In today's episode, I chat with Dario Dean, GTM Engineer at Reach, about being the first GTM engineer hired at a merchant of record company helping SaaS and e-commerce businesses expand globally—and what it looks like to build GTM strategy from scratch in-house versus the rinse-and-repeat agency world he came from. 

We explore his favorite campaign: a LinkedIn content agency client targeting business authors releasing books, where Dario got the agency's internal content playbook, turned it into a Clay prompt, scraped Penguin Publishing to find authors with upcoming releases, pulled chapter-level detail about each book, and generated two personalized LinkedIn content samples per prospect—sending them in the outreach email as a free preview of what working together would look like. Proof of work at scale, made to feel handcrafted. He also shares his Eventbrite scraping campaign for a printing franchise, pulling companies hosting events, enriching them in Clay, and running outbound sequences that drove 60-80 leads per month and deals worth $200K a year per location. Dario's take on where the space is going: it's somewhere between the LinkedIn crowd claiming they replaced 100-person SDR teams in two days and the people dismissing cold outreach entirely—the real answer is automating the research and prep layer while keeping humans close to the actual outreach, with GTM engineering eventually bleeding into RevOps and dark funnel marketing to build a complete picture of who's engaging and when. Dario shares his path from social content and newsletters at marketing agencies, to discovering Apollo during COVID while running virtual team-building events, to joining a cold outbound agency, to landing his current role at Reach. His advice: just get in and do it—he learned Facebook ads by selling dog portraits, learned outbound by running his own campaigns during COVID, and reckons no course or tutorial replaces the feeling of actually spending real money or sending real emails and seeing what happens. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:20) What Reach Does and Dario's Role as First GTM Engineer Hired 
(01:27) Agency vs In-House GTM Engineering: Rinse-and-Repeat vs Constant Strategy Innovation 
(03:12) Printing Franchise Campaign: Eventbrite Scraping to 60-80 Leads Per Month 
(04:30) LinkedIn Content Agency Campaign: Playbook-to-Prompt to Personalized Lead Magnet at Scale 
(06:10) Proof of Work in Cold Outreach: Making Automated Feel Handcrafted 
(07:07) Future Predictions: Volume Still Wins But Can't Stand Alone Anymore 
(08:31) Conference Prep Workflow: Enriching Attendee Lists Before the Event 
(09:55) GTM Engineering Bleeding Into RevOps and Dark Funnel Marketing 
(11:16) Dario's Journey: Social Content to Newsletters to Apollo During COVID 
(12:03) Advice: Just Get In and Do It—Learn Facebook Ads by Selling Dog Portraits

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