In today's episode, I chat with Tim, CRO at Agent F, about building a Berlin-based pre-seed ERP platform targeting the mid-market gap between small accounting tools like QuickBooks and enterprise giants like SAP—companies between 50 and 500 people that are too complex for the bottom and too cost-sensitive for the top, with AI now making that layer viable earlier in the company journey than ever before. 

We explore Tim's evolution from mass automated campaigns with 50%+ open rates but near-zero replies, to a signal-plus-manual approach that pushed response rates from 3-5% all the way to 30-40%—by switching from ICP thinking to ideal use case thinking, identifying specific life events like a founder transitioning out of founder-led finance and hiring a VP of Finance, then spending 15-30 minutes per lead doing real research that AI can't replicate (like spotting a shared VC connection in a website photo). Tim shares his trust-times-value formula: perceived value isn't fixed—it's multiplied by the trust level of the person delivering it, which means a human writing a genuinely personal message creates more perceived value than the same words sent by automation, and that in a world flooded with AI content the human brain still instinctively assigns more trust to real human contact. He also ran 10-12 small hypothesis-driven campaigns of 50-150 leads each across different segments and roles, using the data to narrow down exactly where in a startup's journey the ERP question surfaces—landing on Series A as the new sweet spot, not pre-IPO. Tim shares his path from mechanical and production engineering, to operations management at Berlin startups, to getting handed the sales team over a dinner and a bottle of red wine, discovering that sales is 70-80% human psychology, and eventually becoming CRO at Agent F. His advice runs through the whole conversation: do things that don't scale for your first customers, because trust compounds into referrals before you've even closed the deal. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:19) What Agent F Does: AI-Native ERP for the Mid-Market Gap 
(02:50) Early GTM: Expert Interviews, Network Leverage, and Hypothesis-Driven Campaigns 
(05:00) Switching from ICP to Ideal Use Case Thinking 
(08:00) Signal-Based Outreach Plus Manual Research: 3-5% to 30-40% Reply Rates 
(09:45) Why AI Can't Replace the 15-Minute Human Research Layer 
(11:09) The Trust-Times-Value Formula: Human Contact as a Multiplier 
(13:35) Do Things That Don't Scale: First 10 Customers Deserve a Human 
(14:12) Tim's Journey: Mechanical Engineer to CRO via a Dinner and Red Wine 
(16:13) How Sales Became Human Psychology and Partnership Over Pipeline 
(17:00) Future of Sales: Efficient Is Not the Same as Effective

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