How the best do it

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

The short answer

They treat outbound as an engineering problem, not a headcount problem. The best teams have someone technical sitting inside GTM (the GTM engineer role) who wires together data sources, enrichment and AI to find signals nobody else is acting on, then builds a play around each one. The three rules Clay's own team lives by are worth stealing: find signals that are specific rather than generic, expect your creative edge to decay quickly, and win by iterating faster than the competition. Notice what this is not: it is not more volume, and it is not better templates. It is a tighter loop between a hypothesis and a measured result.

Go deeper, your way

3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Advanced

Why we picked it 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

Open clay.com →
📰 Newsletter
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it 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

Open growthunhinged.com →

The same ground, at another level

How outbound that works reads from a different seat.

I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start? Start with twenty companies, not two thousand. Pick people you can describe precisely (job title, company size, the specific problem you think they... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → My cold calls die in the first ten seconds. What do I actually say when they pick up? Stop asking whether you caught them at a bad time, because it hands them an exit and Gong's data across hundreds of millions of calls shows it cuts... Doing the work 3 resources → When do I hire SDRs, and how many AEs can one SDR feed? Hire SDRs after you can point at a message and a segment that reliably produce meetings, not before. If a founder or AE cannot book meetings from c... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

Terms in this answer

Go-to-Market

People also ask

I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start? Start with twenty companies, not two thousand. Pick people you can describe precisely (job title, company size, the specific problem you think they... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder in India and my buyers are in the US. How do I get a stranger twelve time zones away to reply? Distance is not your problem, credibility is. A US buyer who has never heard of you needs a reason to believe you understand their world, so lead w... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → My cold calls die in the first ten seconds. What do I actually say when they pick up? Stop asking whether you caught them at a bad time, because it hands them an exit and Gong's data across hundreds of millions of calls shows it cuts... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I build a target list that is worth working instead of scraping ten thousand random companies? A list is a hypothesis about who has your problem badly enough to pay, so write the hypothesis down before you open any tool. Start from the accoun... Doing the work 4 resources → When do I hire SDRs, and how many AEs can one SDR feed? Hire SDRs after you can point at a message and a segment that reliably produce meetings, not before. If a founder or AE cannot book meetings from c... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Should my outbound team sit in India while my buyers are in the US? Yes for most of the funnel, and this is a genuine structural advantage rather than a compromise. Indian SaaS companies have built pipeline into the... Leading a GTM team 5 resources →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Get your first customers, our Starting Up track.

How do I actually get my first 10 customers when nobody has heard of me? You go get them by hand, one at a time, email people you already know, people your investors/friends know, and strangers in the exact niche you're ... 19 resources → When is my product 'ready' to launch? Sooner than you think, a launch is not one perfect moment, it's something you'll do again and again. Ship as soon as it solves one real problem for... 20 resources →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.

How do I build a referral program that people actually use, not one that just sits unused in my Shopify admin? Most referral programs die because the ask is vague and the reward is boring - "refer a friend, get 10% off" doesn't beat a WhatsApp forward from a... 4 resources → Should I be on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest, or just pick one? Where do I actually put my limited time? Don't spread yourself across five platforms on day one - pick the one where your customer is already searching for what you sell, and go deep. Inst... 4 resources →
eChai Partner Brands