Evan Dunn

Pixis

Head of Growth

Warmly,

Advisor

Punch GTM

Cofounder, Chief Scientist

GTM Partners

GTM Ambassador

Rep.ai

Head of Marketing

Syncari

Director of Growth Marketing

Airwallex

- Deployed PMF Testing Framework to identify lowest-friction industry/company-size fit for Airwallex’s SMB offering. 
- Led SDR team of 1 (on a PIP) to 5 meetings per day per SDR using validated cold calling. 
- Managed channels for multiple product launches in the US, including
- Identified major revenue leakage points in top funnel traffic and collaborated with global marketing org to resolve.
- Responsible for US strategy and execution of web, paid, SEO, content, social, SDR. Reported skip-level to CEO.

US Growth Marketing Lead

Convoy Inc

- Cross-functional role leading web strategy (56% growth in traffic), advertising (225% growth in qualified leads), and SEO (233% growth). Their current flagship page for acquiring carriers even two years later is "Load Boards Introduction" - see Media. 
- Built project management infrastructure for entire marketing org (35 FTEs). 
- Double daily carrier signups to free app with a simple tweak to on-site widgets.
- Led organic and paid search to become 2 highest contributors of sales opps behind sales outreach. 
- Led advertising strategy and execution, earned 3X budget increase into a $1.2M portfolio. 
- Managed massive 800-page website cleanup project, bringing site audit score to 93%, preparing site for Core Web Vitals update, coordinating 5-person vendor team and 4 dotted line reports. 
- Developed and implemented tracking and funnel frameworks, in collaboration with Marketing Ops and Sales. Pioneered multi touch attribution modeling.

Senior Digital Marketing Manager

Resonance AI

Led company-wide product strategy for Resonance AI, culminating in a massive product launch and the first real customer traction. Oversaw product vision, roadmap, weekly planning and prioritization, as well as product marketing and branding. Honed focus from multi-vertical to single-vertical (media) and infused productive discipline into dev team.

VP Product

Led customer communications as the load-bearing link between product 	development and sales, including customer-facing materials, product demos and co-marketing partnerships. On consultative engagements, directed a team of business 	analysts in support of our customers’ ambitious growth initiatives.

Director of Customer Success

Led consultative efforts with multiple Fortune 1000 customers to support and train digital marketing teams. The wide array of project types included go-to-market 	strategy, sales collateral development, marketing optimization, multivariate testing, competitive intelligence and brand strategy. Created most of these capabilities from scratch.

Digital Marketing Practice Lead

In my own free time

Wrote and performed original Spoken Word poetry to dozens of different crowds of 10 to 500 audience members, in an effort to engage the community in difficult but important conversations; competed in 2012 Grand Poetry Slam in Seattle; organized and emceed Poetry Slam community event in May 2012; speaker at arts workshop; performed as artist advocate for documentary on sex trafficking in Seattle; performed at 2009 "Take Back the Night" event at Univ. of Wash. raising awareness of sexual assault.

Performance Poet

Lean Growth. Agile GTM. Test-and-Learn. Revenue-centric Marketing & Growth Leader with success leading demand, paid, web, PLG, content, & sales dev, through rapid & robust experimentation. Led AI product strategy & dev.

Avid Experimenter. GTM Scientist. Conversation-First Marketer.

Jason Bay dialed TitanX numbers live.

And it made for some good moments 🤣 

One prospect said "Aaaaah" and hung up.

Another picked up in what sounded like a call center, couldn't hear anything, and asked to be removed from the list.

A Google Voice voicemail turned into an actual pickup mid-message. The guy was... not thrilled.

Classic cold calling chaos.

But here's what actually matters:

30 dials. 9 pickups. 1 meeting booked.

That's a 30% connect rate.

Jason's own words: "I've never talked to this many people in like a 45-minute period."

He also admitted he was unprepared for how many conversations he'd actually have. Didn't pre-research enough people because he didn't expect to reach this many.

That's the problem we're solving at TitanX.

Most reps spend hours dialing into the void.

When you're actually having conversations? Everything changes.

Your talk track gets reps. You learn what's landing. You build momentum.

Jason went 0-for-4 conversions early on and was feeling it. Then he booked a meeting and said his first thought was "how can I land another one?"

That's what real connect rates do for your team.

Full video link in comments. Shoutout to 30 Minutes to President's Club for awesome content.

Head of Marketing @TitanX. Create Conversations. Always Be Experimenting. AI + human expert on ABM, inbound, demand gen, pipeline creation, cold calling, SEO, paid media.

The team is at Pipeline Conference right now. 14 meetings booked today so far, though some are from Reese Kerlin and Catherine Park still hitting the phones that normal boring way. 

But for pattern interrupt, here's what we chose to do:

1. AI generated printouts. Yes. Real paper. From trees. Probably uses less tree than the AI queries to get the output.

The logo, company name, a 1 to 1.5 page letter from Joey, and a closing page with a branded custom QR code to our website all produced using Clay to DocsAutomator with some AI queries referencing:

➔ tech stack from job descriptions via Sumble
➔ estimated SDR/BDR headcount
➔ calls with TitanX if any (sanitized for sensitive information)
➔ estimated ACV
➔ SDR/BDR, GTM Eng, RevOps/Sales Ops/Marketing Ops job descriptions
➔ data waste analysis

Are some of the estimates off? Sure. Are there likely some errors? Yeah. A couple of the letter elements didn't insert at all.

But it's a handout that no one else is handing out.

2. GroundTruth for ads within 1 mile of the hotel everyone is staying at.

3. LinkedIn Ads to the city for our GTM functions at accounts that we know are attending. Already had a couple hits from those.

Would've loved to do more but this was a 3 day turnaround. Cheers to Fedex Office for printing 76 unique documents within 48 hours.

We booked just under 30 meetings in one day at Pipeline Conference last week.

And Sam Byassee got lawn-darted.

Success vs Enthusiasm in Different Outbound Modalities (Channels).

AKA what does it FEEL like to be part of winning outbound, given the typical SDR activity set.

AKA the nerdiest video I've done yet.

tl;dr:
📧 Email: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm →
 📱 Social: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ↗
 📞 Phone: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ↑
 🤖 AI: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ~

Some people wonder if TitanX works long-term. 

"Will I run out of high intent numbers?"
"Is my TAM big enough?"

Let's say your TAM is 2,000 accounts. A very modest TAM. 

First, TAM = Total Addressable Market - the universe of potential buying organizations. It should never be measured in contacts. But of course you can estimate number of contacts at each account you want to speak to. This, however, should INCLUDE the number of contacts who can meaningful provide intel or influence deals in your favor or who manage the person who is your decision maker, or are managed by them. 

It's important to remember that if you sell to anyone in GTM, then GTM operations and finance are often influencers. If you sell to anyone back office, then IT and finance are often influencers. If you sell to anyone senior/dir/VP level, then a few C-suite titles are influencers from top down, and the team below them are influencers from the bottom up.

Second, remember you can pivot TAMs. You can build a new list of companies and pitch a new product. Anyone in non-verticalized ("horizontal") b2b SaaS (meaning you sell to a function e.g. HR, finance, IT, ops, data/analytics, sales, marketing), for instance, has a massive TAM. Way too big. Anyone in vertical SaaS has a rather limited TAM.

Third, TAMs evolve. New companies become part of your viable account list all the time, some companies sunset. Are you tracking them that actively?

Ok, so let's say your TAM is 2,000 accounts.

Decision Makers: You can name 3 possible titles that are likely decision makers, and each account has 1 to 2 of those people. 2K-4K contacts.

Champions/Sponsors: These people run small teams of 1 or 2 given the size of the org, and each DM reports to a more senior person. That's 2-3 more; 4K-6K more contacts.

Influencers/Referrers: And those DMs work collaboratively with two other departments, so there are 4-6 additional contacts worth speaking to. 8K-12K more contacts.

Obviously, start with your DMs.

But already we've got 14K-24K contacts. 

Let's say you have 3K high intent contacts in there. If you speak to 30% of them in the first 3 months of outbound, you can speak to those who don't book AGAIN in 3 months. Meanwhile you try the other 2K that you didn't speak with again in months 2 and 3. Speak to those you connect with AGAIN in a few months. Log who they're using instead, when the renewal is, when to follow up, who owns the relevant program/tech/decision.

Even with a limited TAM, there's a couple full time headcount of work here to be done building relationships and conversing with it. 2000 accounts. And if your founder really believes that's all there is in your future, you have other problems.

This is a rather isolated buying group, maybe something like a small HR org in 100-500 employee companies, or a small accounting team. It could easily be expanded by looking at smaller orgs, or larger orgs. 



P.S. These numbers are from Outbound Operators (Ryan Reisert / Ronen R. Pessar).

There is a substantially different FEELING for SDRs who are hitting quota reliably, vs. those who are not.

No "team culture" matters if there is no "culture of success" - everyone can smell layoffs coming when perks and happy hours and gimmicks are the bandaids taped over underperforming teams.

It's a miserable spot to be in.

Below is November to date: 24 meetings booked from Reese Kerlin and Catherine Park, on the phone alone.

They booked 30 from the phone in all of October.

Not only that, but meetings booked to qualified opp jumped 33% from Sep to Oct.

There is no chance they don't keep improving - they have more conversations than teams 5x their size.

This is the momentum effect of a successful playbook.

It feels different.

It feels good.

What I wish I had done with my $1M paid media budget back in the day...

(TLDR; MARKETING SHOULD FUND SALES TECH)

The budgeting mentality in sales orgs vs marketing orgs is soooo weirdly different.

CMO: "what's the cost of this tech?"

CRO: "what's the cost of this tech per headcount?"

Is that good? Is that bad? Not sure. But wildly distinct.

With SDR orgs underneath sales, this has some weird effects:

E.g.
CRO "We need a centralized tool to get signals for our SDRs"
CFO "What's that cost per SDR?"

This is one of the many reasons that marketing should be funding sales tooling. No I'm not crazy. Yes I've worked in big ish companies before with lots of sales and marketing money.

Once I had a $1M paid media budget. 

If I had taken even the smallest sliver and put it over into quality data vendors (very different list back then vs now) and validation (yes like TitanX) and a good dialer, as well as (today) a couple pieces of a signal stack (Sumble API, Clay, Trigify, Usergems, Common Room, Warmly, whatever is bespoke to the industry (those are the best signals)), I would've still had a massive paid media budget 

AND

I would have been funding high velocity pipe creation. 
Quotas would not have been an issue. 
It would free up time for creative SDR experiments like video chat on target accounts landing on high intent pages on the site or in deal rooms. 
It would have meant conversation volume that I could analyze and use to tune ad copy and email copy and blog content.
The list keeps going.

The other reason marketers should fund sales tech is
GTM is GTM.
It all runs together.

Success at the top of the funnel aids all other top funnel efforts. (Rising tides, lifting ships, yup)

Cold calling creates a ton of awareness, with the highest recall possible.

(Recall is a metric B2C folks use to measure the impact of ad campaigns where there is no clear CTA to a purchase - email and ads have way lower recall than a conversation)

And the third reason:

CROs don't really have budgets other than people X pipeline. Which is why they budget per headcount.

They have no real tech budget. And if given, given very begrudgingly. Usually owned by RevOps, who also have almost no budget other than vital tooling.

Marketing is for top funnel innovation. Marketing should hire GTM Eng type roles. 

And Marketing should fund sales tech, at least as it concerns SDRs.

ROCS. 

Gerry Hill and Chris Beall thought of this metric.

I'm still puzzling over the implications.

But I think I'm in love. (Yes when you work in GTM design long enough, you do fall in love with the right metrics).

First: how much does a conversation cost you?

Second: how much money do you make per conversation held?

The first question is simple to calculate, yet most don't. Cost of tech+team+time involved over a day/week/month/year, vs. how many (qualified) conversations the team has over a day/week/month/year. If you're REALLY honest, you include top funnel + awareness marketing spend here as well (ouch).

What we've seen at TitanX is that it can range anywhere from $200 to $2500. 

Per conversation. 

Just for SDR time+tech.

Most are north of $800 per conversation. 

(So yes, buy better headsets for your sales team, they're cheaper than 1 convo).

And also if you do calculate this, it gives demand gen something to aim for in terms of ROAS calc. Especially if you can answer the second question.

Return side: how many qualified new business conversations to get to an opportunity, then calculate down to revenue. 

The result is a truly scalable SDR org.

Can you imagine what that level of clarity FEELS like?

Confidence in hiring. Confidence in direction. Break down ROCS by vertical, SKU, team, rep even - and you know exactly where to double down and where to shore up.

Of course this assumes distributed work among a team of SDRs, which is not so much the domain of email/social any longer and more fit for the phone. But that's a debate for another post.




...Build your house on ROCS. (Couldn't resist)

Been messing around trying to get AI longform video ad makers to play nice.

I think we're pretty close to something here. Time to run it in the retargeting set?

Disclaimer: this AI is obviously not a lawyer.

"Intent data" gets a bad rap. Mostly deserved.

But it makes sense: we all want to filter our market down to "who is most likely to buy."

But like with all words, we've got to narrow down what we mean by "intent."

I usually break intent into three categories:
- 1st party (web and owned engagement signals) = always good, they existed before your linkedin feed got taken over by them
- 2nd party (review sites) = sometimes great
- 3rd party (topical intent) = meh, usually a waste of $$$

But a better framework might be: Behavioral vs Topical.

The real problem with third party intent, which Jason Bay pointed out the other day is one of the biggest scams, is trying to tie the topic of web content, to the identity of a human reader of that content, to the possible behavior/disposition of a business. 

That's a lot of logical (and logisitical) fancy footing.

Instead:
- who is naming your competitors in their tech stacks (fan of Sumble for this)?
- who is active on linkedin? filter for linkedin outreach
- who is active on the phone? That's what we call TitanX Phone Intent

We don't tell you who is likely to buy. 

But we make it reeeeeal easy to ask them.

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