apollo "Workflows" — Apollo doesn’t have SDRs
• Read more here: https://www.apollo.io/magazine/how-apollo-tripled-meetings-booked-using-its-own-platform
• Using Apollo, for Apollo (meta, I know)

Product-led sales ("AutoSDR")

Groundswell

• Here is what we learned building Groundswell for 2.5 years: https://www.thesignal.club/p/what-we-learned-building-groundswell
• Started off building in "product-led sales" and then expanded to, what I call, "signal-based selling" (using gen ai to find signals and generate next-best actions)
• Raised $1.6M from Village Global, GTMFund, Henry Schuck, Lars Nilsson, Shaan Puri, and other founders and executives from the world's leading PLG companies including Slack, DocuSign, Rippling, Snowflake, TripActions, Workato, and others

Co-founder & CEO

Zoom Video Communications

• Consulted for Zoom starting in Dec 2019
• Joined full-time in 2020 as things got busy due to the pandemic (it was a wild time to be there)
• Led Operations and Enablement for the Global SDR Org (150-person team)

Operations & Enablement (Global SDR Team)

The Revenue Engine (Consultancy)

• While figuring out my next move, I took on some consulting and advising gigs to help B2B SaaS companies build scalable, predictable revenue engines
• I've been lucky to work with some incredible companies and people, including: TripActions, Zoom, Snapwire, WellHealth, LoanBase, Edvo, among others

Owner

OutboundWorks - ACQUIRED

• I joined OutboundWorks as VP Sales as part of their acquisition of my company, Hexa.ai
• We were building “Automated Sales Development”
• I led Sales Development, Sales, Marketing & Customer Success 
• The company was acquired in October 2019 (I decided to leave during this transition)

VP Sales

Hexa (acquired by OutboundWorks)

• SaaS Product to help automate XDR work
• Acquired the technology of Brisk.io and merged it with Proleads.io
• Class 17 of The Alchemist Accelerator (6 month program; #1 Enterprise B2B Accelerator in the World)
• Raised $800k in funding
• Acquired for 7-figures in Feb 2018, by OutboundWorks (backed by True Ventures)

Wiser Solutions, Inc.

• 1st full-time employee (started as SDR then AE then Manager)
• Was there from ~$15k MRR to $10M ARR 
• Personally closed $1M+ in first full year selling - online retailers, brands & manufacturers (mid-market and enterprise)
• Built and managed the Sales Team (SDRs, AEs, Sales Engineering, and Sales Ops)
• Wiser was acquired for 8-figures in September 2016

Head Of Sales

Avista Solutions, Inc. - now part of D+H

• Avista Solutions was acquired by D+H, for $40M (45 employees, in business for 4.5 years)
• I left after Avista was acquired by D+H (cubicle life wasn’t for me)

SDR (before this title existed)

Playing long-term games w/ long-term people ✨ Building Groundswell

Currently writing about the future of gtm tech, at The Signal. Subscribe: www.thesignal.club (it's free!). 

I’ve worked at a couple of startups ($0-$10M), a couple of big companies (Zoom Video, Apollo.io), and I’ve started a couple of venture-backed SaaS companies (Hexa.ai, Groundswell).

I’ve been an SDR, AE, Head of Sales, SDR/Ops Leader, and CEO. Jack of all trades, master of none, perhaps. 

I like learning and building. 🤘

Writer

• Separating the signal from the noise—a weekly newsletter on all things GTM tech

Okay, I'm officially using Clay in almost every consulting gig I'm doing now (either the client already has it, or, I'm bringing it in for them). Here's how my thinking has shifted, and share 3 examples:

Clay is super powerful. There are tons of use cases (it's horizontal... which, I assume makes it a hard product to market and sell, but a fun product to expand with customers over time 😊).

Think of Clay as: a spreadsheet with APIs to 80+ data providers, Google search, and LLMs — all centralized in one place.

But, this post is really about my friend Andreas Wernicke, who has helped "show me the light" over the last couple of months about Clay (and AI as it relates to data).

There was not a single "aha" moment for me - instead, it has been a slow process.

But now, I can't unsee it.

Here are 3 projects Andreas has built for my/our clients:

Example 1 → LEAD SCORING

Think: a more personalized MadKudu (sorry MadKudu).

Tailored *exactly* to your needs.

This is stuff you CAN'T get in a standard B2B database, eg -

SaaS? Funding >$5M? Public or Private? Hiring x department? Mentions of x technology in job posting? Has a generative ai initiative right now? Following the company's founder on LinkedIn? # of website visitors in the US? Presence of x title at the company? Etc (The only limitation here, is your imagination)

Because all of this data is centralized in a Clay table, it can then be rolled up into custom-built logic to tier out companies as Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, or Unqualified.

It's magic. (And relatively cheap, and highly customizable).

Example 2 → MICRO-CAMPAIGNS

I wrote a dedicated post on this subject: https://lnkd.in/erSS5Kbm

I'm seeing this motion quietly, but quickly, become one of the most important ways of generating pipeline in 2024.

Here's how I define "micro-campaigns":
- Small, highly-targeted lists of, say, 50-250 contacts
- These lists are generated using *very* specific filtering and/or signals (usually using AI/agents at least for certain parts)
- Each list (aka "micro-campaign") is relevant this week, but won't be next month

I can't come up with these ideas for you. The customer is the expert. All we can do is pull these ideas out of them and scale them (using Clay).

Example 3 → PLG ENRICHMENT+AUTOMATION

Any sign-up gets automatically enriched in the background with data* that is highly relevant to the company.

*Rich data.
Not "off-the-shelf" data from a b2b database.
(Eg: the data points in example 1, above)

Andreas custom built an integration from the customer's database into their Clay table, and then back to their CRM and Sales Engagement platform, which can add these sign-ups into sequences, automatically.

––––––––––––––––––––––

Again, the only limitation is your creativity.

This has been a shift in my mindset over the last couple of months.

And, I think it's a *great* direction for modern GTM operators to be heading.

If you want to learn more, reach out to me or Andreas.

Writing @The Signal • Playing long-term games w/ long-term people

If you enjoy my content on LinkedIn, I think you'll love my newsletter, where I post once a week about the future of gtm/tech. Here are a few recent posts:

- "Micro-Campaigns"
- How to automate signal-based selling
- The New Playbook for Pipeline Generation is Emerging
- The "System of Intelligence"
- The Rise of the GTM Engineer
- Will AI Destroy Outbound?

Three ways you can help me: 

1. Subscribe

If you're not subscribed already, I'd love for you to join today (it's free, forever) - https://lnkd.in/dv3BduGr

2. Tag a friend

Know someone who enjoys building / discovering the future go-to-market playbook? Tag them here. I want to learn from the best. 

3. SMASH those Like and Subscribe buttons, bb 

(Am I doing this right? What level cringe am I at? Should I start a YouTube channel and launch a course? I won't. But... podcast? Maybe.)

Open article: The Signal | Brendan J Short | Substack by thesignal.club

David Connors gave me an exclusive peak behind the curtains of what they've been building around "go-to-network" (stuff they haven't revealed publicly yet 👀).

It’s clear the old playbook in B2B is broken.

“Growth at all cost” days are behind us.

And companies are looking for more efficient (and scalable) ways to attract + acquire + convert + retain customers.  

But, hidden within every company's network lies a web of warm relationships waiting to be discovered.

Warm intros have always made intuitive sense to me, to leverage in go-to-market. But, hard to crack. Hard to operationalize. There’s so much friction. (I know this, because, as a founder, I’ve tried many tools in the “warm intro”/”go-to-network” space). 

With that said, warm intros (at scale) feel inevitable.

(That’s why I included it on my list of predictions I put out at the end of last year)

In a world drowning in noise (and, I believe, AI will only further this trend), The Swarm 🔆 is betting that the future of B2B go-to-market will be powered by sophisticated network intelligence. And they're building the infrastructure to make that future possible.

I cover topics around how they've reduced the friction in their product in a clever way, what I find most interesting about how they're taking their product to market (spoiler: they're not competing with revtech, they're selling to revtech; reps don't have to learn a new workflow), and how they're quietly building a really interesting data asset. 

Read my full breakdown in this week's Sponsored Deep Dive post with The Swarm 🔆: https://lnkd.in/gWs_AeSF

WTF is GTN? (Go-To-Network)
and why you should care

Open article: WTF is GTN? (Go-To-Network) by thesignal.club

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