You may have noticed it has been quiet.
No newsletter. No posts. For a while.
For the past couple months I went heads down building GTM Bud with a few very talented developers in the AI space, and I did not want to half-do either thing. Content or product. So I picked the product.
Our early users are seeing results that I am downright giddy about. Which is what pulled me back here…
Because building it taught me something I want to hand you today.
There are two camps right now:
One thinks AI can run their entire go to market. Prompt it, walk away, check the calendar.
The other thinks AI output is slop and refuses to touch it.
Both are wrong. Both are slower than the people who figured out the actual line.
AI is not good at everything. And it’s not bad at everything.
It is extremely good at a narrow set of things and extremely bad at another set.
The people winning right now are the ones who know which is which.
Here is how I split it when it comes to outreach…
WHAT AI IS GOOD AT:
Reading. Scanning. Applying a definition across thousands of companies without getting tired or sloppy.
Give it a specific characteristic to look for and it will check 10,000 websites, job posts, reviews, funding announcements, and podcast appearances for that characteristic.
It will do it for 7 hours straight.
A human doing the same thing accurately would need weeks and would start cutting corners by row 200.
It is also good at cleaning lists, drafting first versions of messages, and spotting patterns across replies you already got.
WHAT AI IS BAD AT:
Deciding who to reach out to.
Knowing which problem your buyer actually opens their wallet for.
Designing an offer that makes someone reply.
Knowing when a campaign is dead and it is time to pivot.
Telling you when it got something wrong.
Notice the pattern. AI is good at execution at scale. It is bad at judgment.
Judgment is the part you already have. You have been on the calls. You have heard the objections. You know the difference between a company that looks like a fit on paper and one that actually buys.
THE PLACE THIS MATTERS MOST IS PROSPECTING
Most list building still looks like this…
Open a database. Pick an industry. Pick a headcount range. Pick a job title. Export.
But that’s not an ICP. That’s a persona.
And every competitor you have is pulling the exact same filters, which is why your prospect got nine messages that sound like yours this week.
The real ICP lives in attributes those filters cannot see.
-Agencies that mention retainers on their pricing page.
-Companies that just posted a job for a role that only exists when the problem you solve is already hurting.
-Founders who published something in the last 60 days complaining about the exact thing you fix.
Those signals are sitting in plain sight. They are just buried across a thousand websites, and nobody has the hours to go read them.
That is the job AI was built for.
WHAT TO TRY THIS WEEK
Write down the three things your best clients had in common before they bought. Not their industry. Not their headcount. The situation they were in.
Then go find everyone in that situation.
This split is one of the big reasons GTM Bud exists.
You describe your ideal prospect in plain English, the same way you would explain it to a new rep, and it goes and finds the companies that match. Not title filters. Actual characteristics.
That was the part I could not do at scale by hand, so we built it.
If you want to see how specific the targeting can get now, take it for a free spin at gtmbud.com.
Good to be back.
Rooting for you,
Tom
Want to start getting positive replies this week?
Launch Your Outreach Campaign In Less Than 30min With GTM Bud - CLICK HERE
You will use our proprietary tool to build and launch your own campaign:
-Define your dream client
-Choose your outreach strategy
-Review sample, value-driven messages
-Launch the campaign via LinkedIn, email or both
