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Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
If you want to understand how B2B really works in 2025, you need to meet today's guest. I first met Max Alschuler back when he was building Sales Hacker and I was starting this little tiny group I called Sales Fight Club. He's written three bestselling books built and sold Sales Hacker to Outreach, then transform Angel investing into accidentally becoming a vc. But what makes Max special isn't just what he's built, it's how he saw something. Everyone else miss that in B2B Trust isn't just part of the strategy. Trust is the strategy. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about the future of Go to Market. Max, welcome to the show.
Max Altschuler:
Thanks for having me.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, well the reason we're here is to talk about community. So I've was in the go-to-market fund Slack channel as an lp. I know from the conversations in there that it's really, it's bottom of funnel stuff. Being able to actually figure out how decisions are made, what software works, and being part of Pavilion. I know Dave Erhard's got his Exit five community. We're here today to talk about how community really impacts and influences how decisions are made. And I'd love to just out of the gate talk about how you look at this topic related to pipeline generation.
Max Altschuler:
Yeah, definitely. It's super interesting. I think a lot of really good things come out of communities, and I've said this about Pavilion and things like Exit five and GT M Fund less, but your pavilion Exit five. They're kind of like your community for your career and you can't really do that inside of your organization that you're working for. You don't really have
The same connectivity or be able to ask the same questions. So if you're trying to figure out how to get a raise or promotion or have a tough conversation with your boss, sometimes you can't ask the people in your organization about those things. And then there's also the things that you need to talk to somebody that's at your level at another company or a potential aspirational peer about what you should be doing inside of your marketing organization. So when I was at Outreach, we're at like 200 million a RR trying to figure out all the things we need to do in demand gen, which tooling we need to buy, et cetera, et cetera. I want to go to other people who are either at 200 million a RR and growing or maybe are at three or four or 500 million a RR because they're kind of my aspirational peer group.
They're like the next level ahead. And so I found it super valuable to be in some of these communities where I can go in and say like, Hey, what are you using for X, Y, and Z? How did you think of this? How did you figure this out once you scaled past this number of customers or users or revenue? And that's why I think these communities are so important. And it's not just the like, Hey, help me do my job better, but it's like, well, what happens when I need to negotiate for a promotion? I can't ask my boss that I don't have mentors, but I could find somebody in the community that might've just gone through that and we'll give some great advice.
Andrew McGuire:
And I was listening to one of the episodes that Scott Barker on your team running the Go to market pod was talking to different leaders that have run communities like the Salesforce Trailblazer community. And it is true that you need to figure out how you're going to be able to justify not just purchasing decisions. And some people are putting their jobs on the line for making decisions on some of these new technologies. And with all the noise that's coming at us with emails and phone calls, the great ignores Mark Costal talks about, it's not something you can trust anymore. And so when I think about you and your journey from when we first met Sales Hacker at the Metreon in San Francisco 10 plus years ago, all the way through to rebuilding Sales hacker into what it is today now and what you're doing, it's about trust. And you've been able to build what you have based on that. And I think that's one underlying thing that isn't talked about that much around trust in the community and being able to lever on that when you're making a decision about a new technology that you want to bring into the organization.
Max Altschuler:
Well, it was a big reason why Outreach acquired Sales Hacker was if we want to go out and build relationships with a bunch of our buyers, our potential customers, our customers, what could we do to do that without selling them something? Could we just actually be helpful to them and when they're ready to buy something, they know who to come to because we've just been super helpful and we've been giving that out for free the entire time. And so Sales Hacker was kind of, outreach is gift to the entire sales community and it worked really well. I mean, we threw a lot of events through Sales Hacker, we did podcasts, et cetera, and we had our plays that we ran.
If we wanted to get through to A CRO at a decent sized company, we could reach out to them and say, Hey, buy our product. Or we could reach out to 'em and say, Hey, I have a podcast that goes out to 50,000 people in the sales profession every month and it's one of the biggest ones in our domain and I want to get you on it and help you build your platform, put you on a pedestal and share your knowledge. And that was like, okay, yeah, I'll have a conversation now. We've got a dialogue going with this person. We just did them a favor. It also works for us because it promotes our platform. It's great. That opens up a conversation where you may not have otherwise had an ability to have one.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. I'd love to end on this. These are supposed to be short snacks that we chew on, but just being able to talk a little bit about that specifically of the belief that you have around pipeline generation and what the market has wrong and how companies should be thinking about this differently to unlock the next big opportunity. Again for someone trying to build a company and a new founder that just got funding, join the communities, be able to pull people in and leverage that. But I'd love to get your perspective on how you think about whether it's community or something else for this topic of how to generate pipeline in 25.
Max Altschuler:
You got to Zig when everybody's zagging is always tried and true. I think community is a great way to do it. Referral based selling all these different things that are now having, there's technology really built around like Noble and a few others that are out there on the referral or common connection sales type stuff. What I think is really interesting about Operator and lends to the great ignore error that we just went through is we've kind of over tooled and now everybody has access to the same hacks or shortcuts or even many ways best practices. So for example, when in 20 15, 20 13, even when we were coming up as sellers and we were doing some of the hacky stuff, if I found out that a company raised a series B, it was hard to find that out. I had to go slu, I had to go on TechCrunch or whatever, find that out.
Andrew McGuire:
That was a signal and a clay table
Max Altschuler:
Because it was hard.
Andrew McGuire:
It
Max Altschuler:
Worked because I was one of the only people that reached out to the VP of sales at that company and said, Hey, congrats on the series B $60 million. Let's talk about how we can help you. And when I'm one of two people to say congratulations, because it was hard to find this information, it worked. Now ZoomInfo says they have 35,000 customers. Six sense says they have 6,000 customers. Apollo has what, 10,000 customers.
If everyone is getting the same signal, then it's really hard for that approach to work where it's like, Hey, we're all going to say congratulations on series B, but 600 people reach out to that VP of sales at the same time. So I think ZoomInfo, six Sense Apollo, they all have great use cases, but it's up to the individual who's using them to figure out how to get the most juice in the bang for the buck for them and how to zig when everybody else is zagging. And I think one of the things I love about what Operator is doing is just making that message so unique and so different from what everybody else is sending that it's not signal based and it's not based on the same markers and templates that everybody else is sending. So excited about that. I also think we went through an era 2022 to 2024 where budgets were completely unlocked or completely locked.
And I wouldn't say that they're starting to unlock, but I do think because of agents and some of the things that copilots and things like that are able to do, I don't know if tech budgets are unlocking, but I do think headcount services and contractor budgets are moving over to tech to be able to pay for agents. So where you would've hired three or four full-time headcount or a contractor or an agency or a services company, you're now saying, okay, well what if we hired one person and then supported them with these agents? Would that save us money and accomplish more than all that human headcount? So I think it does get interesting there.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, that is interesting. And I think we'll end there even though we could unpack that whole box. That is a crazy topic to get into. But for now, we'll end on that. Max, thank you for being here. You heard it here first. Zig, when you should zag or zag when you should zig, when everybody's going one way, go the other. Right? So thank you for being here, max. Appreciate it. And I think everybody knows where to find you, but if they don't, where should they go?
Max Altschuler:
LinkedIn, my name Max ler and then Twitter hack at max and then gtm fund.com. And then Sales Hacker was relaunched as GTM now. So that's our media entity for the fund on the GTM side.
Andrew McGuire:
Alright. Thank you everybody. We'll see you in the next one.