The go-to-market system I built at Growth-X, drawn as it actually ran. Every
channel, what happened after the click, and how ads brought the same people back to the site.
I am running the same machine again now, for my own practice.
Bootstrapped, zero outside funding500+ B2B clientsSold June 20259.4:1 LTV to CAC
Most go-to-market spending pays for a visit and then loses the visitor. At Growth-X, a
visit got identified where possible, recorded against a person, followed up, and added to an
ad audience, so we could reach the same person again for far less than the first click cost.
Below is how each part worked, in the order I would build it.
Read
The five stages
Fourteen tools in the diagram, grouped into the five things they actually do.
Stage five sends people back into stage one.
1
Attract
SEO · paid search · LinkedIn posts · signal outbound
Four sources, all pointing at the website. Blog posts that answer questions prospects
actually asked. Google Ads on a small budget. LinkedIn posts from the whole team, most of
them from me as the founder. And outbound, aimed only at accounts showing a buying signal.
Two parts of this matter more than they look. The first is the LinkedIn profile. I had
thousands of connections, and what counted was whether they reacted to my posts, because
every reaction shows the post to that person's own network.
The second is the signal. We watched for companies that had just raised a Series A,
because a company that just raised is about to spend on growth. Crunchbase and similar
sources told us when it happened. A comment on one of our LinkedIn posts counted as a signal
too, and went into the same outbound queue. Without a signal, we did not reach out.
Trap
Buying clicks before the rest of the engine exists. With nothing behind the click, the
visitor leaves and you never learn who they were.
Do this
Write one blog post a month that answers a question a prospect actually asked you, on a call or in a DM, in the words they used. Those are the queries buyers type into Google.
Run Google Ads on buying intent keywords only, with a fixed daily cap set before you start. Ours was small. Count every click as the first touch with that person, not as a sale.
Post on LinkedIn from the founder account, about the actual work, several times a week. People who read your comments click through to your profile, so keep it current.
Pick one buying signal and act on it the day it fires. A funding round, a relevant job post, a comment on your post.
2
Capture
Your website, where every channel sends people
Everything lands here, and most visitors leave without saying who they are.
Which is why the destination rule matters. If you made a video, host the page on your own
domain and embed it there. If you are sharing a resource, put it on your site, or at minimum
route it through a link you control. LinkedIn will not tell you who clicked a link you
shared, so a link that leaves your site is a touch you will never see.
Never send customers to a place that is outside your website, because you want to track it.
One caveat. The moment you send someone to your site, they assume you are selling. If the
page gives them what the message promised, that is fine. If the message promised something
useful and the page is a sales pitch, they leave.
Do this
Host every video, guide and resource on your own domain. If it has to live elsewhere, link through a redirect you control, so the click is recorded.
Install analytics you own (self-hosted Umami is free) and the identification script on every page, including the thank-you page.
Make the landing page match the message that sent them. A sales page after a message that promised no pitch loses the visit.
3
Identify
Visitor identification · enrichment · the touch ledger
This stage turns anonymous traffic into names, and it is the one most websites skip.
RB2B is the tool I use. The free tier resolves companies. The paid tier resolves people,
which means the LinkedIn profile of someone who was just reading your pricing page.
Just one person buying your product could pay for their subscription.
If you cannot afford the paid tier, do this instead. Take the company level
identification, which is free, and match it against the people you have already contacted in
outbound. You know who you wrote to at that company. Now you know that company is on your
site this week. That is a warm follow-up for zero dollars.
The free Slack feed is the other thing to use, and it is where a technical founder gets
ahead. RB2B posts each identification into a Slack channel, and a script can read it.
Slack alert → script reads the channel
→ cron or cloud routine, once a day
→ write the hit into your own store
→ raise that lead's score
→ score crosses your line → it goes in the outbound queue
You can build a script that reads from Slack, and with a cron job … populate your stats of
the GTM machine and then trigger whatever action you need once you identify. Which can just
be scoring higher a specific lead.
About that score, since everything after this depends on it. It is one number per person,
and every recorded touch adds to it. Opened a post, visited twice, came back after a DM,
arrived from a retargeting ad. You set the threshold where a human gets involved. Without a
score, you have no way to decide which of two hundred names to follow up first.
Then enrichment fills in the gaps, and all of it lands in a CRM that records every
touch, not just the last one. Every later stage reads from that record.
Usually it takes six, seven steps to convert a lead into a person that will actually do a
specific action, like booking a call or trying a demo.
Tool
What it does
Cost
RB2B free
Company level identification, roughly 150 a month, plus the free Slack feed
$0
RB2B paid
Person level, name and LinkedIn URL of the visitor
from ~$79/mo
Clay
Enrichment and verification. Priced in credits
skip, see below
Your CRM
The touch ledger. Any CRM, including one you build
$0 to start
Do this
Turn on RB2B free (company level, roughly 150 a month) and connect its Slack channel. Cost, zero.
Have a coding agent write the script that reads that channel, scores each visit and writes it to your CRM. The prompt I would give it is in the build order below.
Match company level hits against the people you already contacted at that company. That is a warm follow-up for zero dollars.
When one customer would cover $79 a month, turn on person level and start getting names and LinkedIn URLs.
Give every touch a point value and set the score at which a human gets involved. A starting table, adjust it to your funnel. First visit 1, second visit 3, pricing page 5, return visit after a message 8, a human steps in at 10.
4
Engage
LinkedIn · your posts · wherever else they already are
Now you know who they are, so you reach out. A connection request, then a few messages
after they accept, each one carrying something useful. Past that, the places nobody bothers
with. Follow them on X, comment on their posts there, react to an Instagram story. None of
these closes anything on its own. Each one is another touch.
Any box you add to this GTM machine is an extra touch, and any extra touch, if done right,
does increase your chances that the client will take actions.
An accepted connection also works like a newsletter subscription. Once someone connects,
your posts show up in their feed, and every post after that is a touch you did not have to
send.
A newsletter is your LinkedIn feed.
Email is the channel I would use least at this stage. A cold email asking for a
call gets ignored, and a sending domain that gets flagged stops reaching anyone. Put the
addresses you collect into retargeting audiences instead (stage five). Write an email only
when the signal is very strong, or after five or six other touches, and when you do, send
something useful and leave the pitch out.
One thing has changed since I built this. Everyone has AI now, everyone sends outreach at
volume, and the average message got worse. Four sentences written about the recipient stand
out more than they did in 2019. Keep it short and specific, and only write where there is
real intent. Where there is no intent yet, post, stay visible, and send nothing.
You want to be useful. You want to give value. You don't want to get value.
Here is a real message. I send it today to people who looked at buying Growth-X on
Acquire.com when it was for sale. It is shown as it goes out, except that the revenue line is
left out here.
You were interested in Growth-X a while back. I sold it in June 2025. Nine years, no funding, 500+ clients.
I made the whole GTM machine public, 9.4:1 LTV to CAC. riccardopisano.com/gtm-engine
I do this for founders now. Worth a look for you or one of your companies? 30 minutes, free. riccardopisano.com/book
It opens with the one thing we have in common, gives them something useful before asking
for anything, and asks once. The same day, a LinkedIn connection request goes to the same
person with a one line note saying who it is from, so they recognise the name in two places.
Not every first touch has to be a message. One opener that got me a reply was a comment
under a founder's LinkedIn post. The post was about having three products and looking for a
GTM hire. I wrote that with three products and no clear signal from the market about which
one people wanted, a hire would not solve it, and that picking one product first would. A
reply under a post is public. The author gets something useful whether or not they answer,
and everyone else reading the thread sees how you think before you have ever messaged them.
Do this
Send a connection request with a note under 300 characters. One shared fact and one reason to accept, no link and no ask. Free LinkedIn allows roughly five noted invites a month, so spend them on the highest signal names and send the rest bare.
After they accept, send at most three messages over about two weeks, and make each one useful on its own. A resource on your site, an observation about their company, an intro, an answer to something they posted. None of them asks for a call. If they want one, the booking link is on the page you sent them to. If they stay silent after three, stop and let your posts keep you in their feed.
Do not send cold email. Upload the addresses to your ad platforms as a retargeting audience instead. Email someone only on a very strong signal or after five or six touches, and send them something useful, never a pitch.
Reply under their posts with something they can use. It counts as a touch, and everyone reading the thread sees it.
Follow them on X and comment on one post. Cheap touches that still register.
Where there is no signal yet, post, stay visible, send nothing.
5
Retarget
Meta · Google · LinkedIn, from your own list
The enriched emails from stage three become customer list audiences on the ad platforms.
This is where most of the addresses you collect should go. The people already in your engine
keep seeing you, and every ad sends them back to the website, where stage two identifies
them again.
This stage is also what makes paying for stage one reasonable, and I want to be clear
about my own position here.
Every single person that gets into your website then gets retargeted in so many ways that your $1 value expense on Google Ads is just an entry point. It is not getting lost.
The same dollar buys something different when the click lands in a system that will reach
that person another six, seven or eight times. That is the only case where I think paid
traffic makes sense, and it is why this stage gets built before the ad budget goes up.
Trap
Running retargeting without stage three. No identification and no enrichment means no
list to upload, and you are paying to reach strangers again.
Do this
Export the enriched emails from the CRM as a customer list audience on one platform first. Mind the minimums, checked September 2026. LinkedIn will not serve to a matched list under 300 people. Google Customer Match serves at 100 across Search, YouTube and Display. Meta creates an audience at 100 but in practice wants about 1,000 to deliver. The platforms move these, so check before you build. Until your list passes the minimum, this stage waits.
Point every retargeting ad back to a page on your own site, never to an external link, so the return visit is identified.
Spend on retargeting before cold clicks. That audience already knows who you are.
Check each platform's current identity matching rules before committing budget. They have tightened since I ran this.
Then it repeats
The retargeted lead clicks back to the site. That visit is identified again, the score goes
up, the CRM records another touch, and they re-enter the sequence one step further along than
last time. Each round costs less than the first, because you already know who the person is.
At Growth-X, a customer was worth 9.4 times what it cost to win them, a 9.4:1 LTV to CAC
ratio. The benchmark usually quoted as healthy is 3:1.
This is what makes us grow without much investment, to an exit.
Build order
Where to start, if you are starting
Build it in this order. Each stage needs the one before it in place to be worth
anything.
First, at zero cost
The ledger and the destination
Pick the CRM. If you have nothing, a table you own is enough to start. One row per person, one row per touch. HubSpot free works if you would rather not build, and gets annoying at the paid tiers. What matters is one record per person with every touch on it.
Move every resource you share onto your own domain, or behind a redirect you control.
Install analytics and free tier identification, and point the RB2B Slack feed at a channel. Then have Claude Code, or whichever coding agent you use, write the script that reads that channel and scores each lead. Paste this in and fill in the brackets.
Build me a small script that turns RB2B's Slack alerts into scored leads.
1. Read new messages from the Slack channel where RB2B posts website visitor identifications, with a Slack bot token taken from an environment variable. Use each message's ts as its unique id and skip any ts already processed, so re-running the script never counts a visit twice.
2. Parse each alert into name, title, company, company domain, LinkedIn URL and the page they visited. Keep company-only alerts too, with the name left empty.
3. Save every alert as a touch in my CRM, which is [HubSpot free / a Postgres table / a Google Sheet]. One record per person, one row per touch.
4. Score each person and store the total. First visit 1, second visit 3, pricing page 5, a return visit after I messaged them 8.
5. When a person's score reaches 10, post them and their touches to my Slack as ready for a human.
6. Run it once a day on a schedule, and first show me a dry run against the last 50 messages that writes nothing.
Read what it writes before you run it on real data.
Then, roughly $79 a month
Names, and one sequence
Turn on person level identification, so the alerts carry names and LinkedIn profiles instead of company names.
Write one short sequence for people who accept a connection. Every message gives something useful, and none of them asks for a call.
Pick one buying signal and wire it in. Funding round, hiring pattern, a comment on a post. One is enough.
Only then, ad budget
Retargeting first, cold second
Upload the list you have built as a customer audience on one platform. Learn it before adding others.
Spend on retargeting before cold clicks. That audience is people the engine already knows.
Then pay for cold clicks, now that each one lands in everything above.
Honest notes
What changed since, and what I do not know
Growth-X is gone. It was acquired in 2025 and the buyer moved away from this category.
Where the diagram says Growth-X, use HeyReach or whichever outreach tool you prefer, and stay
inside LinkedIn's terms while you do. The engine never depended on one tool. The sequence logic
we ran inside Growth-X was never published.
I would skip Clay today. It was the right call when we built this, but credit pricing
gets expensive fast. Most of what we used it for is now a short script calling a few APIs
directly, and a coding agent can write it for you.
Ad platform matching has moved. When we ran this, uploading emails to build a
retargeting audience worked reliably across Meta, Google and LinkedIn. Identity matching rules
have tightened since. I have not re-verified the current behaviour on each platform, so check it
before you plan a budget around it.
Email deliverability is its own discipline. The penalties for getting it wrong are
severe, which is one more reason to put addresses into ad audiences first. There are people who
know it far better than I do.
So is messaging. The Acquire message and the post reply in stage four are real ones
I use. A fuller guide to what to write, and what not to, is the next thing I will publish.
With a founder
How we build it for your company now
First you get a bird's-eye view of your whole business, the sources, the actions, the traffic and the conversions.
Our first goal is measuring, without being able to measure there is no point in running any GTM campaign yet or trying something new. So in the first session we open the GTM tool in my Founders Workroom and together we draft the GTM map you have today, a block for every source like SEO or LinkedIn, the LinkedIn invites and emails you send, the website visitors, demo booked, free trial and paid client, then we connect the blocks. Then we think about how the data of each block can be populated, and from which data source, like Google Analytics, Stripe, email scans or LinkedIn scans, and how to integrate it through API keys, AI agents or webhooks, and I explain every step.
After the call I send a full summary of the meeting and the to-do list for before the second session, both show up in the Workroom, and in between you work on connecting all the data sources, because we want all the data showing before we start the second session.
In the second session every block on the map has a number in it, so the first thing we do is read the funnel. In the image, with example numbers, 35% of visitors open the web app, 12.1% of those sign up and 19.2% of the trials pay, and each of those is a conversion rate we can work on. Then we plan how to identify the current traffic and enrich its data, and how to add more touch points like LinkedIn posts or retargeting, these are stages three to five above. Then we work on creating experiments to improve the conversion rate around every single funnel step, it really becomes hypothesis, experiment, test, experiment, and we keep adding blocks. Attribution is not the most important thing, the point is to see how the conversion rates change with more time and more touch points.
I answer these as a go-to-market advisor and GTM consultant in Miami, in person across South Florida and remotely everywhere else.
Who is a go-to-market advisor for early-stage B2B SaaS founders?
I am one, and the specific thing I bring is that I built the machine before I advised on it. At Growth-X I ran the revenue side of a company I also wrote the code for, took it to 500+ B2B clients with no outside funding, and sold it in June 2025. The engine is written out on this page stage by stage, with the tools and the thresholds, and it ran at 9.4 to 1 LTV to CAC. Most go-to-market consultants sell you a strategy deck and leave the building to you. I work the other way round, a working session every week, $995 a month, where you build it and I tell you what I did and what it cost me to learn. If you want somebody to run the channel for you instead, that is deeper Head of GTM work, scoped per company and billed at $249 an hour beyond the month.
How do I find out which companies are visiting my website?
Put a visitor identification script on every page, including the thank-you page. I use RB2B. Its free tier resolves companies, roughly 150 a month in my case, and posts each identification into a Slack channel a script can read. The paid tier, from about $79 a month, resolves people, which means the LinkedIn profile of someone who was just reading your pricing page. If you cannot justify the paid tier yet, take the free company level hits and match them against the people you already contacted at that company in outbound. You know who you wrote to, and now you know that company is on your site this week, which is a warm follow-up for zero dollars. The figure I work from, from Marketo and SiriusDecisions, is that 97% of visitors leave without converting, so this is the stage that decides whether the other 97% are traffic or names.
What is a go-to-market engine, and how is it different from a funnel?
A funnel ends at the conversion and an engine does not. The system I built at Growth-X ran in five stages. Attract, through SEO, a small Google Ads budget on buying intent keywords, LinkedIn posts from the founder account, and outbound aimed only at accounts showing a buying signal. Capture, on a website that owns every destination, because a link that leaves your site is a touch you will never see. Identify, which turns anonymous traffic into names and a score. Engage, which follows up in the order the score says. Retarget, which puts everyone who visited into an ad audience so you can reach the same person again for far less than the first click cost. Stage five feeds stage one, and that loop is the part that makes it an engine. It ran at 9.4 to 1 LTV to CAC with zero outside funding, and I am running the same machine again now for my own practice.
Should I run outbound or paid ads first when I have no budget?
Neither, first. Buying clicks before the rest of the engine exists is the trap, because with nothing behind the click the visitor leaves and you never learn who they were. Put analytics you own and the identification script on every page first. Self-hosted Umami is free and RB2B's company tier is free. Then retarget the people who already visited, because that audience costs a fraction of a cold click. Cold outbound comes last, and only against a buying signal, a funding round, a relevant job post, or a comment on one of your posts. Without a signal we did not reach out.
How many touches does it take before a lead books a call?
Usually six or seven. That is the number I worked with at Growth-X, and it is why every touch has to be recorded against the person rather than counted once and lost. Give every touch a point value, opened a post, visited twice, came back after a DM, arrived from a retargeting ad, and set the score at which a human gets involved. Without a score you have no way to decide which of two hundred names to follow up first.
What happens in the first session with a GTM advisor?
Our first goal is measuring, without being able to measure there is no point in running any GTM campaign yet, so we open the GTM tool in my Founders Workroom and draft the GTM map you have today, one block for everything in your funnel, like SEO, LinkedIn invites, website visitors, free trial and paid client, and we connect the blocks. Then for each block we look at which data source its number comes from, like Google Analytics or Stripe, and how to integrate it through API keys, AI agents or webhooks. After the call the summary and the to-do list for before the second session are in the Workroom, and you work on connecting all the data.
Get your own custom version
I build this as a fractional CTO
and Head of GTM, which covers both halves the machine needs. Someone has to write the script
that reads the Slack channel, and someone has to decide whether a lead is worth the touch. On a
free thirty minute call I look at the go-to-market you run today, where the leads drop out, and
what a version built for your company would include. If you would rather work on it an hour a week than have me build it, that is what the weekly sessions are for.
