The GTM Launchpad is where we open the hood on B2B revenue - fixing structure, sharpening outbound and building pipeline that actually holds up

Last week I wrote this newsletter after spending two days onsite with a B2B SaaS team in Denver. The biggest thing I came home thinking about was how different a GTM problem can look once you get close enough to the actual work.

I already knew the numbers, understood the outbound motion and had spent months working with the team remotely but being in the room added context that no dashboard was going to give me.

If you read last Monday's issue, you know where I landed: dashboards are great at telling you what happened but the room is usually where you learn why. I thought about that a lot this week because the work obviously didn't stop when I got on the plane. We went right back into SDR coaching, leadership sessions, workflow cleanup, tooling conversations and interviews for additional outbound capacity.

One moment from an SDR ride-along ended up connecting almost everything we have been working on since Denver.

I told the rep that I wanted him to get another 300 dials done before he logged off for a few days. The number itself wasn't controversial. We had already been working toward a higher level of consistent activity and he knew the expectation.

What happened next was more interesting.

Instead of ending the conversation with “go make the calls” we started working through how he was actually going to produce them. We looked at what was available in the system, which accounts still had viable people attached to them, what had already been worked, where old prospect pools could be recycled and how much usable calling volume was actually sitting in front of him.

By the end of the session, he had hundreds of people available to call.

I went into that conversation thinking we needed more activity. I came out of it thinking much more about what has to exist underneath the activity before leadership can reasonably demand it.

I want to be careful here because I don't think the lesson is that activity targets are bad. I've spent too much of my career around outbound teams to buy that argument.

If you're an SDR whose job is to create conversations, there is a minimum amount of work required to create enough chances for those conversations to happen. Calling matters, emailing matters and following up matters. Sometimes the answer really is that somebody needs to stop overthinking the motion and do more work.

That was still true in this situation.

The difference was that once we started looking beneath the activity number another question appeared: could the operating environment consistently support the activity we were asking for?

There is a big difference between asking a rep for 125 calls when they have a healthy stream of relevant people sitting in front of them and asking for the same number when they need to spend half the day finding, enriching and organizing the next group of people themselves.

From the dashboard, both situations can look like the same problem. The rep made 70 calls when leadership wanted 125.

Up close, they may be completely different problems

That's what caught my attention

The more we worked through it, the clearer the distinction became.

Once the rep had enough viable contacts, knew where they were coming from and could move through the workflow without constantly stopping to solve another operational problem, the expectation became easier to defend. At that point if the calls don't happen we're no longer debating whether leadership created enough opportunity for execution. We can have a much cleaner conversation about accountability.

That is where I've landed after this week: the system has to earn the activity

I don't mean the environment needs to be perfect. No outbound system I've ever worked inside has been perfect and waiting for one to become perfect is another great way to avoid selling anything.

I mean leadership should understand what has to be true underneath the KPI.

Do we have enough accounts? Do those accounts contain enough relevant people? Is the data usable? Can the rep move from one action to the next without unnecessary friction? Are outcomes being captured consistently enough that we can see what is working? Does the math between activity and the business outcome make sense?

Those questions matter because otherwise “do more” becomes the default diagnosis for almost everything.

Sometimes that's the right diagnosis

Sometimes it's just the easiest one

We've also been spending more time reverse-engineering the outbound expectation instead of starting with an arbitrary activity number.

That sounds obvious but I still see teams do the opposite all the time. Someone decides that an SDR should make 100 calls per day because that sounds like an appropriately aggressive number and then the business builds expectations around it without asking whether 100 calls has any relationship to the actual outcome they need.

A more useful place to start is at the other end.

Let's say a team needs 15 meetings per month. If 20% of meaningful conversations become meetings, the team needs roughly 75 conversations to produce those 15 meetings. If 30% of connects become meaningful conversations that requires around 250 connects. If the dial-to-connect rate is 10% you're now looking at roughly 2,500 dials.

Spread across 20 selling days and you arrive at about 125 calls per day.

The simple equation looks like this

Required dials = Meeting target ÷ Conversation-to-meeting rate ÷ Connect-to-conversation rate ÷ Dial-to-connect rate

Now the activity expectation has a reason behind it

The conversation also becomes much better because you can inspect every assumption inside the equation.

If the dial-to-connect rate changes, the required activity changes.

If targeting improves and more connects turn into real conversations, the requirement changes again.

If the team's conversation-to-meeting conversion is poor, increasing dials may technically create more meetings but it might not be the highest-leverage problem to solve.

You stop arguing about whether 100 calls is “too many” or “not enough” and start talking about what the system actually produces.

That's a much more useful management conversation.

This is the part I think revenue leaders can miss.

Reverse-engineering the activity requirement tells you how much work the motion needs. It doesn't automatically tell you whether your current operating system can supply that work.

If the math says a rep needs 2,500 dials this month can you consistently provide enough relevant contacts to support 2,500 legitimate attempts?

If you can't, increasing the daily KPI doesn't solve the problem. You're asking the rep to manufacture supply that isn't there.

This is where the work we've been doing since Denver starts connecting. We've been cleaning up dispositions, thinking through lead stages, inspecting how data moves between systems, discussing what should own the next action and looking at where unnecessary friction exists between finding a person and actually talking to them.

None of that looks as exciting as a new cold call script or a clever outbound campaign but those small operational decisions determine how much of a rep's day gets spent selling versus figuring out how to sell.

The difference compounds fast

A few unnecessary minutes on one account means nothing. A few unnecessary minutes repeated dozens of times per day across multiple reps becomes real capacity.

I've been in several conversations this week around the technology sitting underneath the motion, including with Apollo and other partners we're evaluating or working alongside.

My interest in those conversations isn't really about adding more software. If anything I'm becoming more interested in subtraction.

Modern sales teams have access to an absurd amount of technology. We have enrichment platforms, intent data, sequencers, CRMs, dialers, conversation intelligence, coaching software and AI layered across all of it. Every product can be excellent individually and the rep can still end up operating inside a terrible system.

The question I care about now is much simpler - how easily can the rep move from signal to person to action to conversation to outcome to next step?

If adding a tool removes two handoffs and simplifies that path, great.

If adding a tool creates another database, another sync, another browser tab and another place for information to disappear I'm much less impressed by whatever capability we just added.

The stack isn't the system

The path through it is

We're currently talking with senior SDR talent for this client and this week's work made that conversation more useful too.

A couple of issues ago I wrote about not scaling the assumption. The point wasn't that businesses shouldn't hire more salespeople. Sometimes more capacity is exactly what the business needs.

The sequencing matters though.

If you're going to add another rep, especially someone experienced, you want them entering a motion they can accelerate. You don't want their first month spent discovering all the basic operating questions that nobody answered before they arrived.

Where do accounts come from?
How much daily activity is expected?
What counts as a conversation?
How does an outcome get logged?
What happens next?
What does the manager inspect?
Where does coaching happen?
What does the math say the team actually needs?

We don't need every answer perfected before another person joins but we should understand enough of the system that the new person is increasing capacity rather than becoming another diagnostic tool.

That's a very different kind of hiring

There is another side to this that I don't want to lose.

A better system doesn't remove accountability.

In fact I think it makes accountability easier.

If the rep has enough viable people to call, the workflow is clear, the expectations have been reverse-engineered from a legitimate business outcome and the coaching is available then the conversation becomes much cleaner when the work doesn't happen.

At that point I don't need to invent another explanation

We can talk about execution

This is where three different problems tend to get mashed together inside revenue teams: capacity, capability and accountability.

Capacity asks whether the environment supplies enough opportunity to do the job.

Capability asks whether the rep knows how to do the job.

Accountability asks whether they're actually doing it.

Those three problems can produce very similar numbers on a dashboard.

They require completely different responses.

That might be the thing I'll carry forward most from this week.

If you're leading a sales team and activity is below where you want it I wouldn't start Monday by immediately changing the KPI.

I'd sit next to one rep and ask them to show me how they produce the next 100 actions.

Not explain it but actually show you

Watch where the first account comes from
Watch how they identify the person
Watch how they get the contact data
Watch what happens if that data is wrong
Watch what they do after the call
Watch where the outcome goes and how quickly they can move to the next person

Then take your meeting or pipeline target and reverse-engineer the actual activity requirement using your own conversion rates.

Those two exercises together should tell you quite a bit.

You may discover that your activity expectation is completely reasonable and the team simply isn't executing.

You may discover that the number you're asking for has almost no relationship to the output you need.

Or you may discover what I did this week: the activity target makes sense but leadership still has some work to do underneath it before the rep has a fair shot at producing it consistently.

Any of those answers is useful.

The point is knowing which one you're dealing with.

A week ago, the biggest thing I was thinking about was proximity.

Getting closer to the work changed what I could see.

This week showed me the second half of that lesson. Once you see the problem more clearly, you have to be willing to let the diagnosis change.

I entered that SDR session thinking mostly about output. We needed more calls, and I still believe that.

What changed was my understanding of everything that had to sit underneath those calls.

That's the part I'm paying more attention to now.

Before asking a team for more I want to understand whether we've made “more” possible.

Then once we have I want to hold the standard.

The system has to earn the activity
Then the rep has to earn the result

Both can be true

That's what I'm taking into next week

Thanks for reading. See you again next week at 8 am MST!

- Tom Slocum ✌️

If you're looking at your outbound team wondering whether the answer is more activity, better coaching, another rep or another tool, that's usually where I start.

Through The SD Lab, I work directly with B2B founders and sales leaders to get underneath the numbers, inspect the actual motion and figure out where the constraint lives before we start prescribing fixes.

Sometimes the answer really is more activity. Sometimes it isn’t. The important part is being able to tell the difference before you spend another quarter solving the wrong problem

Book a 20-minute Pipeline Diagnostic
No giant pitch. We'll look at the motion together