GTM 113: Operator.ai, Solving the Great Ignore and GTMfund Incubating a Company with Mark Kosoglow and Max Altschuler

The GTM Podcast

Mark Kosoglow is the Co-Founder and CEO of Operator.ai, a company incubated by GTMfund. Mark was employee #1 at Outreach and former SVP of Global Sales, where he helped grow the company from zero to over $200 million in revenue. He is joined in this special edition podcast episode by Max Altschuler, Founder and General Partner of GTMfund.
Discussed in this Episode:

• The current state of sales and marketing tech, with too much automation leading to spam and prospects tuning out messages.
• The Great Ignore, the place we have reached where buyers are ignoring 90% of sales activity.
• How basic contact and account data has become commoditized and no longer provides a competitive advantage.
• The launch of Operator, its manifesto and mission.
• The founding story and team behind Operator, including Mark and Max's history of working together.
• Operator's unique approach to using AI for finding interesting insights to enable relevant, targeted outreach.
• Incubating a company within GTMfund.

Highlights:
(4:00) Mark's background at Outreach and the early days of sales automation.
(6:41) The problem with relying solely on basic contact and account data for outreach.
(8:41) How Operator uses AI to find unique insights for personalizing outreach
(14:01) The vision for Operator: going from 20 sales touches to book a meeting back down to 2.
(27:58) The founding story of Operator and how the team came together.
(32:47) Comparing Operator's approach to other sales tech tools and their shortcomings.
(38:00) The dangers of AI-powered spam and the need for more targeted, relevant outreach.

Guest Speaker Links (Mark Kosoglow):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkosoglow/

Host Speaker Links (Max Altschuler):
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

Sponsor:

• Brought to you by Attention. Attention’s AI-powered call recording platform ensures that your deals are executed flawlessly. It records your calls, generates next-step summaries, action items, and even creates scorecards for every single call, so your reps can continuously improve. But that’s just the beginning. Attention’s generalized insights allow you to ask any question across all of your conversations - think of it like ChatGPT for your sales calls. Attention also lets you build automated workflows tailored to your needs. For example, if a customer mentions they’re at risk of churning during a call, Attention can automatically loop in a sales director and solutions engineer to ensure that customer receives the full white-glove treatment, reducing churn and keeping your business thriving. Attention is helping companies onboard reps faster, increase the productivity of their existing teams, and giving revenue leaders unparalleled visibility into their pipelines—all while automating those tedious manual tasks.

The GTM Podcast
Features conversations with the top 1% of tech executives, VCs, and founders - the experts who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Scott Barker to dissect their stories - revealing what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.
This podcast is produced by GTMnow, the media brand of VC firm GTMfund.
Visit gtmnow.com to see more content and subscribe.