Guide: 10 Award-Winning GTM & Rev Ops Strategies

Are you struggling to produce demand-generation campaigns that create meaningful sales conversations? Having a hard time expanding and scaling efficiently? Need a new perspective to get back on track or go to the next level?

In this podcast interview, Amy Kohl, CEO and Founder of AK Operations, shares 10 unbeatable go-to-market and conversion strategies that have yielded award-winning results. AK Operations, a fractional sales and marketing powerhouse specializing in scalable go-to-market and revenue operations programs, has mastered these strategies.

A key focus for Amy is the significance of understanding prospects on a profound level. AK Operations creates highly relevant ideal customer profiles by leveraging closed sales revenue data and insights. These profiles are a foundation for developing targeted content that educates and supports B2B buyers.

Amy Kohl, CEO & Founder

Implementing highly targeted email nurture sequences allows them to swiftly test and refine messaging, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI) through the initiation and scaling of meaningful sales conversations. Ultimately, the approach centers around staying relevant, providing resources, and genuinely addressing the challenges faced by prospects.

“Without quality content, the truth is that sales are always going to be a lot harder. And I love the consultative nurture aspects of serving first with key content pieces. Content needs to be a priority. And when it’s not, you will feel it in the revenue you’re able to attain.” – Amy Kohl

Amy underscores three foundational pillars that companies should never overlook: excellent content, strategic marketing automation, and meticulous management of contact databases. These pillars are pivotal in a go-to-market strategy, consistently driving deep pipeline penetration and facilitating revenue growth.

This interview covers10 unbeatable GTM strategies to address the following questions:

How to engage and transition cold prospects into interested sales conversations?
How to nurture prospects with the right content that produces the greatest ROI?
Five content themes that have been tested and proven to be the most successful.
What content do most companies use that you want to stay away from one hundred percent?
Is there a direct correlation between high-quality content and generating revenue?
How much do you help support your client’s content efforts?
How do you test content to increase conversions?
How to transition cold email leads into “interested” email subscribers?
What goes into the initial cold-email sequence, and what’s the desired outcome or goal?
What is the third goal of the initial cold-prospecting emails?

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube.

An introduction to Amy Kohl and her award-winning go-to-market success strategy

Steve MacDonald: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another podcast episode with B2B Marketing Perspectives, and today we’ve got on a special guest, Amy Kohl. Amy runs an outbound prospecting go-to marketing company, and what that means is, if you need leads, if you need conversions, you need sales, and you’re in the B2B world, Amy is somebody you’re going to want to talk to.

Amy, I’ll let you explain a little bit more about what you do right at the beginning here, but I know that you’re one of the fastest-growing companies in the Midwest, and you recently won a Stevie Award. Tell us a little more about you and your company, for starters.

Amy Kohl: All right, Steve. Well, thanks for having me today. I’m really thankful to be here. My company is called AK Operations. We are currently 14 women based in St. Louis, Missouri. And I founded the company initially to fix a lot of the go-to-market tech stack challenges that people were having about six years ago.

HubSpot is an example of a great job at going to market and selling to many startups, but didn’t really teach them well, in my opinion, how to build a program that produces a pipeline. HubSpot is the right tool, but it’s an entirely different skill set to leverage it in meaningful ways. So, the company was originally started to do that. What transpired quickly after that was a way to really articulate what was producing a good pipeline and making campaigns that support it too.

Today, we serve roughly 35 to 40 customers at any given time, and we are running full-fledged go-to-market strategies on their behalf.

Steve MacDonald: When you say full-fledged go-to-market strategies, you’re talking about everything from I need to meet new prospects, I’m buying lists from ZoomInfo and all the way through your team helping to set up actual meetings, demos; that’s the full go-to-market spectrum that you’re talking about?

Amy Kohl: Correct. That’s right. Our scope is quite deep, and it’s part of fixing this problem, or solving it and teaching teams to swim on their own. We had to structure the business to carry the bulk of the scope of what it takes to go to market. The reason is if I can learn something in a fraction of the time, significantly faster, the takeoff time for our companies will be a fraction of that time too.

So my goal always has been to first focus on our standard operating procedure that all of my teammates deploy in every environment. Then we tweak it by 20% in those seven-day sprints to dial in those nuances that are unique to each of their businesses. So, we are manning these inboxes.

We’re prospecting each of these companies. We are inside their emails as real-life senders, and there’s no fakeness about it. We’re all listed as members of their team at a fractional capacity. And we’re doing everything from following up with somebody when she returns from maternity leave all the way to set meetings for our founders or our closers.

And then being the admins inside of HubSpot doing all the initial deploying of these campaigns out of the gate. So it is quite deep. But it’s what it takes to truly solve this problem and create that blueprint for our customers long term, far, long after we’re gone.

1. How to engage and transition cold prospects into interested sales conversations?

Steve MacDonald: Well, tell us a little about your philosophy on engaging these prospects, right? They’re cold prospects. They don’t know the company that you’re representing. They don’t know you, right? And you’re trying to transition to they not only are you engaging them, to the point that they’re interested, and they want a conversation with the company. So, from the very, very beginning, when they’re a completely cold prospect, how do you warn them up? How do you create that engagement?

Amy Kohl: Good question. And this is a foundational principle that makes us very different in the marketplace. So, we initially start every relationship with a customer by understanding what their ideal customer profile is. And it’s not what the founder thinks it is or what the sales rep or current sales leader says.

We typically always analyze and go heavily into the closed sales data. We’ll investigate the pipeline and build out personas and targets and even tier out sometimes their TAM (Total Addressable Market) into tiers one and two. But the point is, foundationally, I need to understand who we’re talking to first.

If that step is skipped, we’ll produce a lot of pipeline of noise and distractions, and then it ends up being a poor representation of the program because we didn’t feed it the right fuel out the gate. The second step, and very, very important to me as you believe passionately as well, is in serving prospects first.

If you give them content and resources that will serve them, whether they do business with you or not, you’re earning the right to be in their inbox. You’re earning a relationship, or establishing yourself as a resource to them, not just the sales relationship. So, if you skip that, sales will always be difficult.

It will always be more of a challenge, and you’ll be forcing yourself to pull everybody into your pipeline instead of inviting them in. And I have always been on the side of sales, where I prefer a consultative relationship. I don’t want to close a deal that’s not good for my business either.

So as long as we’re approaching it with good stewardship like that and serving our contacts before we’re selling them, or at least in tandem with it, you’ll see a change in the way your prospects engage and come into the pipeline. That principle alone has landed us a strong reputation in terms of our strategy and the program that we’ve built because we’re caring for the entire program.

It’s not just about meetings. How many meetings can I get? It’s also how much can convert into a meaningful pipeline that we can actually convert into revenue and extend our client’s runway. Obviously, content and targeting are the foundational principles, and without them, I hate to say it, it’s hard to sustain any go-to-market strategy.

Steve MacDonald: You’ve got to know who you’re talking to. And their pain points are what they’re trying to accomplish. Understand the greater industry that they’re playing in so that the fuel that you’re talking about, that content, is meaningful to them. Right before we started recording here, we were talking about the difference between product marketing content and a higher level of quality content that we were talking about as thought leadership. Tell me a little about that content that’s educating them, is that product-marketing content, or is that more on the thought leadership end?

2. How to nurture prospects with the right content that produces the greatest ROI?

Amy Kohl: It’s never product-marketing focused. It’s always challenging. I shared this with you because I really believe it. I think a lot of times when I’m meeting our founders and our lean companies, they’re comfortable talking about their products. And so, often, I must convince them that they (cold prospects) don’t care yet about who you are. They need first to understand what you do and how it serves them. So you need first to be the solution pro. The program, or whatever you’re offering, is such an afterthought. They first need even to identify this as a problem I have.

Is it one worth fixing? What are other people doing to fix this? And is now the time? So, I have a foundational content theme that we follow when we kick off clients. And then the beautiful strength in what my company does is always on the operations and the rev ops side to where I can say, Hey Steve, this is so cool. Look. 70% of our late-stage pipeline actually engaged with these two pieces of content – these two assets or these two blogs. A great example is people in HR, they love to know what their peers are doing. So FOMO pieces like “Three companies with killer HR compliance technology”, that is a highly engaged piece for a current client’s pipeline.

That informs our strategy back at the top of the funnel. So now I’m going to iterate on that theme and keep that theme alive and going because it’s converting well and supporting my pipeline. It’s not marketing fluff. It helps convert and nurture long-term success.

So even though those folks may be in the pipeline or before they come into the pipeline, they engage with content. The content serves the whole cycle. So to your philosophy, too, it helps turn these prospecting ideas or campaigns into true sales conversations. Without quality content, the truth is that sales are always going to be a lot harder. And I love the consultative nurture aspects of serving first with key content pieces.

Steve MacDonald: And buyers these days, they’re doing a greater and greater amount of research online before ever talking to anybody inside the company. So marketing, in that context, is actually serving much, much more of a greater sales function than in the past.

Amy Kohl: A hundred percent right, those 13 touches to get one meeting on the books for a company. And if that sales rep beats down the door, emailing 13 times…that’s so disingenuous. It’s not consultative. That’s a terrible first impression. Nobody wants their rep to be that guy in the inbox. Right. 13 times. But if you could layer in some nice nurture pieces, a guidebook or a podcast, or a couple of blog articles that are relevant to their industry, then it’s like, oh, okay, I’ve heard of this guy’s company before. I just read that blog post or listened to their podcast, or I just read that eBook. I’m going to respond. That’s how it helps improve sales conversions. I’m not saying you don’t prospect; I’m saying you just need to do it in a really well-synchronized pattern because it does take so much more to get the attention of our prospects these days.

3. What are the five best content ideas tested and proven most successful?

Steve MacDonald: And anybody can buy email addresses. Right? And the people that we’re typically reaching out to are sought after. They’re the buyers, they’re the senior executives of these companies. And so there’s no shortage of people trying to get into their inbox.

And you just said that there were themes on that fuel or that content that you always start out with. Can you take us through what those themes are?

Amy Kohl: Yes. And to your point, too, it helps serve. You can nurture other people in the company that aren’t your sales prospect. And this is where you build consensus around the content. You’re building consensus for your pipeline.

So the foundational themes we like to start with are:

1) “The Ultimate Guide To ____.” Let’s just say it’s social selling. The ultimate guide is social selling.

2) The next piece would be “4 ways to do social selling better on your own,”…kind of like a DIY piece. This is where you’re giving them four key essential tips. For them to do it all on their own, nothing to do with you.

3) The third piece is “5 ways to determine if you need better social selling.” This is how they’re starting to realize, okay, this is a problem I have. This is something I don’t know how to solve on my own, or I don’t have the capacity to solve on my own.

4) The fourth piece is “3 companies with killer social selling strategies.” And it’s quick. It’s not necessarily a case study, but it’s a quick story of three different companies. They should be a variety of different industries and company sizes so that they can relate and be relevant. Peers like to learn from each other, and they like to know if they’re falling behind or not keeping up. So pro tip, people really care about what everyone’s doing in, say, HR.

5) And then the fifth and final piece we usually start with. Now remember, we iterate nonstop. But foundationally, these five themes are the ultimate buying guide. So if you’re interested in social selling solutions, I’m using this as an example, “Six things you should care about and evaluate when selecting a social shopping partner.” And the reason this can sometimes be better used in the pipeline after a first meeting is that now you’re saying, I’m setting the standard and the tone for all the shopping this woman or man’s going to do after we get off this call. And it helps establish you as the best fit. And then they’re going to go find, they’re going to try to find another competitor of the best, and they won’t, they’ll find a good, or they’ll find something far outside of the price point, but you set the tone. And that by giving them that resource, you now have a significant amount of trust in your relationship…for the sales deal, for the sales pipeline.

4. What content do most companies use that you want to stay away from one hundred percent?

Steve MacDonald: And it’s interesting, just to reiterate something that you just said there in those themes that you’re iterating on for the content. You didn’t go into features and benefits. Tell us why?

Amy Kohl: No. Not at all. That’s what the demo’s for. And half the time, even then, when you’re on the demo, you don’t really want to talk about the features and benefits either.

You’re still showing how those same problems are solved, but by functionality. So, yeah, the content creating the engagement is never product/feature focused. Once you stop talking about yourself, it’s wild what you’ll learn. And then again, you’ll start to see their guard come down, and then you’ll start to find out the real reason why they took the call. Not like the surface pain that they discussed initially, but like there’s a bigger pain behind everyone that’s opting into a demo.

And it takes a really good sales rep to listen and hear what the true problem is. And not going to come and say, I need this one button in Salesforce that could just blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t happen. It’s a bigger pain. And you’ll never know it if you’re not listening or nurturing them into a relationship to be vulnerable like that.

5. Is there a direct correlation between high-quality content and generating revenue?

Steve MacDonald: So before we started recording, I teed up a question that I like to ask, and that relates to what you call the fuel, the content we’re talking about on a scale of 1 to 10. One meaning is not important at all, 10 meaning vital to the return on investment from this process…for what companies hire you for. Where would you put content on that scale?

Amy Kohl: I put it at a 10. And the reason is I have a clear pulse on what kind of revenue we’re helping our clients close and generate. This is not fluffy or like I’m a content podcaster myself, which is why I will give that answer. This comes from a true assessment of 200+ clients of ours.

When we have content to support the sales team, it is a fact that we convert at a higher rate, the sales process is more streamlined, and the customers are converting at a healthier pace. And it is truly because of the relationship that content helps you establish and the resource you become to your companies and to your customers.

I also always say this not because I’m naive about how difficult it is to produce content and how a lot of times, we do tend to overthink it and make it very difficult. I think if you could create a voice note or voice memo from a founder, like very high-level conversations, you could probably get a great ghostwriter to piece together everything that’s inside his mouth, in his head.

But when you can deploy really quick pieces of content, I’m not talking about scholarly pieces either, Steve. I’m talking about under five-minute reads, 700 words. It should not be heavy scholarly pieces that take three days or a dedicated hour of sitting time to consume.

It needs to be quick and actionable. And of course, those longer pieces of content have a function in other parts of the sales journey. But initially, it needs to be very practical and simple.

So, as I said, content needs to be a priority. And when it’s not, you will feel it in the revenue you’re able to attain.

6. How much do you help support your client's content efforts?

Steve MacDonald: For your clients, how much do you help and support them in this initial round or rounds of content, because there’s never a stopping point to the end of the need for content. How much do you support them with that content creation?

Amy Kohl: Recently, in the last, I think, over a year, I’ve had a woman on our team named Tina, and she does all of the ghostwriting for many of our founders, or she’ll write on behalf of our clients.

So it’s where we follow those five themes that I discussed with you. She has a session with them, and she finds there are different ways she has to work with all of our clients, of course, to collect many of the nuances and how it really resonates for the client. But we’ve augmented that now as a service that we add onto our scope.

And it is because the clients we’ve worked with together, you know, content can be a bottleneck for sure, but it cannot be ignored. And by having Tina on our team, we don’t just iterate the V1 round of content, we’re then tracking it all the way through to the pipeline. And as I mentioned earlier, even customers in Rev Ops return to Tina and say, hey, I need three more pieces like this.

Or we just try talking about bananas instead of oranges? Let’s test it. See if bananas can convert as our oranges do. And then all that data is so easy to track in HubSpot because of the infrastructure. And we’ll know quickly. We don’t have to wait 30, 60, or 90 days, unfortunately, like many other marketing strategies. We know very quickly if engagement with our marketing content resonates.

Steve MacDonald: And that’s where you dive deeper, right? When you say you find something engaging, a topic that’s engaging, you’re saying, let’s expand on that. Let’s go deeper into it.

7. How do you test content to increase conversions?

Amy Kohl: Yes! I always say that the quantity goal is not always an indicator of health. It’s the conversion rates that are the most meaningful indicators. When you’re going to market, you don’t really want to initially blow through all of your prospects because you want to hit 100 meetings. We want to go through maybe 500, a thousand prospects, measure and execute against healthy conversion rates and then double down, then go back and say, hey, let’s just roll with these three and get rid of these other three because they’re just distracting and pulling down the conversions.

If we eliminate those three and stick to the core three that are converting, well, now I’m ready to go. Now let me put another thousand, 5,000 contacts into my prospect funnel, and let’s watch what happens.

8. How to transition cold email leads into “interested” email subscribers?

Steve MacDonald: And let’s talk about that. Roll back to, “Let’s put another 5,000 prospects into the funnel.”

So these are cold emails that we’re getting from somewhere like ZoomInfo and are very good. In HubSpot, they would not call that a marketing contact. And so, there are only certain kinds of communication and ways that you can communicate with them initially.

How do you transition them from a non-marketing to a marketing contact?

Amy Kohl: Well, there are two trains of thought here. So, the first one, we would typically launch them into our sales sequences. This is where you’re trying to identify who’s interested at all or engaging at all. And I look for indicators of what they’re interested in. So remember, we’re talking about launching after we already know who our true ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is in terms of revenue, like closed sales revenue, not just who we think it is.

So, if I take that profile and launch them into sales sequences, which is not a marketing contact, we do not need those, then I start to nurture those that engage with the marketing content I have.

Because we’re serving them with content that we know they need. And that serves their exact profile industry. It supports what their role is. Because of that, we’re able to play that very carefully. Now remember, the clients that I’m serving need their first 100 customers to survive.

So, we’re ready for go time. We’re your scrappy, hit the ground running, go to market. Let’s land our first 100 logos solution, and then you can get into these loftier, opt-in-only campaigns and more of the traditional marketing strategies that are costly. They’re very costly, but they’re valuable and important too.

First, we need to establish that foundational customer base that all our clients truly hire us to attain in the first place.

9. What goes into the initial cold-email sequence, and what’s the desired outcome or goal?

Steve MacDonald: These sales sequences you’re talking about are the content themes you mentioned earlier, is that correct?

Amy Kohl: Sometimes, not most. Sometimes they’ll be more traditional, like a persona-based sequence that says, “Hey, is this top of mind for you?”

If so, I’d love to explain how we’ve served our clients or give you some resources to help you better execute your day-to-day. Those sequences are establishing us more as a resource and then enrolling them into the marketing contacts, which here is what you’re referring to. But most of the time, our content is always centered around, hey, does this matter to you?

If it does, they can choose to learn more, and I’ll put them into our marketing nurture, or let’s hop on a quick call. Content-led sales sequences work very well. It does not always have to be about a meeting. And I joked on another podcast I was on, it’s like you meet somebody for the first time and automatically ask for a first date.

That doesn’t happen. It rarely goes well. If it has gone well, you might have just lucked out once, but it really does need to be more of an ongoing effort. And that the sales V1 approach, being content-led, is super effective.

Steve MacDonald: In the sales sequences, what is the desired outcome? What’s the action that you want them to take?

Amy Kohl: They’re either going to convert over into our blog subscribers, or they’ll go into booking a meeting with us.

Steve MacDonald: When they take one of those two actions, they become marketing contacts?

Amy Kohl: Yes. Then they’re nurtured forever and ever.

Until they say stop, where they convert into our customer nurture, which is usually a different type of message and content track that’s a little bit more product-marketing focused. Many of our clients will start product-marketing nurture when they’re in that late-stage pipeline or converge on a customer.

Then it’s about how to use this report, new product releases, or five ways to run your XYZ using our platform. That’s then the kind of marketing that you would enroll somebody into.

10. What is the third goal of the initial cold-prospecting emails?

Steve MacDonald: So, with somebody who doesn’t know you, they’re getting a sales sequence, and one of the two actions is to become a subscriber to our blog.

And the other is to have a conversation. You haven’t developed that relationship yet. Getting into that conversation feels a little bit like dating before you really know each other. How successful is that?

Amy Kohl: It works quite well. I’ll explain. If they do follow up, the response itself is what the goal is. In the initial sales sequences, the goal isn’t always a meeting or subscriber. It’s not always the outcome. The outcome is really just, are you interested in any capacity? And often, you’ll get responses like, “Hey, yeah, this is top of mind in the fourth quarter. Could you follow up with me then?” Then that’s part of our team scope, which you and I discussed earlier. Often, a founder-led sales team or growth mode sales team will lose sight of that person. My team does not. So there’s a wireframe that we put around the HubSpot environment. We’ll make sure that we keep tabs on that lead, that woman or man that’s asking for a follow-up in Q4, but the nurture track stays relevant. So after five or six more months go by and they’re engaging in receiving these content nurture pieces, it’s not uncommon to have them just go over to our website and book the demo, and then I’ll get a notification as the rep that says, oh, she’s back.

And it may only be August. But now it’s suddenly bumped up on her priority list. And luckily, we were there to capture the request for a meeting. So, it’s really important to remember that if you go into the sales emails or if you go into the marketing emails with the intent to serve yourself, it won’t work nearly as well versus if you go into it to stay relevant, to stay a resource, and to care about the problems that they have. And if you truly actually care, it comes back, and it’ll come back either in the form of the long-term nurture, engagement, and conversion, like that example I gave, or in Q4 when I check on that contact and say, “Hey Steve, I hope I’m catching you at a better time. We talked in Q1, you said this wasn’t a priority until Q4. Here are a couple of recent articles. Is this a better time?” That’s a way better follow-up than, “Hey, bumping up my email.” Right. And it’s automated. It doesn’t have to be a human being sending that email as long as your whole company can commit to the style and the tone of the content that we would put into those sequences that deploy automatically…it doesn’t have to take somebody’s brain power and reminder on their Google calendar to do it, it happens automatically.

What is your GTM takeaway that you want us all to remember?

Steve MacDonald: Well, so much great information here. If we wind this up and give you an opportunity to provide a parting thought, a takeaway, what would it be?

Amy Kohl: That’s a great question. It’s what’s close to my heart right now because I spend a lot of time with companies that are thriving and companies that are trying to survive because of the things that are happening in our macro economy and just the landscape of startups right now. It’s this. If you need to stay leaner longer and you have massive growth goals to hit, the foundational pillars that you’d never want to skip or skimp on are going to be your operational management systems, like the system that’s going to stay on top of all these contacts on your behalf through automation, content that nurtures and stays relevant, and taking care of the data.

This does not have to be three heads or three full-time FTEs. This has to be the sole person as a point person for a team like mine or somebody that can go through a quick skillset training and acquire that you can survive longer when you do those three pillars working correctly. So…

Care for your automation.
Invest in good content. Care about it, and care about solving the problem.
Take care of your database, and you’ll be shocked at how much it will sustain a company and extend that runway.

Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you, Amy, so much for spending your time here.

Amy Kohl: No, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Steve MacDonald: I appreciate it. We have worked together before, so I contacted you because you do great work. And congratulations on your growth, and the Stevie Award, and everything that you’re doing for all of your clients.

Amy Kohl: Thanks for having me. It means a lot. Thank you.

Next Steps

One of the things Amy stressed is that without quality content, sales are always going to be a lot harder. To learn more about how to efficiently create highly successful, revenue-producing thought leadership content and pipeline enablement strategies on an ongoing basis, CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.