The best automated GTM plays you’re not running
Automation doesn't have to mean spray-and-pray
AI SDRs have been, well, controversial – to say the least. It seems nearly impossible to scroll LinkedIn without seeing the hate pile up.
The chief complaint: AI tools will prioritize quantity over quality, thereby spamming accounts with generic messages, and ultimately burning through your prospect list. It’s a valid concern and we’ve seen this happen before with the rise of sales automation tools.
But automation doesn't have to mean spray-and-pray.
It can mean the highly relevant, precise targeting of ABX combined with efficiency gains from AI and the ability to get real-life data from GTM experiments. In other words, we can recreate what the best SDRs are already doing and scale it with AI. (This promise is what makes GTM engineers one of the hottest GTM roles of 2025.)
A major proponent of this shift is Brendan Short, GTM advisor and founder of The Signal, a weekly newsletter about the future of GTM. Brendan has been an early voice about GTM automation with the experience to back it up (Zoom, Apollo, Groundswell). In fact, he helped Apollo book 1,800 meetings per quarter in a fully automated way (“AutoSDR”) without SDRs.
Together we’re sharing our favorite automated GTM plays. And Brendan unpacks exactly how to build these with modern GTM tools.
This is the 9th installment in my popular series about the future of GTM: how to go from random to unified GTM at scale. Subscribe to join 70,000 readers who get posts like these delivered straight to their inbox on Wednesdays at 6:50am Eastern Time.
25 ways to automate your GTM
If you find an idea that could lift your pipeline, go ahead and try to build it (I’d suggest starting with a small audience to avoid hurting your domain health). And if you’ve found other creative automation plays that work for you, I’d love to know. Just leave a comment or contribute to the conversation on LinkedIn.
Signal-based plays
1. Warm outbound campaign targeting recent (de-anonymized) website visitors
2. Competitor displacement campaign w/ tech stack signals
3. Customers' competitor outbound campaign referencing a use case you believe is relevant to the industry
4. 'Look-a-like' outbound campaign targeting similar companies to recent closed-won customers
5. ‘Look-a-like’ LinkedIn ad campaign targeting the same companies & reinforcing the outbound message
6. Outbound campaign targeting former bosses of recent job switchers
7. Outbound campaign targeting companies that have recently posted relevant jobs
8. Geo-specific outbound campaign referencing an upcoming/recent sports event
Warm outbound plays
9. Prospect re-engagement campaign w/ past prospects who've changed companies
10. Prospect re-engagement campaign w/ closed-lost deals from 9 months ago (referencing what was discussed on the last call)
11. Champion outreach campaign w/ past champions who've changed companies
12. ICP-fit warm intro campaign w/ the prior companies of existing champions
13. ICP-fit warm intro campaign w/ mutual investors
14. 'Alumni' outbound campaign w/ the prior employees of new flagship customers
Personalization plays
15. Prospect research brief ahead of 1st call pulling in recent events and/or competitive intel
16. Account-specific landing pages with personalized copy
17. Outbound campaign including a "1:1 video" (automated) made specifically for that prospect
Social plays
18. LinkedIn connection request campaign referencing past posts
19. Influencer/creator list build based on LinkedIn activity of existing users
Product-led plays
20. Product-led outbound campaign targeting an exec buyer when there are multiple accounts from the same domain (roll-up play)
21. Product-led sales campaign reaching out to non-users within an account that has 1+ existing existing user
22. Product-led sales campaign targeting Admins when a free account reaches an ‘aha moment’ in the product
23. Product-led sales campaign targeting Admins when a free account visits a high-intent website page (integrations, enterprise landing page, pricing page)
Expansion plays
24. Expansion campaign leveraging product usage data indicating the account is approaching limits (usage, seats, credits)
25. Expansion campaign offering product assistance when an account begins a free trial of an upsell package
How to automate these plays yourself
There are hundreds of plays you can run; the best ones to start with depend on your GTM motion and level of sophistication. Below are a few plays for each level of experience – and how to set them up.
Best plays for beginners
Website visitors
Any time a company or person visits your website, you can de-anonymize them and send them a message. (Be sure to track high intent pages like your pricing page or developer documentation.)
Tools that do this: Apollo (company-level only), CommonRoom, Koala, RB2B, Unify, Warmly, and ZoomInfo. Most of these have a free trial, so test them!
Pro-tip: Don’t explicitly say “I just saw you were on our pricing page, want a demo?!” 🤣
Champion tracking
Any time one of your champions changes jobs, reach out and see if they want to use you again, at their new company! (You can also send an email when any of your key buyer personas joins a new company, regardless of if they were a previous customer)
Tools to do this: Champify, Clay, CommonRoom, Koala, Pocus, Unify, UserGems, and ZoomInfo.
Pro-tip: Send swag to welcome them to their new role (even automate this part with Postal, Reachdesk or Sendoso!).
Closed-lost deals
Build an automation in your CRM that automatically finds Opportunities that were marked “Closed-lost” 9 months ago, and reach back out. There’s a treasure trove of data sitting in your own systems—don’t forget to mine and use it!
Tools to do this: You can do this natively in HubSpot or with any of the major sales engagement platforms.
Pro-tip: Use the OpenAI API to get a summary of the last call with them and insert that into the email with a line that says: “To jog your memory, here’s what we talked about last time we spoke back in {{November}}: {{AI Summary}}.” Best to have this be a task for the Rep to manually review and hit “send.”
Best plays for intermediate folks
Technology signals (scraped from job postings)
Use data scraped from job postings to determine if a company is using a competitor or a complimentary product. Traditional technographic providers scrape websites, so they’re great at finding tools that require a web pixel. But, for tools that don’t have this, it’s harder to find — that’s where job postings come in (because a Data Engineer role will mention "proficiency in our stack, which includes Snowflake”). Bonus: find all of the customers of your competitors and run a competitive take-down play.
Tools to use: Sumble (great for reps) or Theirstack (great to use the API into Clay).
Example: You sell a cloud service and a great-fit company is someone who uses Snowflake. Build a list using one of the tools I mention above (or built into Clay) and voila - you’re off to the races.
Warm intros
Find the best path into your target accounts, via a warm intro, from a mutual investor, advisor, employee or customer.
Pro-tip: You can do this manually (with Sales Navigator Team Link), and if it shows promise, use a tool to better operationalize/automate it. These tools also have much better ranking and workflows for the person—such as, a mutual investor—receiving the request to make an intro.
Expansion play
Leverage product usage data, seat adoption, and/or credit usage to determine when a company is ready to expand. Programmatically reach out to the Admin when this aha moment happens. Remember: GTM plays should be across the lifecycle of the customer — not just top-of-funnel.
Tools to use: CommonRoom, Koala, and Pocus.
Pro-tip: For low ACV accounts where an Account Manager is not assigned, fully automate; for high ACV accounts, push this into a View and/or a Slack message to the relevant Account Manager for them to do a bit more research before reaching out to the customer.
Plays for advanced folks
Outbound “micro-campaigns”
Small, highly-targeted lists of, say, 50-250 contacts. These lists are generated using *very* specific filtering and/or signals (usually using AI/agents at least for certain parts). Each list (aka "micro-campaign") is relevant this week, but won't be next month.
Example: Company that has a database of pre-vetted sales candidates; automatically scan your target accounts each day and when any put up a job post for an AE, reach out to the VP of Sales with three candidates and say “If you want more candidates like this, let me know and I can give you a tour of our product.” That’s a timely, highly-targeted and value-add email.
Tools to use: Clay, custom AI agents.
Pro-tip: Use data points that are not in a B2B database like Apollo or ZoomInfo; read this article to learn more.
Turning signups into an outbound account-based sales motion (product-led sales)
When a (PLG) user becomes a product-qualified lead (PQL), automatically reach out to that user and have a system fetch other users at the company who are not yet in your product (end users and decision makers) and add them into sequences to build “outbound” groundswell across the org.
Tools to use: Apollo, Clay, CommonRoom, Koala, Pocus, ZoomInfo (you’ll also need data warehouse or CDP + a reverse-ETL tool like Census or Hightouch).
Pro-tip: For low ACV products, the call-to-action in the outreach should be to drive free sign-ups. For high ACV products, the call-to-action is to gather information from end-users that you package into a deck and send to the decision maker. The deck should show their feedback/pain, how your product solves it, and data on how much product usage is happening across their team.
LinkedIn competitor spying
Use a scraping tool to go see when key buyer personas at your target accounts are engaging with a competitor on LinkedIn. This may indicate they’re having a conversation to buy a product in your category.
Tools to use: Clay, CommonRoom, Triggify.
Pro-tip: Don’t spam people with messages about this one, just use it as an intent source.
Go even deeper
There are hundreds (literally!) of signals you can track to use for GTM plays. Start with a few really high impact signals to build pipeline quickly, then go deeper.
Where things get really interesting is when you start stacking signals and generate lead lists and copy based on dozens of signals, then run automated GTM plays based on these. AI can also be an incredibly powerful tool to build a tiering model that uses rich data and signals together, helping you reach out to the right companies (and people) at the right time.
Here’s how to think about automations: what do your best reps research manually when they are prospecting? What signals are good indicators of the right time to reach out to a company? These are the things you want to monitor at scale with a signal-based platform, or by building AI agents to find this information for you. Then, operationalize that data into autonomous plays.
When done right, it’s truly magic.
And again, the goal is to use AI and automation to send far fewer emails. Because, with a creative, thoughtful approach, the research of companies and people is so targeted (and timely) that these plays convert at 5-10x higher than normal “spray-and-pray” cold outbound.
How to automate signal-based selling [The Signal]
From random to unified GTM in 30 days [Growth Unhinged]
ICP marketing done right [Growth Unhinged]
Brendan’s favorite resources of signals to track [The Signal]
Follow Brendan on LinkedIn or subscribe to his newsletter, The Signal
 | A guest post by
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There are so many signals to consider (which is rad), but I think having a clear plan around which signals will have the best impact for your GTM motion is the best path forward. Then, figure out how to use ai and automation to help you research those signals and scale your plays. It's magic when done thoughtfully.
This is a great resource, Kyle. Saving it for future reference!