the gtm engineer The hidden secrets to building your TAM & what GTM engineering is NOT with Emre Kavaloglu
Emre Kavaloglu started Waterfall.io to help companies more efficiently and cost effectively find, store and maintain their company and contact databases. He works with some of the fastest growing companies in tech and has a comprehensive view about building your TAM (total addressable market). We get into the nitty gritty details about TAM building - from new ways to find good-fit companies, to building a system that gets smarter over time. Emre also shares his views on common misconceptions about GTM engineering and how to become an effective GTM engineer.
In this podcast, we discuss:
* Why most companies overlook 20–40% of their TAM—and how to find it
* How to pick (or build) a data stack and why you should be thinking about opportunity cost, not price per contact
* How much effort to put into TAM building based on your company size, stage, and product market fit
* All of the places that a GTM engineer can add value along the entire funnel
* How to build GTM engineering skills from scratch, and advice for founders looking for their first GTM engineer
Episode highlights:
* Smaller business without product market fit shouldn’t be concerned about maximum TAM coverage. Instead, they can think about the need for TAM building as a function of the different active acquisition channels. For outbound or cold email, having a large database is materially more important than if you’re driving all of your revenue through partnerships.
* To find the right company list for your business, you need to look beyond the basic industry, location and employee size demographics. You can find more companies by looking for good-fit contact titles (e.g. “VP of human resources”), and by deploying manual enrcihment efforts against possible-fit lists until you identify the patterns that can scale with AI.
* Decide what you are going to use intent data for before spending time and money capturing it. Once you start tracking intent, aim to retrieve + act on it as quickly as possible after the signal actually happens.
* GTM Engineers can (and should) be thinking about how to deliver value across the entire funnel, not just cold outbound. The fastest way to do this is to go talk to internal folks interacting with customers (customer success, AEs, AMs, etc), be curious, and find ways to add value.
* If you want to build your own GTM engineering skillset - be curious, play with workflow tools like N8N, and be intentional about honing your business intuition.
Where to find Emre:
Transcript details:
(00:00) Introduction to Emre and the conversation
(05:15) Defining what GTM engineering is NOT
(12:45) Framework for building and maintaining your TAM
(18:29) Practical ways to increase your TAM coverage
(23:55) Database hygiene best practices
(25:46) The common mistakes and best practices when tracking intent signals
(30:15) Using intent across the entire funnel of your business
(32:05) Account prioritization frameworks
(36:56) TAM building for early stage companies
(39:55) Other parts of the business a GTM engineer can add value
(47:29) Building GTM engineering skills
(52:46) Hiring and scaling GTM engineering for founders
(55:41) Underrated tools and the future of GTM engineering
(59:35) Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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