27 posts
Send 4–6 follow-up emails before stopping outbound to a prospect. Most replies come on the 3rd to 5th touch. Stopping after one or two emails leaves a significant portion of pipeline on the table.
Lead qualification is the process of determining whether a prospect has the need, budget, authority, and timing to buy your product. Qualified leads are worth pursuing; unqualified ones waste sales capacity.
A sales playbook is the documented set of processes, messaging, objection responses, and best practices a sales team uses to close deals consistently. It captures what works so the team doesn't re-learn it from scratch with every hire.
Pipeline hygiene is the practice of keeping CRM deal data accurate, current, and useful for forecasting. Poor pipeline hygiene produces unreliable forecasts, missed follow-ups, and sales decisions made on bad data.
A GTM (go-to-market) strategy is the plan a company uses to bring a product to customers and generate revenue. It defines who you sell to, how you reach them, and how you convert and retain them.
A sales sequence is a pre-planned series of outreach touchpoints sent to a prospect over a set period. Each step uses a different angle or channel to increase the chance of getting a reply.
An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a detailed description of the company and contact most likely to buy your product and succeed with it. It defines who you should target in outbound, paid acquisition, and content — and who you shouldn't.
Definitions for the key terms used in AI-powered go-to-market: agents, heartbeats, memory, closed-loop execution, ICP, and more. A reference for anyone building or evaluating AI GTM systems.
HubSpot and Salesforce have AI features. Ektie is AI-native. The difference isn't the quality of the AI — it's what the underlying platform was built to do.
AI agents and chatbots are both powered by large language models but work completely differently. One responds to prompts. The other acts without being asked. Here's the distinction that matters for sales.
A sales AI agent is an autonomous software program that executes sales tasks independently — prospecting, outreach, follow-up, pipeline management — without requiring a human to prompt each action.
Closed-loop GTM is a sales and marketing execution model where every action produces an outcome, every outcome produces a signal, and every signal feeds back into the team's memory before the next cycle.