What are the best outbound teams doing in 2026 that the rest of us are not?

A rare account of the specific moments a GTM changed shape, from narrowing to cold email agencies, to reversing the demo, to layering enterprise on top of self-serve. Best-in-class practice described as decisions rather than principles.

The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation

From First Round Review by Varun Anand ~25 min read

• Clay started with about 20 customers paying 30 to 200 dollars a month before the pivot that worked.
• Founders ran 8 plus reverse demos a day, watching users work rather than presenting.
• The waitlist stayed on for 15 months after public launch, through millions in ARR.
• Pricing is credits tied to columns times rows, and they took three swings before enterprise pricing landed.

The clearest definition yet of the role that is quietly reshaping outbound teams, with how Intercom, Canva, Notion and Ramp actually structure it and what to test for when hiring. Useful even if you never make the hire, because it describes where outbound leverage now comes from.

GTM Engineering: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Hire

From Clay by Mishti Sharma and Varun Anand long read

• Roughly 100 GTM engineer listings go live every month, for a role Clay only named in 2023.
• GTM engineering work climbs three rungs: data foundation, data modeling, data activation, and most teams stall on the first.
• Most companies embed GTM engineers inside RevOps first, then federate them out to the teams.
• At Verkada the setup lets SDRs book 80 to 100 meetings a month, about 4x their previous rate.

Shows the actual arithmetic of list building, cutting 66,000 companies down to 5,700 real targets, then tiering them by how much human effort each deserves. Also honest that signal-based plays alone are not enough, since most of your market shows no signal at any given moment.

An outbound playbook for 2025

From Growth Unhinged by Fivos Aresti long read

• Filtered 66,000 companies down to 5,700 accounts by applying ICP criteria (VC-funded HubSpot users).
• Tiers the outreach: a Dream 150 gets manual prospecting, Tier 1 adds cold calls, Tier 3 gets email only.
• Four pillars: cold calling, automated email, LinkedIn signal plays, manual prospecting for top accounts.
• Signals alone are not enough, only a fraction of the target market shows one at any given time.

Clay's own Head of GTM Engineering explains the role the written answer points to, in his own words: how the team wires data and AI into plays, and why every tactic has a short shelf life. Eighteen minutes, recorded in January 2026.

What is GTM engineering? Inside Clay's GTM strategy

On SaaStock by Everett Berry 18 min