RevOps is still the upper limit of your outbound

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RevOps is still the upper limit of your outbound.

Not AI.

We’re interviewing for head of RevOps at TitanX. This past month I felt like I was back in my middleware vendor days, talking to RevOps people non-stop.

It’s fascinating because the sharpest among them tend to present as anchors, as strong foundations that outlast the turbulence of hype cycles and GTM trends.

They are so grounded in what really makes GTM great, that when I say “I think the game has changed a lot in the last decade” I almost feel foolish.

Because what really has changed?

On the surface, everything.

If you believe LinkedIn and X and every-2nd-Tuesday’s-new-AI-release-breaking-frameworks:

GTM IS NEVER GOING TO BE THE SAME!!!

(I just fired my marketing org)

(I just replaced SDRs forever)

(or one I just saw today: “I just made myself obsolete”)

Etc.

But under the hood, change is gradual. Generational.

You still need a source of truth for GTM data, activity, and outcomes - and that is still the CRM.

You still need great foundations - targeting, messaging, discipline - or as Justin and Joey like to put it: List, Message, Rep, Follow-up.

Normally, I’m part of many GTM Engineering, Clay, AI related conversations. The Great New “Top Funnel Imagination” dominates my thinking.

But the last few weeks, the RevOps perspective took over.

In fact, we did a series of research efforts on our TAM and found some incredible insights to improve our targeting. AI did the research, but only to confirm a human hypothesis, through a RevOps-grade analysis, with systems thinking.

There is a huge gap between the velocity and success we have with companies who fit 3 key attributes, compared to those who don’t.

So now we build lists along those attributes.

The lists your team calls on, emails, reaches out via LinkedIn to - who makes these?

We think about this question all the time. At the end of the day, TitanX’s scoring cleans lists. 

And so many are junk. But not just “these are bad phone numbers” - many lists are plagued with retirees, contacts no longer with company, titles that don’t fit your ICP, etc.

Most teams don’t have a way of scrubbing this out systematically. ICP drift is commonplace, both on titles and companies.

Part of what happens is that we place a lot of implicit faith in the data vendors and enrichment tools that we source companies and contacts from.

We buy these platforms because we believe they have a representative sample of most of the companies and contacts that could possible be reached within our ICP.

We buy them because they boast hundreds of millions of contacts across tens of millions of companies, and that feels like enough.

Then we stuff this haystack through our own outbound engine and hope that our lowest paid GTM team members find the needles.

And when they don’t, we fire them.

I’d love to say I’m oversimplifying, but the advantage to having worked with many, many startups is you get to see patterns. Everyone does this.

I will say almost none of the RevOps people I spoke with understand how flawed this approach is.

Some even talked about how a pipeline generation model can provide a number for how many people should be sequenced, to bridge gaps in a given rep’s pipeline.

That would only work if there is some predictability to responsiveness.

That would only work if you filtered the haystack for needles, and only put those into the funnel.

I’d love for this not to be the case. But in all our engagements at TitanX, it’s clear that listbuilding is still a nebulous, difficult pain point for everyone.

Note - it is more fungible and flexible with Clay. More and more outbound leaders are tuning into the importance of high quality lists. Some even bring a sense of “this list came from this signal so we can deploy a specific message against it.”

But in most outbound orgs, listbuilding is left in a state of chaos.

Joey recently asked LinkedIn “Who builds the lists for reps to dial?” 27% said lists are built for reps. 33% said reps build their own. 37% said “little bit of both” - which sort of means, there isn't really a set process, more a loose array of parameters.

Consider a layer of filtering mechanisms, one for accounts, one for contacts:

The final list is high quality, and broken out by the best way to connect with these people.

It's worth mentioning this can start differently, with a feed of high quality accounts and contacts coming from platforms like Orbital (for niche industry contacts) or Landbase.

It’s also worth mentioning that moving aware from “data dumps” is almost always a good idea.

And there are many other considerations given your specific ICP, market, and tech stack. But this is the essential framework that will keep you from working only at the haystack level.

This is why everyone is lighting money on fire at the top of the funnel.

You can see how this kind of systems work is a RevOps limitation. RevOps needs to be involved here, building a smooth architecture to how you get in touch with the right people.

But, because it often hasn’t, a new pseudo-RevOps group has formed - GTM Engineering - to take over top funnel architecture.

The issue is that RevOps believes in robust, shareable, long-lasting architecture, and GTM Engineering has yet to offer much in that regard. Most of the time you get one-off campaigns launched into the ether with little thought for follow-up or nurture or a consistent GTM operation going forward.

What if we merged the two mindsets to make best-in-class prospecting systems?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who bakes the “List” cake. It could be “SDR operations” - or Pipeline operations (that’s a thing at a couple customers). Listbuilding Lead. GTM Engineer. RevOps. Sales Ops. Sales Enablement. Demand Gen. Growth Marketing. SDR Lead.

Who cares?

The cake just needs baked. Really, really well.

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)

P.S. If you have questions, hit reply. I read every response.