Tom Grainger's Linkedin Analytics

Someone tried to drag our GTM funnel, using our own graphic... Matt Lakajev publicly framed it as a “quick-win spam funnel” pushed by “22-year-olds chasing volume.” Here’s what he missed: → The entire strategy is built around founder-led content → It tracks real buying signals before any outreach happens → It’s designed to protect brand equity — not burn it → And it takes weeks to build: TAM mapping, enrichment, segmentation, testing, orchestration It’s not “quick.” It’s just engineered properly. To his credit: Matt reached out, admitted he hadn’t taken the time to fully understand the system, and confirmed he’s deleted the original post. That was the right move. Respect for owning it. But the narrative had already landed, so we’re setting the record straight. Because when your strategy works, people will either try to copy it, or try to tear it down. Either way, they’re still looking at your funnel. 👉 Want to see the real thing (not the caricature)?: https://lnkd.in/eFrC2nZb

I speak with dozens of businesses each month And around 7 out of 10 are winging their sales process → No structure → No automation → No real-time follow-up It’s usually older, more traditional industries And here’s the crazy part → These businesses are already crushing it Decades of reputation, referrals, and product-market fit But with a few small changes… They could unlock an entirely new level Things like: → Sending leads to sales while they’re still on your website → Auto-writing follow-up emails before the call even ends → Routing warm buyers to reps in real time Here are 4 workflows I’d drop into any sales org tomorrow 👇 1. Inbound → Routing → Track site + LinkedIn engagement with Teamfluence™ or Trigify.io → Enrich leads in Clay → Ping reps in Slack within 15 mins 2. Outbound → Smart Sequencing → Segment by use case in Clay → Use Instantly.ai with spintax → Auto-parse replies and route warm ones into Slack 3. Calls → Follow-Up Engine → Record with Fathom - AI Meeting Assistant → Summarise in OpenAI → Auto-draft 3 follow-up emails using OpenAI 4. Reps → Daily Digest Slack sends a morning digest with: → Hot leads from yesterday → Booked meetings → Call summaries and action items → All fully enriched, ready to go Most of these companies don’t need more leads They just need more structure Give them Clay, Instantly.ai, Slack, OpenAI, Zapier And a GTM engineer to wire it together... And they’d blow their competitors out the water

I stopped trying to “personalise” cold emails. And started doing this instead → I built a table in Clay that pulls every LinkedIn profile view, comment, and like we get using Teamfluence™ & Trigify.io. Then we score each person against our ICP and enrich their email with Findymail. If they’re a match? They get routed to Instantly.ai & HeyReach.io with messaging based on what they engaged with. The results? - 5x reply rates - 10+ qualified meetings/month - No more burnout But here’s the part most teams miss. → We only email people who already know who we are. That’s why the replies are so warm. Because we’re not chasing strangers. We’re following signals.

Most “outbound engines” are just one rep doing hero work. No backup plan. No automation. No safety net. If they get sick, your revenue forecast gets sick too. This is how $1M ARR companies stall. → The founder sells the first 20 logos. → They hire a great AE. And suddenly that person becomes the pipeline. → No signal tracking. → No shared context. → No visibility if they’re OOO for 48 hours. One week off = 3 deals ghosted = 46% miss on the quarter. Not because the AE sucked. Because the GTM motion was built like a house of cards. Here’s how we’d fix it: 1. Turn your founder into a magnet. Start posting consistently on LinkedIn - not thought leadership, but first-person content that shows the buyer you get it. This builds trust at the top of funnel and drives profile views, comments, and DMs from actual prospects. 2. Capture signals instead of chasing leads. Use tools like Trigify.io, Teamfluence™, and RB2B to monitor engagement—profile views, post interactions, company visits. Push this into Clay and enrich it in real time. Now your “lead list” updates itself. 3. Route high-intent leads to someone who can act. Fast. The second someone hits the threshold (commented twice, visited pricing page, etc.), send it to an SDR or AE via Slack with a short note: “This one’s hot. Reach out now.” Response time = conversion rate. 4. Add an inbox manager. No, not a junior VA. A trained operator who lives inside your inbox, follows SOPs, answers replies in under 15 minutes, and loops in AEs when it’s time. Speed + context = more booked calls. You don’t need more reps. You need fewer single points of failure. Founder-led doesn’t scale. But neither does rep-led. Only system-led does.

Your SDR isn’t underperforming. → Your system is. We onboarded a client last year whose reply rates were under 1%. They thought their rep was the problem. “He’s not doing enough volume.” “He’s not personalising properly.” “He’s just not hungry.” Turns out, the rep was fine. What was broken? → No data validation. Just old lists recycled from 2022. → Messaging (kinda...) built for personas, not real-time buying signals. → Domains flagged from bad sending practices. Zero inbox monitoring. → No reply routing. No triage. No CRM updates. The worst part? They had 500+ inbound signals a month. Not a single one was being enriched, qualified, or followed up on. — That’s when it hit them: Outbound wasn’t a rep issue...It was a systems issue. And systems are your responsibility as a founder. You can’t scale outbound the way you scale headcount. You scale it by designing a machine: → Demand-led → Signal-driven → Operationally sound All before you put a rep in the seat. — Here’s the shift we made: → Built a Clay table that tracks LinkedIn views (Trigify.io, Teamfluence™) & web traffic (Vector 👻). → Set up Slack + CRM alerts for “hot” signals (decision-makers w/ multiple touchpoints). → Routed those to a reply-ready inbox manager w/ 15min SLA. → Created an Instantly.ai sequence targeting only mid-intent, warmed-up prospects. No more mass sends. No more cold-as-ice follow-ups. No more burned domains. Just warm leads, perfectly timed. Reply rate? From 0.9% → 5.7% in 3 weeks. — Cold email isn’t an SDR problem. It’s a systems problem. If your reps are underperforming… check your infrastructure. Because right now, most teams are setting fire to their domains - and blaming the smoke on their reps. Fix the system. Then hire the rep.

FOUNDER: “We rewrote the emails. Rewrote them again. A/B tested 12 variations. Still nothing.” Burned out. Panicked. Sitting across from me, trying to figure out why their outbound system just… stopped working. Here’s what I told them: Your outbound isn’t broken because of copy. It’s broken because no one’s managing the machine. The backend was a disaster. - 6 domains firing cold emails from the same IP. - One inbox hitting 7% bounce rate for weeks - no alerts. - 3 scripts running with no segmentation, one targeting everyone in SaaS with the same 3 lines of copy. - And no one replying to replies, just one poor SDR ghosted by 12 missed meetings. This wasn’t outbound. This was an unmanaged liability. They had a setup - but not a system. And definitely not a scalable one. Here’s the reality most founders don’t see until it’s too late: Setup ≠ Maintenance ≠ Scale → Setup gets you off the ground. → Maintenance keeps you in the air. → Scale needs a pilot, not a passenger. The best systems we’ve built, ones doing 5–10 calls/week with <1% bounce and 5%+ reply rates, follow the same playbook: Dedicated Infra: → New domains. Proper warmup. Deliverability tracking every week. Spam tests, not guesswork. Real-Time List Health: → Validate before sending. Remove soft bounces. Monitor intent signals and engagement decay. Live Reply Handling: → 15-minute response windows. No leads go cold. Inbox managers trained like closers. Performance Loops: → Cold campaigns are living systems. We don’t “test” them—we evolve them. Daily. Segmented Messaging → Not “personalised.” Relevant. Built off live intent signals, not first names and emojis. If no one’s managing deliverability, warmups, list health, and reply handling, you don’t have a system. You have a liability. And sooner or later, the liability gets flagged, filtered, or forgotten.

Louis once again giving away our entire business model… not happy 🙍‍♂️

Personalisation isn’t the problem. Relevance is. Everyone keeps trying to write the perfect cold opener. → “Loved your podcast.” → “Saw you spoke at SaaStr.” → “Congrats on the funding.” And yeah - it sounds nice. But it doesn’t make people reply. → Because being noticed isn’t the same as being needed. We used to personalise every message manually. Spent hours referencing LinkedIn posts and founder interviews. Then we stopped trying to be charming. And started being relevant. Now every campaign starts with relevance scoring: → ICP match → Active on LinkedIn → Recently hired for GTM roles → Using a tool like Apollo or Instantly → Engaging with competitor content That tells us more than any “love your podcast” ever could. Example: We were targeting Heads of Revenue at B2B SaaS companies. → One lead posted a job opening for 2 new SDRs. → And they’d just liked a post about deliverability issues. We led with this: "Saw you’re growing the outbound team. If you’re open to chatting, I can show you how we help GTM leaders book 6–10 calls/month without hiring more reps just by fixing deliverability + routing warm leads faster." They replied in 11 minutes. Not because we were clever. Because we were relevant.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to admit this But I’ve been pretty anxious about AI lately Every week it feels like another industry gets replaced overnight This week? Creatives Graphic designers, photographers, video editors , entire careers just…evaporating And if it can happen to them that fast… What about sales? We’re already using AI to write emails, track intent, even handle calls It’s not hard to imagine one business: - deploying a buying AI - And another deploying a selling AI - And letting them figure it out without us So what happens to people like me? I used to think if I just got good enough at cold email, I’d be safe - Then it was demand gen - Then LinkedIn content Now it’s like… none of those things really feel defensible anymore And I’m not saying this to be dramatic I’m saying it because I know I’m not the only one feeling this way But here’s the one thing I’m clinging to: → It still matters who you build for → How you connect the dots → What system you build around the signals Because AI might do the heavy lifting But it still needs a map Would love to hear how others are thinking about this? P.S. the new GPT update is... interesting

I think sales is heading the same way as creative. It’s all becoming a game of taste. The playing field is level now. Everyone has access to the same tools, the same data, the same workflows. And headcount doesn’t help if your offer sucks. So what’s left? Taste. The ability to choose better targets. Write sharper copy. Spot better signals. Build cleaner workflows. Outbound used to be a race: Who could spam faster? Who could shout louder? That game’s over. Buyers are jaded. Everyone’s been burned. And attention is harder to earn than ever. So what wins now? Slower, smarter outbound. → Tools like TitanX (Joey Gilkey) help you stop calling 1,000 random numbers by true fit leads that will actually pick up. → Trigify.io, Teamfluence™, and Common Room show you who’s already looking → Clay qualifies fast and deep → Lavender 💜🔮 www.ora.im and Twain help you write with intent, not fluff You don’t need more SDRs. You need better judgment. Taste is the new edge. P.S. I've been loving putting myself into vintage Malboro ads to fantasise a life I don't live.

465 meetings. No ads. No SDR team. (IMPORTANT UPDATE: LINK TO RESOURCE NOW IN THIS POST) Just a simple workflow that turns content signals into pipeline. Most teams ignore the warmest leads they’ve got: People who view your profile Like your post Click your ad and bounce We don’t. We track them. We score them. We follow up within minutes. And it works — 465 meetings booked last year using this exact setup. → I mapped the whole thing out in a 63+ page playbook Link: https://lnkd.in/eFrC2nZb

I used to ignore my LinkedIn profile views too. I'd see a few visits, think “cool,” and move on. But every view is a potential buyer. Someone curious enough to check you out, but not ready to message. So I stopped letting them slip through the cracks. And built a system that turns views into booked meetings, automatically. Here’s how it works: Teamfluence™ tracks who's viewing my profile Clay filters for job titles, company size, and ICP fit Findymail gets verified contact info Instantly.ai sends a personalised email while interest is still high The result? No more cold emails to people who’ve never heard of me. Just high-intent outreach to warm leads that already know my name. → I broke the full workflow down into this visual. Took one weekend to build. Now it runs in the background every week. One-time build. Ongoing pipeline.

Sales teams miss this window (And it’s killing their pipeline)… → A lead likes your post. → Views your profile. → Maybe even DMs you. →You wait 24 hours to follow up. By then? Cold. → We built a system that hits warm leads within 15 minutes. We monitor triggers across LinkedIn: profile views, comments, competitor engagement. Using tools like: →Trigify.io →Teamfluence™ Clay qualifies and enriches in real-time. If they match our ICP, they’re routed instantly: → Slack pings the SDR → CRM logs the lead → Instantly.ai fires a personalised sequence No delays. No missed signals. No leads slipping through the cracks. Same traffic. Same team. More pipeline.