Olivier Tytgat 🪖

Co-Founder & Head of Sales

Outbound Catalyst

Outbound Catalyst partners with B2B SaaS companies to engineer predictable growth systems. We use targeted outbound as the validation engine - the one channel that lets you control who you reach and get direct market feedback. Once your messaging and positioning are proven, we help you build the operations, systems, and processes to scale growth across all channels.

From early-stage GTM validation to scaling outbound at volume to optimizing revenue operations for larger teams - we apply systematic thinking to help you grow faster and more predictably.

Founder & CEO

Operated as a co-founder and IC for various B2B tech companies. 

- Leexi.ai (Head of Sales as a service | 1.5M in pipeline in 6 months)
- Butterfly.ai (EU market validation | 250K pipeline in 6 months)
- TIMi.eu (setting up an enterprise SaaS selling motion & validation | 2.5M pipeline in 6 months)
- MyMove (full cycle AE, founding AE | 2.5M in pipeline & €1M ARR in 18 months)
- Ingenix (advisor to founder on lead gen & commercial topics)
- SalesArchitects (co-founder | 0 to 250K in revenue in 20 months)
- SalesNote (co-founder | 0 to 10 paying customers in 6 months)

Solopreneur

Clay

Co-hosting the Clay Club meetups in Lisbon. 
We bring together GTM leaders and Clay enthousiasts to brainstorm and showcase our latest workflows and how to be successful with Clay.

Clay Club Lisbon Co-host

I am the first official Clay Expert in Belgium and Portugal. I was certified in April 2024, after having helped +3 organizations set up Clay efficiently and effectively. 

See my page here: https://www.clay.com/experts/profile/olivier-tytgat

With Clay, you can build workflows that:
- automatically qualify your inbound leads
- research your market at scale for outbound
- waterfall enriches contact data
- helps you prepare for your sales calls
- keeps your CRM clean & up-to-date 
- much more

Certified Clay Partner (#1 in Belgium & Portugal)

IzyCoffee

I own a very small amount in the next European Coffee Empire. The reason for my investment is threefold:
1. I absolutely love coffee
2. I am amazed by the vision of their founder, Bart and believe in him as a founder
3. I tend to back the underdog 

I am not involved in any decisions or operations whatsoever.

Co-Owner

MyMove

Enabling car rental companies, car dealers, and corporates alike to offer an end-to-end digital fleet sharing experience to their users. Either in an open fleet setting that’s accessible by third parties (car rental) or in a pure, closed fleet only accessible by people within a closed network (car-sharing) .

MyMove provides all the technology to have your fleet connected and therefore shared: in-car keyless technology, mobile-app for the end-user, mobile payments (credit cards) in-app, platform & dashboards for the fleet manager(s) and the possibility to integrate with your current systems. All supported with a 24/7 customer support (in-app) for your people/customers for extended live support, whenever, whatever. MyMove, leads the way.
What I'm involved in: 
- managing the outbound process to prospect our target audience
- entering new (European) markets
- direct report to CEO
- lead the outbound efforts towards mid market and enterprise customers
- book and lead meetings with key stakeholders as to identify a valid business case
- following up and following through (super essential!)
- providing our product team with valid input
- help with the scaling and streamlining of processes 

My impact: 
- saw the team grow from 8 to 16 people
- provided product feedback to grow the product
- first sales rep to close deals and bring in money
- created traction in 3 international market (BE, NL, UK) 
- booked over 400 meetings
- advised the CRO on improvements for the outbound process --> led to me being in charge of that.
- worked closely with the CRO to improve Customer Success framework and onboarding
- worked closely with the CRO to setup lead magnets, webinars, etc. via the marketing manager
- my sales efforts contributed to closing a 3.2 million SERIES A funding round

Founding Account Executive (Intrapreneur)

SalesArchitects

Existing start of my career where I got the opportunity to help scale the company to up to 25 ongoing projects, helped implement a project management strategy, and helped multiple companies to increase their lead generation conversion rates, resulting in more revenue.
Some achievements: 
- created a Social Selling Course
- filled in the different offerings and shaped them into valuable packages
- established myself as a thought leader on sales in Flanders
- actively led a team of 5+ interns.
- set up lead magnets
- created and promoted 2 events resulting in +500 subscriptions and leads in less than 2 weeks. (one of them was paid)

SalesArchitects assists businesses in gaining organic and sustainable growth by building a structured sales plan.

We design a blueprint for your sales by challenging your business and assisting you with hands-on methodologies, creative strategies, and by assisting with implementing them. 

No guru talk, no sales talk, pure hands-on strategies which will make you a better entrepreneur and sales person!

Main industries we're active in: 
- SaaS / tech
- IT (hard- & software)
- Insurance
- Wholesale

Always open to discuss any other B2B industry as well!

Chief Sales Architect / Managing Partner

SalesNote

Amazing journey while running another company, to bootstrap this one to their first successes and key metrics. Some things I did here: 
- improved the product via a product development framework
- developed an outbound strategy generating over 5000 leads in total
- spoke with more than 250 sales professionals (from C-level to individual contributors) over 1,5 years talking about their challenges
- conducted customer interviews
- set up and managed a research study on the biggest challenges salespeople face, executed with a university student
- participated in growth trajectories at Startit@KBC and Birdhouse.
- sold the first contracts
- experimented with a lot of growth strategies and tests, quickly iterating when needed

SalesNote is the sales productivity platform to capture data during contact moments with prospect and customers. 
Capture data that is otherwise lost, enabling you to get to know your clients better and sell more!

Our mission: helping SMBs and corporates with implementing new ways of selling combined with using the right tools. Hereby creating the highest sales effectiveness possible at the moment!

My role: finding ways to boost our company in order to help as many organizations and sales professionals as possible.

Head of Growth / Managing Partner

CEO @ Outbound Catalyst | generate pipeline consistently with our revenue systems

👋 I'm Ollie, and here's my journey in a nutshell: 

- Helped over 25+ tech companies get their first 10-50 clients through smart revenue systems
- Trained over 250 people from diverse backgrounds on becoming the best cold callers ever
- Hosting a podcast where we decode B2B Revenue Systems: https://open.spotify.com/show/5LMwgSpPBRfffF4OyQsXC5?si=7bb99931399e40aa

🚀 On a mission to helping another 25+ tech companies increase their pipeline and net new revenue (building out Outbound Catalyst to be the 🥇 GTM agency in the EU).

🧠 Sharing my learnings from generating 100 million plus in pipeline and growing a growth/GTM agency in my newsletter -> https://bit.ly/newsletter-linkedin-website-profile 🧠

What you'll get by following me:

🚀 Actionable tips to grow smart outbound/revenue systems

🔥 Transparent & actionable advice, no fluff

💼 Exclusive updates on Outbound Catalyst's growth 

I’ll be posting growth tips and tactics - so hit that “Follow” button!

Peace, pipeline & revenue ✌️

Ollie

Founding Member

As a Founding Member of the Sales Hacker community, I exchanged ideas on how to provide value for the community. 

Sales Hacker is a community where B2B Sales Professionals share their experiences, best practices and exchange interesting ideas and other content.

Olivier 🔎 Tytgat

Every milestone I chased taught me one lesson: 

Achievement without alignment is just expensive misery.

That realization changed everything.

2 years ago, I was obsessed with one goal: 
scale Outbound Catalyst to $1M in revenue before 30.

I believed hitting that number would make me feel fulfilled. Accepted. Enough.

I was wrong.

But along the way, I noticed something critical:
	•	16-hour days weren’t productivity—they were avoidance

	•	More revenue created more problems, not more peace

	•	I was solving everyone’s problems except my own

At first, I thought: “This is just what it takes. Push harder.”

But then it hit me:
I didn’t believe in myself anymore. And my actions proved it.

Summer 2025: I took 2 weeks off and made a decision.

What if I could:
✅ Build a company that doesn’t require me as the bottleneck
✅ Choose sustainability over urgency
✅ Remove friction instead of powering through it

Fast forward to today:
I’m rebuilding Outbound Catalyst with proper foundations.

Same mission. Different approach.

1️⃣ Remove friction 👉 Wrong-fit clients, toxic patterns, limiting beliefs—all gone

2️⃣ Do less, better 👉 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome

3️⃣ Choose honesty 👉 Hard conversations over comfortable lies

4️⃣ Trust the process 👉 Slow progress beats urgent burnout

5️⃣ Build for me 👉 Journal daily, find clarity, stay true

I’ve spoken to 8-figure entrepreneurs who still chase more, rush everything, and hide behind “hustle harder.”

They’re not happy either.

More money creates more money problems. It doesn’t solve what’s broken inside.

That work? It’s free. And it’s yours alone.

Don’t sacrifice who you are for who you think you should be.

You are enough.

What did you sacrifice to get where you are? And was it worth it?

Olivier 🧪 Tytgat

Engineering growth for ambitious SaaS revenue teams | Founder/CEO @ Outbound Catalyst

No alternative text description for this image

385 contacts.
9.61% reply rate.
16.22% positive reply rate.

1 positive reply for every 64 people contacted.

This was Campaign 1.

Then we optimized.

Campaign 2:
201 contacts.
8.46% reply rate.
29.41% positive reply rate.

1 positive reply for every 40 people contacted.

What changed?

We ran 5 filters before anyone got an email:
→ Sourcing (find buyers where they actually show up)
→ Enriching (layer in signals that matter)
→ Qualifying (filter for must-haves, no exceptions)
→ Segmenting (group by intent, not just job title)
→ Routing (each segment gets its own angle)

Smaller list. Better targeting. Higher conversion.

Precise targeting beats spray-and-pray contacts.

Every. Single. Time.

Engineering growth for ambitious SaaS revenue teams through programmatic GTM | Founder/CEO @ Outbound Catalyst

I just open-sourced our GTM diagnostic framework.

The same one we use with clients paying €3,500 for a full audit.

It's called the GTM Scan.

Here's why I'm giving it away:

Most B2B SaaS companies approach outbound wrong.

They blast emails. Pray for replies. Wonder why nothing converts.

The problem isn't outbound.
It's their GTM foundations.

The GTM Scan evaluates 6 dimensions:

1️⃣ ICP & Targeting
→ Is your ideal customer clearly defined and validated?

2️⃣ Signals & Triggers
→ Are you reaching out at the right moment?

3️⃣ Data Infrastructure
→ Is your prospect data reliable and enriched?

4️⃣ Messaging & Positioning
→ Does your message resonate with buyers?

5️⃣ Outbound Execution
→ Is your sequence structure optimized?

6️⃣ Process & Measurement
→ Are you tracking what matters?

Score yourself across 23 questions.
Get your GTM Readiness Score.
Know exactly what to fix.

Takes 10 minutes.

If you're a B2B SaaS founder or revenue leader, comment whatever you want below OR just DM me & I'll send it to you. 

Stop hoping for growth. Start engineering it.

Here's how Frank Sondors 🥓 and his team book 500 meetings/month with only 5 reps 📈

2 months ago, Frank launched 5 million pages for SEO.

Here's the controversial part: they auto-dial visitors who scroll past 50%.

Most companies spend months driving traffic to their site, then just... wait. 

Wait for form fills. 
Wait for demo requests. 
Wait for someone to raise their hand.

That's like throwing a party and hiding in the kitchen.

Frank took a different approach:

The Strategy:
Generate massive programmatic content from directories and datasets (anywhere there's structure + search volume).

The Twist:
They proactively call visitors based on intent signals.

Low intent page (blog, "top 10 tools" lists):
- Visitor scrolls past 50% depth → auto-dial triggered
- Shows genuine interest, not just bouncing

High intent page (competitor comparison, alternative searches):
- Visitor lands on page → immediate dial
- They're already evaluating options

The Result:
Thousands of calls initiated automatically. 

Real conversations with people actively researching, not cold prospects.

Think about it: 

You invest everything into generating traffic. SEO. Content. Ads. Distribution.

Then they finally arrive on your site and... nothing happens?

You spent months getting people to show up. Don't let them walk into an empty house.

The traffic is already there. 

The intent is already there. 

The only question is: are you going to wait for them to reach out, or are you going to start the conversation?

What's stopping you from engaging visitors while they're hot on your site?

p.s. you can use Nick Tomic's Face2Face.io for this

There's 3 main areas you need to be on top off as a GTM team in 2026:

1. Data

2. Strategy

3. Infrastructure

Let's break them down 1 by 1:

1. Data

Historically, data has been immensely overlooked and ignored. People bought Apollo or Zoominfo, perhaps a lusha on top, and thought it would do the job. 

Little did they know they can't trust that data and they didn't do their own research. 

Result? Spam city, bounces, etc.

The fix? THE 5 FIRST PRINCIPLES OF LIST BUILDING
1) Sourcing
→ use all relevant places to find potential clients & data (not only 1 database, use multiple)

2) Enriching
→ Enrich for all minimal required data so you are not excluding companies because you don't have the domain, or LinkedIn company page. (I like to use real-time APIs here & AI does an awesome job at searching the web here too).

3) Qualifying
→ Based on the enriched data, you can now go a layer deeper and enrich for specifics that indicate whether or not they are an ICP company. 

4) Segmenting
→ Stack signals, intent, triggers & different ICPs (some would call this "scoring")

5) Routing
→ Determine which lead you'll send to which campaign (I love to use Clay formula's for this)

2. Strategy

This is evolving continuously based on real time experiments and feedback. It covers who you are for (AND NOT FOR!), which problems you solve & why that matters to your buyers (if you can explain it better than they can, you are winnning). 

This comes down to campaign management:

- choosing your evergreen campaigns

- your always on campaigns

- your seasonal campaigns

- your signal-led campaigns



3. Infrastructure

The architecture behind it all. Covers all the systems to execute on the process. 

- Lead management & follow-up

- Automatic workflows in your CRM

- Extract relevant info from sales calls, replies, etc. and feeding it into your knowledge hub

- Automatic task creations

Over the next 5 weeks, I will break down in-depth systems to cover all these areas. 

Subscribe to my newsletter (link in comments) to be the first to receive them.

Most outbound teams are stuck in an endless loop 🔁

Building lists. Testing campaigns. Nothing sticks. Deliverability tanks. Repeat.

Here's what 1500+ campaigns taught me about sustainable outbound:
Stop thinking about "campaigns" and start thinking in buckets.

1️⃣ Evergreen Campaigns (Every 3-6 months)
↳Your predictable plays. 
・First-degree connections. 
・Event targeting. 
・Closed-lost revamps. 
・Pain-based messaging. 

⟹These work because they tap into recurring patterns.

2️⃣ Always-On Campaigns (Set and forget)
↳Automate the obvious. 

・Profile viewers. 
・Post engagers. 
・Competitor followers. 
・Website visitors. 
・Pricing page views. 

⟹Low maintenance, steady results.

3️⃣ Signal-Led Campaigns (Your experiments)
↳The LinkedIn darlings everyone talks about. 

・Custom research. 
・Deep personalization. 
・Breakthrough potential. 

⟹ But here's the truth: they rarely keep working.

The mistake? Most teams live in signal-led chaos.

They over-engineer everything. 

They chase the next shiny tactic. 

They burn out building campaigns that die in 30 days.

The real ROI? It comes from boring, scalable, systematic approaches.

We've proven this across dozens of B2B companies. 

The simplest campaigns consistently outperform the complex ones.

But nobody wants to hear that building a foundation is sexier than chasing signals.

What's your current split? 

Are you running all three buckets or stuck in experimental hell?

I made a 10-minute in-depth video on this (linkedin comments). 

Steal my insights for free.

Why do most outbound agencies price based on contact volume?

(The answer reveals a fundamental misalignment with B2B success)

I've been reviewing agency proposals with founders all month, and I keep seeing the same pattern:

"We'll reach 5,000 contacts per month."

"We'll contact 10,000 people."

"Our premium package includes 20,000 outreach touches."

Here's what they think they're buying:

More contacts = more opportunities
Volume drives pipeline
Scale equals results

But here's the reality for most B2B SaaS companies:

Your TAM is 500-2,000 target accounts, not 20,000 contacts
Success means account penetration, not contact volume
Quality of targeting matters more than quantity of touches

When we audit clients' actual ICPs, we rarely find more than 1,000 ideal accounts to pursue.

Think about it: If you only have 1,000 target accounts, why would you pay for an agency to contact 10,000 people per month?

This creates two distinct approaches:

Volume Play (makes sense when):
▪️ You serve a horizontal market (like local printing services)
▪️ Your solution works for almost any company
▪️ Your TAM is genuinely massive
▪️ Broad outreach yields consistent conversion rates

Targeted Play (makes sense when):
▪️ You're building for a specific vertical or niche
▪️ Your ICP is tightly defined
▪️ You have limited high-value accounts
▪️ Personalization and account strategy matter

The misalignment happens when agencies sell volume pricing to companies that need targeted strategies.

Before you sign with any outbound agency in 2026, answer this question:
Do you have 10,000+ potential customers, or 1,000 target accounts?

Your answer should determine which agency you choose and how they should price their work.

Are you buying contact volume or account penetration?

2 weeks ago, I attended Tectonic in Wintercircus Ghent. 

Always great to be there whenever I'm in Belgium. Such a vibrant tech scene. 

Even though I usually don't like to smell the breath of VC money, I was super pleased to hear some awesome wisdom. 

Pieterjan Bouten said this:

"We like to give money to talented founders who know what to do, so we do what we do best (inject capital) and then get out of the way, so they can do what they do best (build the company)". 

It's paraphrased, but he basically said that what he learned during his time at Showpad is kind of obsolete in a way. 

The game evolves and changes, and therefore the advise you get from someone who did it years ago, might not be relevant at all. 

I thought this was worth sharing, because I see many founders and revenue leaders making these mistakes:

- following people who aren't in the trenches

- paying multiple 5 figures for advise that leads nowhere

- allowing others to create urgency and pressure in the organization instead of protecting the team & trusting the process 

- hiring expensive sales reps who sold for Microsoft or Salesforce but never took a company from 0 to 1 or 1 to 10 before 

And now with AI, the game is evolving SUPER fast. 

Imagine that we sometimes feel behind, let alone if you're not doing this every day... 

TL;DR: be careful with who you take advice from, and don't let FOMO eat you up inside.

Focus on getting your basics right first. 

Let me know if you want to talk about real-time and effective revenue systems that generate and convert pipeline in 2025.

Here's how I build lead lists programmatically. 

(after spending 7+ years, I am close to perfecting the perfect system). 

1. Start with accounts. Go to Clay (https://lnkd.in/ep8Dhw-m) and create a workbook. Call it “ACCOUNTS” 

2. Pull in companies using their find companies. They have AI filters that you can use to get more afcurate results.

3. Enrich for qualification criteria & double check info like industry, company activity etc where necessary. First use formula’s, only then use AI (one task per column). 

4. Once you have all criteria, you can filter for ICP accounts. 

5. Write those to another workbook, call it ICP accounts. (Congrats you now mapped your ICP accounts and have something 90% of companies don’t have). 

6. Repeat this process for leads, start by finding leads in sales nav with the same filters you used for your account search. It's better to scrape broadly (use Icypeas to export without getting your linkedin banned). 

8. Use formula’s to filter out irrelevant titles.

9. Enrich for account info (company ID or domain) 

10. Lookup in ICP accounts table. Also lookup from ICP accounts table to leads to see how many leads you are still missing (across accounts). 

11. Now look for extra leads using Icypeas database, apollo & enrich the leads with real time linkedin APIs to check accuracy 

12. Enrich for qualification criteria per persona

13. Segment per persona

14. Push them to a new table, name it ICP Leads. (Again congrats, something 99% of companies don’t have)

15. You can now build signals, triggers, intent on top of them

16. You can now segment for different campaigns

17. You now know what you’re working with in terms of market cap and can draft a campaign strategy that is actually sustainable. 

This is how you avoid building lists for campaigns, how you free up your sales team to focus on selling instead of admin & how you become independent of obsolete databases.

"Most sales leaders don't interview their customers—and that's why their outbound engine fails."

This brilliant insight from Mafalda Johannsen should make you rethink how you build your outbound foundations.

Marketing teams interview customers for case studies. 

Product teams interview them for feature requests. 

But sales leaders? Crickets.

Mafalda explained that before obsessing over cold email copy or video prospecting, you need to answer three critical questions through customer interviews:

1️⃣ When did they buy? What was the trigger event that created urgency?

2️⃣ Why you vs. competition? What made your solution the clear choice?

3️⃣ What situation were they in? Context reveals targeting opportunities

"If you don't know what's important to your customers, how do you know what to say on a cold call?" she shared.

This is how you build strong hypotheses instead of guessing.

The companies seeing breakthrough results from this approach:
👉 Find lookalike accounts in similar situations with similar triggers

👉 Hook prospects with the same reasons that made existing customers buy

👉 Speak their language because you know exactly what resonates

Stop building outbound campaigns on assumptions. Start building them on customer intelligence.

Are you interviewing your customers before launching outbound campaigns?
(We both know you're not)

Full episode in comments 🎙️

Your AI agents when Cloudflare decided to take a break today.

Every early-stage founder makes the same mistake.

They assume why they built it is why the market needs it.

I learned this the hard way in 2019.

I was selling sales conversation AI before AI was cool.
My assumption: "Reps spend too much time on admin."
Reality: They weren't doing admin at all.

The real problem? They forgot 90% of what happened in their calls.

It took me 3-6 months and my first 10 customers to figure this out.

Here's what that taught me about GTM:

1. Your hypothesis is probably wrong
2. The market will tell you, but you have to listen
3. Outbound is the fastest way to validate (you control who you talk to)
4. Don't scale before you've validated

That lesson became the foundation of everything we do at Outbound Catalyst.

Design → Validate → Scale

What's a GTM assumption you had to unlearn?

"If I'm sending let's say 10 emails today, I'll be lucky to get one reply back."

This pivotal insight from Frank Sondors 🥓 (Salesforge 🔥 and a bunch of other forges) on today's Revenue Systems Decoded podcast stopped me in my tracks.

The fundamental issue isn't bad leads; it’s channel fatigue. Our audience knows everything is automated, even when it’s disguised. They are savvy, which means we must pivot where we engage them.

Frank explained that the path to higher engagement is about radical channel iteration:

• Identify the channels that are completely saturated (like many outbound emails).

• Find where your target customer actually does business (e.g., WhatsApp in many European markets).

• Switching channels can drive up to 10x more replies by meeting the customer where they are.

"People are not stupid; they’re very savvy," he shared.

The companies seeing the best results prioritize collaboration over pure automation:

Mobile Enrichment: Integrating mobile number enrichment into the sign-up flow.

Hub-and-Spoke: Pushing all non-email replies (e.g., WhatsApp) immediately back into a collaborative hub (like Slack).

Decentralized Response: Enabling any human team member to reply from the hub, making the interaction fast, authentic, and scalable.

Is your team still reliant on email, or have you found your 10x channel?

Full episode with Frank Sonders in the comments. 

p.s. know anyone who should be a guest on our podcast? Tag them below or send me a DM.

Outbound isn't dead.

Bad outbound is dead.

Here's the difference:

❌ Bad outbound:
- Spray and pray
- Same message to everyone
- "Hope you're doing well"
- Pitch on first touch
- Activity metrics over results

✅ Good outbound:
- Research before reaching out
- Segmented by intent, not just title
- Lead with insight, not pitch
- Multi-touch, multi-channel
- Obsessed with positive reply rate

The companies saying "outbound doesn't work" are doing bad outbound.

The companies crushing it? They treat outbound like science.

Test hypotheses.
Validate with real buyers.
Scale what works.

Outbound isn't just a channel.

It's your controlled laboratory for testing before you scale everywhere else.

Which type of outbound are you doing?

Holistic Go-To-Market & AI for B2B / 12 domains / €2M up to €1B+ / 14 int. known experts.

As a Chief Revenue Officer, I operated 20+ B2B AI, SaaS and traditional companies in more than 15 industries. I've felt firsthand how building modern, leading revenue systems became a very complex given. A bit like building a house. 

🤯 Everything became too complex. Every domain became a universe on its own, with all its subdomains and now even more so with AI.

🚣🏻 You don't have everything in-house. You just do what you can with what you have.

🏃🏾‍♀️ All while you're constantly trying to improve your go-to-market maturity in all these domains, relative to your current and next growth phase.

👎🏼 Agencies and freelancers have a core offering and 101 side-offerings, which are average at best.

🧩 Getting external help is also always very fragmented and very transactional in nature.

💲Everything is so solution-first, never that problem-first approach.

Based on these experiences and findings, I created The GTM Syndicate. Where I developed my vision around holistic GTM and AI - and the 3 houses narrative 🏡.

Then I brought together an international team of 20, best-in-class domain experts and their companies, across 21 domains of expertise. And created our complete mirroring offerings and holistic way of working, around GTM and AI.

Via our problem-first approach we’d love to see how we can help you as a long-term, anti-transactional, strategic knowledge and implementation partner. Whether that’s starting holistically, multi domain, or single domain - we can help you to build in-house.

Stephane Maes

What the 5 different go-to-market motions can cost vs. what you are spending on each of them right now.

Everybody's always talking about growth & measuring growth - but what about the cost?

Today I'll cover:

- $ to € normalization (Notion Capital)
- Conversion rate vs. ACV
- CaC & CTS vs GTM motions
- New ARR vs CaC
- LTV(nY) is needed
- CaC & CTS vs LTV(nY)
- Gross Retention Rate (GRR)
- Average GRR
- What a GTM motion should cost

In a world where:

- Everyone talks the same
- Sounds the same
- Talks about the same stuff...

Work with the people who know how to count & how cost is half of a modern revenue system.

How many of these folks do you hear about how it actually works, mathematically? Most people find it "boring". Admit it, you probably find that boring too.

It's where it's all about. If you get your math wrong... forget about it. If you get that math right, it's how you build a company.

Your growth is dependent on proper calculations & measurements. And you're probably calculating and measuring wrong.

Most of all, you're probably heavily overspending on your GTM motions vs. what they should cost. Which means you need to adjust your GTM motion.

I'm available as a fractional CRM and GTM advisor. Aside from us as The GTM Syndicate being happy to take a closer look at your GTM System.

WDYT? Jacco van der Kooij, 🚁Roee Hartuv, Jeremy Spijker, Douwe Wester 🟢 👉, Guillaume Jacquet, Jonathan Moss, Yasmine de Aranda, Charlie Moss, John Williams

Closing your GTM capability gaps with real operators, real context, and end-to-end orchestration / Go-To-Market & AI Partner for B2B / 20 experts / 21 domains

GTM Motion Correction

Sales. You probably think it looks something like this.

- A simple org chart.
- A funnel.
- Some targets.
- A few dashboards.

But when you zoom out, you realise something. Sales isn’t a function, it’s a system. A system made of strategy, operations, infrastructure, enablement, execution, cross-functional interplay.

All influencing each other, all compounding behind the scenes. That’s why most teams feel like they’re “doing the right things” but still missing something.

They’re optimizing pieces, not the whole. This carousel breaks down what a modern sales system actually includes and why the obvious view is rarely the real one.

When you look at your own sales org… do you see a team, or a system?

These are the elements we focus on with your team, when we onboard ourselves to create the context we need - by screening your sales engine.

Sales

The biggest issue in SaaS right now isn’t pipeline, product, or pricing. It’s competence at the top of the go-to-market engine.

Was an absolute pleasure meeting Douglas van Oijen yesterday for a first time. 

We had a high-energy, lovely exchange between 2 people passionate about GTM, about the state of the industry, when it comes to operating SaaS & AI businesses. 

I wanted to share these insights with you, because I think they're just golden & summarize everything that's wrong right now.

After years of easy growth, the market has shifted - and it’s exposing something uncomfortable…

A lot of GTM leaders were promoted during “good weather,” not because they had the operating depth to lead in a storm.

We’re seeing it everywhere:

- inflated titles with thin execution skills

- leaders fluent in playbooks but unable to fix a broken system

- teams that reforecast instead of rebuild

- companies loyal to “nice” but under-qualified managers

- budgets locked not because money isn’t there, but because CxOs, VPs & Heads of were burned before

And while the market keeps tightening, the knowledge gap keeps widening. Modern GTM now spans so many domains, subdomains and now, also AI and no single leader covers it all.

This creates a strange paradox: SaaS companies aren’t short on headcount. They’re short on people who can actually operate (knowledge).

People who’ve lived the hard years and know how to navigate complexity. Who can translate strategy into execution and can rebuild when the system underneath is failing.

2026 won’t be won by the loudest brand or the biggest team. 

It’ll be won by the companies with the fewest blind spots. The ones honest enough to admit where the gaps are and mature enough to fix them.

What do you think?

State of The SaaS & AI Industry & Operating The Business

Over the past six, seven months, I’ve been working on something that didn’t exist yet. It was just a passionate pitch to the domain experts on a new operating model for how revenue expertise should work in SaaS.

A model where domain experts & their companies don’t only operate in isolation but rather next to their business, also stand together as one unified brand.

One narrative, one long-term strategic partner for companies that need deep, cross-domain expertise & not another surface-level fix.

It took months of experimenting, dozens of prospect conversations, feedback loops, and iteration to shape it into what it is today.

And then a conversation with a top ICP stakeholder (CRO) recently only reinforced something I deeply believe - and what our pipeline and most conversations with prospects' stakeholders are also indicating: the time is right for this and the market is asking for it.

Most GTM problems today are strategic, interconnected, multi-domain and trust-based which means the deal cycles are longer. The work is simply so much deeper and the impact is so much bigger. You can’t rush that.

Very soon, companies will recognise these challenges for what they are. And they’ll start looking for real strategic partners who can fix them.

But here’s what has become clear, if we build this together, we can create an engine none of us could ever build alone.

Not through one hero (or ego), one company or through one network.

But through:

- the combined brand-equity of proven experts & their companies
- our combined network
- a shared long-term vision
- product-led content & education
- consistent thought leadership
- and a reputation for being the partner who actually does what they say.

It’s still early, painfully early.

We’re still in the “trust-building” phase with companies and we’re still laying the foundation for a motion that compounds over time.

But the fundamentals are there. The conversations with prospects are alive. The opportunities in our pipeline are maturing. The need in the market has never been clearer (yesterday's post).

This however only works if we pull together with:

- Promotion.
- Content (new podcast will soon launch).
- Our Syndicate's dealflow, next to their own deal flow.
- Shared upside
- A rising tide that lifts all of us

Because no single expert (& their company) - no matter how strong - can solve the GTM problems companies face today.

But together... 

Together we can create a category-defining engine that benefits all of us far more than what any of us could build alone.

That's why we're now working on the GTM Syndicate 2.0, where we take that to the next level. Because if we execute this properly, it's the most powerful growth engine we could ever dream of.

That’s the vision and what I'm building. This is just the beginning.

How to reactivate a deal with 3 stakeholder changes in a just a few months, by consistent follow-up and a cold call.

How much of your pipeline fell apart because a champion left for a new company? With us, this happened for about half of our pipeline deals.

This GTM planning season, so many companies are either replacing key roles. Or key people just leave for a new company.

We have this customer from heaven but a deal flow from hell.

The deal flow:

- Introduced by the founder to the CMO & interim CEO
- Want to start ("sold")
- CMO leaves, warm intro to the interim CMO (resell)
- Deal stuck with interim CMO
- Interim CMO apologized for the delays (very respectable)
- New CEO & CRO hired
- New CMO joined too
- Start from "scratch" (resell x2)

Had been chasing the new CEO and CRO for a while now - but LinkedIn messages, outbound emails - it's what it is these days. Hard to get through.

So I picked up the phone and I called the CRO a couple of times. No luck.

Yesterday I got through and I must say, a good cold call is still better than a 1000 emails, dms or whatever touch points. 

A kind of magic happened there you just can't replicate in any possible way. It's the next best thing to meeting F2F. You have direct feedback & you can have a real interactive conversation, as human beings. 

Enabling you to also briefly, really & truly connect with someone. Was it a cold/cold-call? No, there is of course the history here & context.

Yet I had to start from scratch with explaining what we do, the deal flow so far and why we're different than all others. Since as a new CRO he gets 100 messages a day now with folks asking if he needs help with GTM.

We agreed to reconnect in dec/jan when their strategy and gtm planning was finished so we could start from there.

Best of all there's another window of opportunity, where the interim CEO wasn't interested in our holistic approach and the company wanted to focus on marketing as a starting point.

Now, because of all these changes, it's like starting from a white page - with also a new opportunity to potentially support them beyond just marketing and a domain - but apply our multi-domain or holistic approach there.

The power of consistent follow-up combined with a cold call. A good outbound call is worth it's weight in gold. Yet most of you stop after a couple of tries - and never pick up the phone.

It just works. 

Do you do a lot of cold calls or calls in general to reach out to prospects?

Why do we do what we do? And how do we do it? This is the core or every narrative, at every company. It's what makes you unique and it enables you to articulate it to clients.

In a world where everything sounds the same, looks the same, acts the same & folks use the same copy/paste frameworks, how to differentiate?

I upgraded our website this weekend. Simpler. 

Gave the Homepage and How We Work a huge makeover.

- Recorded a video for the top of the homepage
- Updated the house narrative to the latest version
- Removed strips on the home page (more clarity)
- Updated some strips here and there
- Rolled out the GTM & AI Hotline as main CTA.
- Removed the "book a meeting" strips"
- From 9 ways to start to just 3

Tomorrow I'll share the video on the hero (top) of the homepage, explaining why we do what we do - and how we do it. Simple.

What do you think? Is it clear to you what we do - and how we do it?

We're here to support you during GTM planning season. All of us.

It's time for some reflection now 6 months in, on how I been making ALL the mistakes I set out to help you avoid... Turns out, I'm the "I'll do everything in-house myself" person too, ironically.

I had this bold vision of building a strategic GTM and AI partner for B2B companies. Of course, it's then up to you as a founder, to get it off the ground.

It took 3 months to bring the original band together, 11 domain experts across 10 domains - and to create the house narrative V1, the website & marketing material.

Then it took another 3 months, to work my way to 20 domain experts across 21 domains - and move to a 3 houses narrative, before I was comfortable with starting to market it at scale while serving our first customers.

All while continuously testing, tweaking and fine-tuning things with continuous feedback from small batches of prospects. Everything had to ripen & grow. 

CxOs and VPs have little time as it is. You only have one real shot, whenever you get one, so it better be good.

I then realized lately, I brought it as far as I could myself, by myself. By doing what I am truly good or great at, when it comes to all domains of a modern revenue system.

What I'm great at:

- Understanding your revenue engine like few people do
- Running revenue & sales departments
- Bringing a group of top people together around a vision
- Moving fast and changing things
- Creating innovative service products
- Interaction with executives of 2M to 1B+
- Spotting patterns
- Frameworks, processes, models & value propositions
- Creating a brand, marketing material & storytelling

I set out to create something where I could focus on my true zone of genius, while others focus on theirs. To help people with their revenue system, in a holistic way and as a long-term strategic partner.

Despite me having deep expertise in most of these domains, I am not a deep domain expert in any of these things. This was kind of the whole point when I set out to create The GTM Syndicate.

I haven't yet succeeded in unlocking our biggest growth catalyst of all - which always was a part of the design and vision...

Unlocking our domain experts, their expertise & network to really get our concept off the ground. While that's exactly what now determines if it will succeed.

It's my last hurdle to cross and I know when I do, demand will explode and the concept will take off - finally. Now before I could ask that, I had to make it "good enough".

Now the question is simple: is what has been created now good enough for all of us to publicly get behind, at scale - and to start broadcasting? And for them to now be more involved, out of their domain of expertise?

Sounds like I need to talk to a lot of folks internally, and just ask them. Instead of painfully trying to keep grinding by myself. Doing all these things I'm not an expert in, feeling stuck at times.

Unlike you, fortunately, I do have all that expertise in-house.

Are you experiencing that too? Then reach out, we can help.

Fractional CRO / Go-To-Market & AI Partner for B2B / 20 experts / 21 domains / €2M up to €1B+

Week 1 of planning season is behind us. We all got confronted with our own revenue system's challenges... I've been breaking my head over how we can offer you immediate impact & value around those GTM and AI challenges.

It's just required these days...just to cut through all the noise & to build trust. Everyone sounds the same, acts the same, talks about the same things. Must be so difficult for people.

So we got creative and that's how and why we came up with our new ☎️ GTM & AI Hotline ☎️. 

A way for us to stand out and offer a very low-barrier way to get acquainted with our concept. Based on really supporting and helping people with their current challenges and questions.

To do so, I will discuss your challenge or question with our 20 domain experts around the 21 domains of expertise we cover. To offer you an answer to your challenge or question within 24h.

Of course not all people who call will become customers. But then we can showcase value and expertise to our ICP customers. We already know our offering, team and way of working are awesome. Now we need folks to experience it. As many as possible.

To do so, we just needed to think of creative ways so people can experience it in a low effort and low barrier way. So that's why our GTM & AI Hotline, now actually is our PLG-motion, when I think of it 😂.

Now, folks, tell me... where else can you get support by such 20 world-class domain experts, across 21 domains of a modern revenue system? 

Nowhere, that's where. Try out our Hotline ☎️. Experience it for yourself. We made it to help and support YOU, during and beyond GTM planning season.

☎️ Your Go-To-Market & AI Hotline ☎️

Why do we (and I) do what we do and and how do we do it precisely? A question that haunts founders, makes or breaks teams & what customers are oblivious and indifferent about - until you can make them see and care.

That's why I recorded this 15 minute video for the top-fold our website's homepage. For our website? I made this 15 minute video for you.

What more do you need at 8.30am on a Thursday during week 2 of GTM planning season (the 13th of November of all days, at least it isn't Friday) than a 15 min video explaining how we can support you? My thoughts exactly. 

We've build such a powerhouse, to help you build your house, across any part of a modern revenue system. Now it's just a matter of you experiencing it and giving it a try.

Imagine a partner like that, who really knows you, supporting you and the team. Where you can count on 20 known domain experts & their companies, each setting the tone in their domain of expertise , across 21 domains.

The right expertise for you and your team, whenever you need it. Aligned with everything we ever do for you and everything we know of you.

That's it. That's what we've build for you and why, what and how we do it.

Now you may not realize it, but that's the future of GTM advisory.

So keep this in mind during GTM planning season.  

- You know you need to upgrade your GTM maturity 
- You don't have all that knowledge in house
- The way you get help today is broken (siloed, fragmented, transactional)

GTM planning season is in full swing. What better time to talk to us and see how we can help?

Want to jump to specific parts? You can, here's how:

00:00 Introduction to GTM Syndicate
00:48 What Our Customer Experience
01:25 Challenges with Current Solutions
03:39 13 Breaking Points of GTM
03:54 We Cover All 5 GTM Motions
04:35 The House Narrative
06:15 The Holistic Approach
06:51 The Multi Or Single Approach
07:25 AI Integration in Revenue Systems
08:51 The Team
09:07 Why We're Different
10:38 How We Work
13:12 The LEGO Approach
13:37 3 Ways to Get Started
13:57 The GTM Hotline

Holistic GTM & Revenue systems, you probably think it looks something like this. While in reality, it look something like this...

I've been working on visualizing the domains we cover to show you what we look at, when we look at your revenue system.

And what to us is important in that domain of a modern revenue system.

This is what we look at if we take the Holistic GTM approach, starting with our onboarding audit.

I'm also available as a fractional CRO to take full ownership & responsibility over your revenue engine - or to help you as your sparring partner & GTM advisor.

Holistic GTM

What are you doing more of in 2026 and what will you do less in your GTM approach? Every team we’re talking with is deep in 2026 planning. Deciding what stays, what breaks, and how to grow without doubling CAC.

To me, that really starts with RevOps & Finance. Not that 123 fluff stuff (omni-present). Complexity isn't a bad word here, in this case, it means mature & advanced RevOps.

What do things really cost - and what do they generate, in detail? Do you really, truly have a view on that. Otherwise you're flying blind. A lot of companies are (relatively) still flying blind - and you don't have a real "control room" you can trust and rely on.

Are you able to look at the data like a Rubik's Cube? Any region, any GTM motion, any possible angle you want to look at the data? With 95% accuracy The bigger a company becomes, the harder that is.

Next there's of course your overall GTM architecture also known as "Revenue Architecture". Are you still doing the right things, vs what they cost and what they bring in (GTM motions), is each department operating to today's standards and how much building revenue systems changed the past 2 years?

Finally, I'd ask myself, is everyone still the right person, on the right seat vs. the current (and next) growth stage? And can you rely on each of your VPs or heads' of to take their teams & departments next level?

Those are the questions I'd be asking first, during planning season, as a CRO. 

It's easy to step into the trap to avoid exactly these topics. Don't. You're setting yourself up for failure if you don't. 

Looking the other way, won't make it go away.

Just remember this planning season building modern systems really is like building a house - or a skyscraper. Start with your foundations and work your way from there.

Only then I'd start looking at the house or skyscraper and its rooftop. With all the domains and subdomains of a modern revenue system - also AI. Where of course most challenges are multi-domain, or occur where domains ought to connect seamlessly, yet rarely ever do.

Every planning season GTM teams make these mistakes over and over again - that's foundational. If you don't get that right, whatever fancy house or skyscraper you put on top, it becomes unstable.

You don’t need more leads. You need outbound systems. Most teams still think outbound is “SDRs + tools + messaging.” It’s not...

Outbound touches 13 different GTM domains, whether you like it or not.

- Finance → cost structure
- RevOps → revenue math
- ICP & Messaging → who & why
- Product → usage signals
- ABM → account selection
- GTM Architecture → motion design
- Marketing → channels
- Sales → conversion paths
- CRM → data integrity
- AI → automation layer
- N8N & Clay → workflow engine
- People → skills & capacity

… and everything in between.

Outbound isn’t a tactic, it’s a system with inputs, throughput, and outputs.

And for every GTM motion, the system changes:

PLG → low-touch, cheap acquisition, automated sequencing

Mid-market SDR/AE → hybrid workflows, semi-personalized, layered follow-up

Enterprise → multi-threaded, deep research, exec-level orchestration

Completely different:

- costs
- workflows
- economics

So the question isn’t:

“How do we get more leads?” It’s: “Which outbound system matches the economics of our GTM motion?”

If you know the answer, scaling is easy. If you don’t, outbound feels random, expensive, and slow.

We help you design, build, or rebuild any of these systems - in-house or DFY - so they actually produce pipeline, not noise.

Which outbound motion are you running today and does it (still) your system match it?

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