In Today's Edition

• Spray & Pray Just Won’t Go Away

  • That’s The Old Fashioned Way

  • But Are Results Really Non-Existent?

  • Teamwork Makes The Dream Work

  • Presence is a Present

  • So What Is Modern GTM?

  • Want Your Own Modern GTM Solution?

  • Yummy Tidbits From The Interwebs

  • Funny of The Day

  • Thanks To Our Sponsor - Aware

Spray & Pray Just Won’t Go Away

Last week, in AIC #54 - Marie Kondo Your Lead Gen - we talked a ton about how the economy is a little whacky & that things are likely gonna be tight for a while. That means you are going to have to SCRAPE & CLAW & FIGHT for market share and new clients.

But there is so much stupid thinking in the world of lead gen and go to market that JUST WILL NOT STOP. It’s infuriating. We have these amazing tools (Clay, Apollo, Dripify, every AI tool, etc) that can help you REALLY dial in to your target client so specifically that they are really likely to have whatever problem you solve near the top of their OMFG this is killing me list.

Still, every day I get messages like this - a straight up pitch with no context, no qualification…nothing.

I did a post with screenshots of the whole conversation - apparently that guy blocked me on LinkedIn today. Check out the entire exchange here…I thought it was hilarious:

That’s The Old Fashioned Way

It used to be that you’d find a big fat slice of the market and hammer away at it. Good quality writing plus enough send & you are going to have a pipeline you could brag about. The automation tools like Lemlist & Woodpecker came online and scale with GTM became so EASY. And people started to get lazy.

Then email platforms started getting better. Gmail & Outlook started sending these obvious unsolicited pitches to the dark nether regions of your inbox. So biz dev folks countered with MORE SCALE.

And that has continued to this day…but now we start to hear about things not going so well in the world of outreach and cold messaging. Here is a snippet of a recent LinkedIn conversation I was in:

Want Some Pod Exposure?

But Are Results Really Non-Existent?

To be completely honest…if you are relying on email as your sole GTM strategy, then it’s going to be a tough road. The “Send M0aR Emailz” crowd who send 10K emails a week, or the LinkedIn bros who own 400 fake profiles to barrage your inbox on the regular have made high-quality messaging difficult to parse out from the noise.

How do you increase that signal to noise ratio, then, if the email weapons of mass destruction have filled the market with spam craters and set all the ESP filters on high alert?

Teamwork Makes The Dream Work

High quality, thoughtful direct messaging is really effective when people read it. But the machine gum of irrelevancy makes you NOT want to read anything unless it is safe, or has some sort of woo-woo vibrational frequency that compels you to open it.

That woo-woo vibration that compels the right people to open your message isn’t in your masterful subject line or your witty PS that made you feel so clever after you wrote it. The vibration comes from other kinds of contact. The vibration that makes people open your email comes from your CEO on a podcast, or your logo on the sign up page of some virtual event, or the torrent of data insights your lead analyst is dumping out on X, or the in depth campaign structure breakdown that your media buyer did on your blog & YT channel, or your social media wiz doing LinkedIn lives about mastering whatever algo they are fascinated with…

It is the CHORUS of activity from your team, it’s the aggregate number times you make someone’s brain buzzy with new information, its the content that you create where the viewer feels seen, its the number of times that stupid meme you shared made someone shake their head and chuckle.

Presence is a Present

A long time ago, when I was running SEO at an agency in 2009 or so, I wrote an article in some ad industry rag where I said the biggest SEO advantage any page could have was to be associated with a brand somebody already knew. That was the difference in page ranking and clickthrough. It wasn’t really what was on the page, or whatever keywords you jammed in there, it was the fact that the page belong to something that you already had awareness of… (That was a little heretical at the time…SEO purists railed against the idea of brand as a factor of consumer trust…blech…glad I don’t have those fights anymore.)

GTM used to be about jamming yourself in enough inboxes until you found someone who is in-market. Today, it’s a dramatically different game.

Modern GTM means using all of those super-fancy tools to hear the signals that gives you evidence that someone might be more likely in market, then crafting a deeply resonant message that shows you understand the impact of whatever issue they are feeling and have a credible solution.

But that’s not enough. You need the present of presence. You need to have at least a modicum of visibility to give your prospect permission to receive the message you’ve sent. It is the visibility that you create that gives your direct outreach that tiny drop of familiarity (and therefore safety) that takes down the “Oh, crap, they are trying to sell me something…” wall that we carry around with us.

So What Is Modern GTM?

1. It’s direct outreach to an audience that you have some clear indication of the likelihood that there is some natural relevance between your offerings and their needs.

2. It’s content distributed across a few or many channels that creates enough awareness to generate a low level sense of familiarity.

3. It’s the rigor of messaging and content that continually gives a refined sense of understanding the circumstances and needs of your target audience.

4. It’s the maniacal focus on relevance and specificity that cuts through the detritus of every day digital existence and brings insight, generates clarity, elicits curiosity, provides validation or promises relief to the recipient.

It sounds REALLY hard doesn’t it? Wouldn’t massive piles of GDPR-violating, CANSPAM-smashing, LinkedIn TOS-avoiding spamarific communication be EASIER?

In short? No that isn’t easier. That’s digital pollution.

The magical thing about GTM activity is that it is hugely iterative. You take the simple problem set that your target audience has and your awesome solution and you draw a bright line connecting the two.

That’s your prime message.

Then you iterate on that message and turn it into a blog post, a LinkedIn video post, a discussion on a podcast, a looping slide deck at a conference & a million other things. Then you iterate on those messages for all of the people and positions that make the decisions at the companies you want to work with.

Then you reconsider the message and spin it 3 degrees to the west - and now you have a slightly different perspective to iterate on. Then spin it 17 degrees to the east and now do it again.

That prime message fuels your awareness which makes your GTM direct messaging perform.

Want Your Own Modern GTM Solution?

Yummy Tidbits From The Interwebs

🎙️ Podcasts & Audio Insights (Now with 83% less buzzword bloat)

1. Go-to-Market Plays #1: When To Do a Launch

Most people think a launch is a one-day confetti cannon moment. Nope. It’s a slow burn—like sourdough starter or revenge. This episode from The Marketing Millennials lays out how to actually time a launch like you have a clue (spoiler: it starts months before your big “announcement”).

👉 Listen here

2. GTM 141: Timeless Growth Tips from a $7.4B Oracle Exec

Ever wanted to pick the brain of someone who helped scale a business to billions (with a B) without drowning in jargon or AI-laced fairytales? This one delivers cold, hard GTM wisdom—like grandpa’s business advice if grandpa ran Oracle.

👉 Listen here

🧠 Strategic Frameworks (For when “just post on LinkedIn” isn’t a strategy)

3. The Ecosystem-Centered Marketing Strategy

Peter Cranstone basically says: “Hey kids, what if your marketing strategy wasn’t just built around you?” Revolutionary, I know. This is for grown-ups who want to build something sustainable and mutually valuable, not just spam prospects until they block you.

👉 Read it on NinjaCat

4. Why a Podcast is Essential to Your Go-to-Market Strategy in 2025

If your GTM plan is “send 20 cold emails and post a meme,” congrats—you’re generic. This piece argues why podcasts are the modern Trojan horse for GTM: slow build, high trust, long-term payoff. Think of it as compound interest, but with your voice and slightly better editing.

👉 Read it on TrellisWork

📊 Market Trends (That aren’t just ChatGPT + Midjourney = $$$)

5. Product Pulse: April 2025 – Event-Led Growth

Remember when events were just awkward handshakes and name tags? Not anymore. Splash says events are now core GTM infrastructure—aka the actual way to drive intent and build pipeline without praying to the LinkedIn gods.

👉 Read it on Splash

Funny of The Day

Thanks To Our Sponsor - Aware

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