Today is everyone’s favorite day of the week - PG (pipegen) Wednesday!
I spent Sunday agonizing over how to automate my PG. So, I did something simple: I scoured through 100+ recruiter messages in my inbox. 95% were terrible.
I screenshotted one and sent it to Chris Balestras at Vibescaling. He sent me back one of his recruiting messages. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t gimmicky. But it felt different…a pattern interruption in a sea of automation.
That text exchange inspired today’s article: pairing creativity with automation - and a PG frenzy that started Monday, not Wednesday..
Before diving in, quick shout out to my friends at Mastra. Back in January, GTMBA featured their unique PG strategy: how Mastra hacked developer mindshare with the most un-AI move, a physical book. Now, Baseten is copying them. Imitation is flattery, but execution is the true differentiator. The question isn’t who prints a book, it’s who builds a scalable distribution engine around it.
Baseten’s book gives Emerald City vibes - the book is chic.
Preamble: AI Won’t Replace Enterprise Sales (Yet)
Kyle Asay, VP Sales @ LaunchDarkly called BS on LinkedIn posts claiming AI will replace sales. For high-volume SMB transactional deals? Probably. For enterprise, we have a ways to go. I wrote about this extensively in “Clawdbot Took My Sales Job.”
Enterprise prospects are inundated and have built up immunity to automation. Standing out is less about volume, and more about precision.
My best outbound ever was to the CMO of a public fast-food chain. I heard her on a podcast, disagreed with her PoV, and told her (respectfully). It was risky, but I broke through. My second-best was a parody-style knock off video of “The Office” where I played a frustrated Microsoft employee solving internal problems with Branch. That email got forwarded internally and racked up ~125 views.
Should you do this every time? Absolutely not. It’s not scalable. So what am I actually doing?
(A) Pre-Work: Automating Grunt Work
(i) PG Agent 1.0: I built what I’m calling PG Agent 1.0 in Manus. Its trained on Cognition’s public case studies, ICP, and unique differentiators. Using Manus is shockingly easy - you just talk to it, and it does what you want.
One output is an outreach messaging generator. I dislike the output (more on that below). But as a starting point, it’s incredibly helpful.
More importantly, it flags strategic entry points. For one account, it identified that the prospect is a customer of a key BD partner, prompting me to parallel path the PG motion with that partner.
The email draft was mediocre. The account intelligence was gold.
(ii) Lead List Building Agent (with Devin): A few of my teammates started dogfooding Devin for GTM automation. To be clear, Devin is built for enterprise end-to-end code automation, not GTM automation. That said, it actually works quite well for long-running, scoped tasks. Create a structured “Playbook” outlining: company, target persona, key words, geo, and let Devin build your prospect list and save it to LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
(iii) Lemlist PG Command Center: My biggest PG weakness historically: follow through. So I implemented Lemlist as a master task manager (not generic messages on autopilot) across lead lists.
(B) Personalized PG: VP/C-Suite Messages
Every AI tool is trained on writing emails from Gong templates that sounds like this:
Hi {name}
{insert hook / problem}
{1 sentence value prop}
{1 sentence objection handle}
{Social proof}
{Soft CTA}
I haven’t gotten a meaningful response to this format in years.
When I was at Metronome, a prospect screenshotted my email, sent it to our CEO (who he knew personally), saying “Your sales team needs to do better.” Our CRO defended my message: “this is an A- email.” On paper, he was right. In reality, I sounded like everyone else. Learning moment for me.
AI trained on best practices produces average over time. So what am I doing instead?
Example 1 - Fortune 100 Business Unit CTO - Saw he was mutually connected to someone who previously sold into the account. I assumed they’d worked together. Name dropped. Wrote a colloquial - non-Gong approved - tight message centered on differentiated value. Instant response.
Example 2 - Fortune 100 Sr. Director: No mutual connection, but he had a personal blog. I use similar messaging to Example 1 and linked a GTMBA article that intersected with a topic he wrote about. Instant response.
Example 3 - Fortune 500 Business Unit CTO: He posted about a competitor. I respectfully disagreed with his POV and presented a counter-case publicly. No response yet, but social selling compounds and we’ll land him with a few follow-up tactics :)
Example 4 - Fortune 500 CEO + CTO: PG Agent 1.0 surfaced a not-so-talked about use case. I validated it with a BD partner and learned it is a Board-level priority. My messaging is short & sweet with the initiative as a 2-word subject line. Sent my 1st messages yesterday. No response yet, but I know exactly where to aim.
Conclusion
Some of you are thinking, “I’ve built something far more automated than this.” Amazing, hit reply and share, I’m always learning. If it’s truly killer, I’d love to feature your workflow on GTMBA.
On a more meta level, daily actions compound and I’m starting to see the results of this investment and regular tinkering to unlock my creativity.
If you’re looking for more creative PG ideas, check out “5 Ideas You Shouldn’t Copy and 1 You Should.”
Cheers,
Julian @ GTMBA
Opinions do not reflect those of Cognition and are solely my own.