GTM Engineering: The Technical Bits — Everett Berry, Clay
Aug 26, 2026 · 19:04
Everett Berry of Clay explains GTM engineering, the discipline of letting go-to-market teams ship as fast as engineering teams, by covering its hardest technical areas. Data first: accounts never hold still, so teams waterfall across hundreds of vendors—Forager alone yields half of phone numbers—and must run evals to trust providers. Orchestration is the second problem, a data engineering puzzle across 20–30 tools that sync behind your back; Clay's fix is a graph of general purpose nodes. Third are long-running agents, one per account, dormant until triggered, holding state across a deal cycle; human-agent interface is the hardest problem. Execution is the fourth: with cold email reply rates at 0.5–1%, reps spread domains, route replies home, and suppress channels when meetings book.
