Kellen Casebeer

The Deal Lab

Message-Market-Fit is when you know exactly what to say in your prospects’ own language to book consistent outbound meetings with them.

We’ll help you find it for less than the cost of an SDR.

Then we’ll either keep running our systems and booking calls for you, or we can build & train your in-house team on exactly how we do it.

Chosen as 1 of 25 Smartlead Certified Partners.

Founder

Clay Cafe

I started a Slack community of GTM Operators that has grown into the world's most potent hivemind of GTM excellence.

What began as a way of staying on top of the latest trends has become a breeding ground for innovation. Careers, Agencies and more have been launched out of this free little community.

We do a weekly live call, Friday 10am Pacific (the best time zone). Join us, ask stuff, and walk away with an MBA in GTM. - Kellen

Smartlead

Out of 1000s of applicants, I was chosen as one of 25 Smartlead Certified Partners for The Deal Lab's successes delivering outbound campaigns via Smartlead on behalf of our clients.

Our specialties in Deep Market Segmentation & Analysis, Cold Outbound Copywriting, Sales Automations, and Ai // LLM integration across the GTM stack make us an ideal partner for anyone looking to methodically approach outbound in the pursuit of repeatable success.

Our clients range from early-stage startups to publicly traded companies.

🏆 What is the Certified Partner Program?
It is an exclusive collection of top-tier cold email experts and lead gen agencies dedicated to helping you generate more revenue from your cold email marketing efforts.

Smartlead Certified Partner & Hall Of Fame Member

HeyReach.io

Recognized by HeyReach.io as one of the go-to experts for running high-performance LinkedIn outbound campaigns.

I bring HeyReach into The Deal Lab’s GTM stack to give clients a channel with completely different market and messaging dynamics than email or phone - helping de-risk message-market-fit pilots, go after smaller TAMs, or to pour fuel on proven motions.

Certified Expert Partner

Clay

I have been a paid Clay user since February 2023.

Since then, I have booked thousands of meetings for myself and my clients using methodologies that would be impossible without Clay.

At my company, The Deal Lab, we create some of the most creative and effective GTM plays in the world, including DFY outbound campaigns, inbound enrichment flows, 100% custom one-of-a-kind "intent" signal capture and enrichments, bounced-at-paywall re-engagement automations, and much more.

I have coached users from Y Combinator, Apollo, and other agencies, and have even introduced Clay to some of the other Clay Experts.

Additionally, I run an unofficial "Clay Cafe" community where I share workflows, answer questions, and host weekly Zoom office hours with other Clay creators, agency owners, sales reps, and founders.

Don't hesitate to reach out if there's something that I can do for you; I love meeting new people, working on fun GTM challenges, and making an impact.

Certified Clay Expert 🥇

Apex Revenue

Worked as the 1st Vp of Sales for Apex Revenue, a legendary sales consultancy building outbound sales teams with a 5x ROI guarantee against a $120,000 sale price.

We mapped the market, built out messaging, connected tech stacks, hired reps, and oversaw the operation.

I got to 0 -> 1 30+ sales functions, learned a ton (maybe too much for my own good), and made some lifelong friends along the way.

VP of Sales

LEON Health Science

Joined company pre-product to build the GTM motion as Chief of Staff to our Founder. Responsibilities included:

- Define initial target Ideal Customer Profile(s)
- Crafted initial outbound messaging to test against pre-Product-Market-Fit ICPs
- Worked with Product to align MVP of software to market needs via product-market-feedback-loops
- Created and ran cold outbound messaging // cadences using cold calls, emails, social touches & videos
- Closed first Beta client(s) & paid client(s) prior to product being built using slide decks alone
- Built & ran sales tech stack including CRM, sequencer, data tool, zapier automations, slack alert
- Owned sales & marketing reporting to Founders
- Worked with Customer Success to foster early user relationships & create strong feedback loops with customers
- Drove brand awareness with heavy social presence, blog writing, and podcast appearances

This was one of the most transformative experiences in my life; it's where I learned how to do things from 0-> 1.

Chief Of Staff, Head of GTM (Go-To-Market)

Insperity

HR platform for SMBs & MidMarket companies. 3+ month deal cycle in a complex selling environment selling to business owners & Founders focused on operational excellence & risk mitigation.

Still friends with a lot of my clients :)

Account Executive

Darktrace

Generated $2M+ in closed revenue with CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, and IT / Cyber Security leadership across software, financial services, gaming and government sectors in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Enterprise SDR

Home Automation Startup

Doubled YoY Revenue 3x in a row running a home automation business while in college. 

Clients included tech executives, NFL & NBA athletes, rock stars, and other cool people looking to do innovative things with consumer technology.

Helping companies find Message-Market-Fit | Founder @ The Deal Lab | Smartlead Certified Partner | Clay Certified Expert

Obsessed with speed to value.

The #1 revenue struggle that most companies face is their inability to consistently & repeatably generate pipeline that converts into stable revenue.

I’ve built a systematic way of dividing a market, identifying where your buyers are within it, and rapidly testing messaging against those segments in the pursuit of Message-Market-Fit.

For less than the cost of an SDR I can run cold outbound campaigns (phone and/or email) on your behalf and establish what works vs what doesn't.

10x the volume, 10x the quality, and 10x the rate of learning vs doing it yourself or hiring a jr sales rep to try.

I do this through my company, The Deal Lab.

We are a proud Smartlead Certified Partner, which means the #1 tool for people building businesses like ours has recognized us for our excellence in the space.

If you’re considering building an outbound program, or have one that isn’t performing like you wish it would - give me 30 minutes to change your perspective & I guarantee you’ll want to find ways we can keep the wins rolling together… people often remark that they're stunned what I'll do for free and confused why I don't paywall my helpfulness.

When I'm not running my business, I also hangout in the free communities that I have built for digital sellers & side hustlers with the goal of being everything I wanted ((and needed)) but didn't have access to earlier in my career.

I'm also really into submission grappling ((BJJ)), holistic health, lifting weights, and taking Lindy walks in the California sunshine with my beautiful family.

If you're a sales rep, sales leader or Founder with questions or looking for support on something - drop me a DM 🤠 I love chopping it up and solving problems with my fellow sellers ❤️

Clay Cafe (soon to be GTMcafe.com) is up to almost 1,400 members

What began as a way to cure my solo-founder-loneliness has spiraled into a bustling ecosystem all of its own

Every Friday from 10am pacific until 11 or noonish we do an open office that continues to shock newcomers with “how valuable” it is

My #1 focus is participating in the doing and talking about of some of the greatest GTM strategies in b2b

We help agencies launch, we help in house teams do savvy stuff, and we help random passerby’s find a home 😌❤️

I changed the name to free things up a bit & to decouple our own excellence from other storylines happening in parallel

There’s a ton of high level operators inside of there building, sharing, and void of a lot of what makes LinkedIn a suboptimal “community building” platform

No cost, no bs… gtmcafe dot com baby 🤠😎❤️

Obsessed with speed to value.

Working as a sales leader, having trained hundreds of SDRs on how to book calls, I saw that the #1 thing that companies struggle with in sales is creating pipeline.

That pipeline struggle generally came down to misaligned communication; sales reps rarely understand "how to speak their prospects' language" in order to drive intrigue and interest in meeting with your company, or they lacked a modern tech stack that would do most of the heavy lifting for them.

So I created a service, CliAcquire, to help people "speak their prospects' language"; Message-Market-Fit as I call it.

For less than the cost of an SDR I can run cold outbound email campaigns that book calls with your target market.

Or you can pay me to teach you how to do it...

When I'm not running my business, I also hangout in The Speakeasy - a slack community for digital sellers & side hustlers that I started with the goal of being everything I wanted ((an needed)) but didn't have access to earlier in my career.

I'm also really into submission grappling ((BJJ)), holistic health, lifting weights, and taking Lindy walks in the California sunshine with my beautiful family.

If you're a sales rep, sales leader or Founder with questions or looking for support on something - drop me a DM 🤠 I love chopping it up and solving problems with my fellow sellers ❤️

It’s Saturday, it’s not even 10am yet, and half a dozen of the best GTM agency owners are already 52 replies deep into “what the best tech is to manage their agency”

Garrett Wolfe asked, Ravi Khurana, Mitchell Keller, Charles Ellenburg III and myself dove in…

This is what happens 24/7 inside the 1200+ member slack community that we built

Whether you’re a pro looking to hang with friends or someone new aspiring to learn… gtmcafe.com is the GOAT community

When you send a mean unsubscribe message, this is who you’re talking to

It looks different to "test messaging to see what works" and maximize the yield against that messaging.

Here's how I approach each

1) Message-market-fit testing: I made up this term while working as a fractional VP of sales helping teams build outbound motions.

Most of our clients had $1M+ revenue, so the idea of lacking "product market fit" was not resonant with them.

Yet their outbound struggled to produce any results - and they asked me if outbound doesn't work for them

I had to explain that why someone says "yes" to talking to you is different than why they say "yes" to buying from you.

Especially when they're not yet problem aware, and you want to resonate with the top 40% of your market vs only the top 10% (400% increase in reachable market using this sort of phrasing)

Using email is best here, since it removes influence from the LinkedIn profile (aka founders convert better than new BDRs)

And removes individual performance that comes via the phones (Evan Dunn and I have playful disagreement here, but imo what Charles Needham can do on the phones has little representation of what your next 4 Jr SDRs will be able to do)

Email = async, hyper repeatable, and "deifies" the message itself vs tonality, moment-in-time-sales-jitsu, profile optimization, title optimization, or anything other than what message goes to what audience to drive sales calls

We concede comprehensive "yield" to allow "purity"; think "clinical trials" where the best practitioner "actualizes" each formulation - they DO NOT throw away 95% of potential formulations because they "believe" the other 5% will work best

All you need for this is Smartlead (their new people data finder is crazy & you can validate emails inside the platform), Ocean.io (they've been our #1 company finder since day 1), and ScaledMail and/or Hypertide.io to send emails from.

Don't overcomplicate it. Test data = proof. Outcomes = the truth

2) Maximizing the number of sales calls set: Once you have relative best performing messaging, you can focus on "yield".

Now you want to take that messaging and start layering on LinkedIn and phone calling and maybe some letter drops via LettrLabs (Adam Rutkowski)

For LinkedIn, HeyReach.io is an obvious choice - I will help anyone get this going if needed - they're amazing

For phones, we're taking all of our replies (positive, negative, we don't care), throwing them through BetterContact for their native "waterfall" (to maximize the % of contacts we get a mobile number for), and then calling them

Even when "maximizing yield", only 70%ish of your send volume should be focused on "what you know works". I like to break that into 2 chunks of 35% each, doing an A/B test on small changes to known working funnels

The remaining 30%ish I split 10/10/10 and do wild ideas, net-new tests, and yolo stuff to constantly be "reinventing" what works best.

For those smaller tests, throughput potency is the focus vs total number of replies or leads.

Hope this helps :)

Some VP at Google replied to my cold email this week.

Still wild to see that happen in 2025.

Cold outbound isn’t dead - it’s just misunderstood.

Most people still optimize for volume instead of precision.

That’s why every Wednesday, I go live for an hour with Samantha & 💜 🔮 Will Allred to break down real outbound.

Message-market-fit testing, frameworks, and live copy reviews; all the good stuff.

It’s free. It’s live. And it’s happening today at 11am pacific time.

Zoom link’s in the comments.

P.s. thank you Dean Fiacco + ScaledMail, Alka Gupta + Smartlead, and Michael Heiberg + Ocean.io for keeping us in the primary inbox… 

even against tall odds ;)

If you need excellent HubSpot RevOps support, Daniel Hill is NOT CHEAP (and won't let you hire him full time 🥲) - but has been an 11/10 partner on a project with The Deal Lab on something that would take me 2x longer

If he ever lowers his rates, I'll make a post like this on a tuesday at 10am pacific or whatever... 

but instead here's 9:47 pm on a sunday ;)

For years (until now), the contact data market has been built on extraction.

You paid per lead, per export, per lookup - feeding a model that made scale expensive and experimentation harder.

Smartlead’s new SmartProspect release flips that model entirely; and we're testing it (via early access - general release coming soon).

Instead of renting access to data, teams get verified, live contacts directly inside Smartlead - maintained by a flat upkeep fee that keeps quality high and cost predictable.

Giving teams free, verified data and only charging to keep it fresh changes the whole equation - especially in a space that’s always made you pay to grow.

If you want to see how The Deal Lab uses Smartlead as a full-stack system for testing message-market fit faster, drop a comment and I’ll share a short walkthrough.

A personal cheat code: if you align what excites you the most (competing & serving others) with what provides for your loved ones… you’ll become unstoppable 😈❤️

1st) a dear friend (and competitor now lolz) landed their first client! So exciting and it means the world they share this moment with me. Game on

2nd) a random connection comes to me for a way out “of the trenches”; brother I have been there…. They don’t know how hard ima show up for them - we’ll make a little content piece out of it - no transactions needed… 

3rd) a customer shared this after an emergency all hands to address something their team needed. Out of scope technically, but spiritually they knew this is the type of stuff The Deal Lab thrives on

4th) a quote that inspires me. Electric energy. Hang it from the rafters and hold me To it  😈

T-minus 59 minutes until our weekly open office for GTMcafe.com , followed by a lil podcast recording with Dean Fiacco 

“Gm” everyone 🤠

In 2023 when I started The Deal Lab, our "thing" was still helping people find message market fit

But back then, the tools we have for data scraping were much simpler.

We had to change how we thought in order to build market alpha

We'd focus on using granularity to improve specificity, and specificity as a lever for potency

Meaning we would use narrower list criteria to have more compelling copy

Smartlead has been an amazing partner since day 1, and Thursday we will be hosting a session on how you can replicate some of this thinking in order to drive more wins for yourself or your own clients

Who's gonna come hang with Akash Ravikumar and I? <3

Being really talented in something is like having a 250 lb bowling ball

And the decision between taking that skillset and building a business vs applying it inside of someone else’s is more different than I’d have imagined before starting The Deal Lab 

If you stay “in house” and work “for someone”, it’s like throwing your bowling ball downhill with bumpers 

Gravity is your friend - the forces of the universe make it EASIER for your ball to hurdle down the lane into those pins

You regularly hit strikes

For some people, that’s extremely important 

Now entrepreneurship? 

Imagine you have that bowling ball, and now your task is to go rock climbing (you don’t have a backpack)

In one hand is this ridiculous, 250 pound ball - leaving you with just one hand free to climb 

 The bowling ball does little for you re: climbing the wall

It’s every other thing besides the ball that you need to overcome

If throwing bowling balls down bowling lanes made you feel good - say goodbye 🤣

No bumpers. No gravity. Just grit.

“Why would someone choose to do this?” You make ask… I don’t honestly have an answer - I think you just know if it’s something you need to do

And time sifts through who’s “about it” vs not - things end up where they belong 🤝

The scariest part of outbound isn’t the cold email.

It’s bad deliverability. 👻

Most teams don’t think about infrastructure until their domains tank.

That’s the wrong order.

Your mailboxes are your foundation.

If they’re weak, every campaign cracks.

That’s why this is crazy:

🕸️ The Spookiest Mailbox Sale of the Year - "Powered by SmartSenders"

🎁 100% free Admin Google & Outlook mailboxes for your first month
(min 51 mailboxes, setup included).

✅ Works for Smartlead and non-Smartlead users.

✅ Properly configured by experts - no manual setup.

✅ Valid until Halloween night (Oct 31).

The people who scale fastest next quarter are setting up infrastructure this week.

Claim it before it vanishes. 🎃 (see below)

Most teams overpay for outbound because they start with bad data.

They buy a “lead list.”

Then smash “ICP” and “messaging” together like that’s the same thing.
It isn’t.

There are dozens of interwoven stories to tell inside every market - and if you can’t see those layers, you’re flying blind.

That’s why Ocean.io has always been our first stop.

For the first year of The Deal Lab, we built every company list directly inside Ocean.

No scraping.

No enrichment.

Just clean segmentation and logic that actually reflected the real market.

These days, we split and enrich that data further in Clay - but honestly, we don’t have to.

Ocean gives so much control and coverage that it’s often where our tests start and end.

Lately, it’s even becoming our go-to for people data too.

We’re seeing more and more teams switch over.

Ocean.io’s running 25% off annual plans + 25% extra credits for another 48ish hours:

🏄🏼‍♂️ https://lnkd.in/gRRm-QAN

Start with smarter data.

Everything downstream compounds.

“Clinical Trials for Outbound Messaging” is The Deal Lab 

How would you pitch yours?

Man I am buzzing with excitement for this launch announcement Trigify.io & Max Mitcham are about to drop

T minus 20 minutes… no recordings and no replays… last chance to go sign up everyone 🙈😈❤️

In 1943 the AT-6C trained pilots who would go on to fly real combat missions.

It wasn’t glamorous. It was the crucible.

If you could handle the Texan, you could handle whatever came next.

Yesterday my little cousin got to fly one.

Eighty years later, the same plane that once prepared people for war is now a museum piece with wings.

It made me think about how technology carries forward.

What was once cutting-edge becomes a stepping stone.

Today’s frontier becomes tomorrow’s foundation.

The same thread runs through every era.

Mastery before machinery.

Tools change, but the core doesn’t.

In my work I try to stay tied to that thread.

The systems evolve, the noise shifts, the hype comes and goes.

What lasts is the ability to see through it, learn fast, and move with precision.

In 41 minutes I’m going live with Samantha & 💜 (will made his name weird on here) to talk cold outbound

Here’s the link: https://lnkd.in/gtzTdxuV

Photo is my son on Halloween :)

3 types of systems. 3 ways to interact with them.

Simple: fully knowable and predictable

Complicated: not easy to know, but once known, predictable

Complex: not knowable - only modelable within boundaries

People try to treat cold outbound (and GTM more broadly) as simple or complicated.

Both miss the mark.

Outbound isn’t a puzzle you solve once - it’s an ecosystem you tend.

Signals shift. Messaging evolves. Human behavior loops back on itself.

You don’t “solve” outbound.

You learn how to sense, adapt, and respond inside a complex system.

("Complex systems theory" will provide a wealth of knowledge on how to effectively operate here and why a lot of what people spend their time focusing on is a total waste)

A reframe on popular advice, that I’ve found has served me as a skilled seller turned business owner:

Common advice: find “easy” customers.

I.e. people who pay high margin, don’t ask for too much, are nice, etc…

All of this is fine

And rooted in what is easiest for “me”, the agency

When I started out, I did not have the luxury of choice

And without realizing it developed a muscle that I see a lot of my peers struggle with

Adaptability & resilience

Pressure is a blessing

Sometimes, you have a client who is “needy” as the naive business owner may see it.

My reframe: clients who ask for a lot, are “demanding”, or put pressure on you to perform are some of the best you can have

Yes, it is harder

Like a 350 lb back squat…

You know who can handle that load? STRONG PEOPLE.

You know who can’t? Almost everyone alive.

Being able to handle the load = a celebration of skill and strength

When my business has been in weaker states, high-intensity clients put pressure on us and strained the system as a whole

As we’ve built and improved, these types of clients drove us to higher highs & forced us to adopt new ancillary skill sets that bolsters our core offering

I’ve had to hire differently, sell differently, and it allows us to win deals today in head to head scenarios pretty consistently

It’s not bad to be super productized - but it’s also not the only path…

Saturday morning thought for ya :)

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