Media/Appearances/YouTube

What is GTM Engineering?

dnsUNFILTERED/Benyamin Holley/May 25, 2026

Mikey Pruitt has Ben on dnsUNFILTERED, episode 54, while Ben was at AirOps. Teams go wrong applying software to sales because they do not know what opens or closes a deal, experienced sellers included. AI coding turned the job into product management. Where the hyphen goes in the Python script is the cheap part. Sales is still vibes. What closes, in his telling, is the truth: help someone decide, and the decision might not include you. The simple research loop is a 10-K, the press, the job board, then ask Claude what the problem is. AI earns its keep on the admin, so there is time left to be a person. He had just warned an SDR who stood up a Vercel database. The workflows that move the needle are boring. The hit is Cursor spitting out rows and a localhost link. Weather-in-Houston personalization is something he has done. Finding people who have the pain, then saying it in one clean note, matters more. At Cyft he sent VCs messages risky enough that he will not describe them. Some became meetings and a deal, because there was nothing to lose. At AirOps he pulled that back. Be yourself. Boring is allowed. He treats Cursor and Claude as search. In the AirOps data he was citing, traditional SEO was still the best predictor of an AI citation, and the gap versus a normal Google query was widening every day. A buyer with Claude Code and the codebase gets a better tool recommendation than a salesperson who never read the code. He also says you probably should not hand that codebase over. John Barrows had said buyers and sellers would both be AI. Ben does not buy that for enterprise deals. He does buy it for a mid-market tool that has to fit Salesforce or HubSpot, and for a 23-year-old putting software on a company card. On the tools: he was building lists in Claude Code almost every day, because every list is different and a new Clay table is a pain. Clay lets you audit every row. In the terminal he was opening the CSV in LibreOffice, since he does not have Excel. A job-changer for the SDR team lived in Cursor, on Vercel, tied to Common Room, Slack, and email validation, because it had too many moving parts for a table. The enterprise TAM refresh had to live in Clay. His boss wanted everybody singing from the same hymn sheet, and a GitHub repo the rest of the team will not open does not do that. He invited the SDRs into the growth repo anyway. If someone vibe-codes something useful, he wants it in GitHub so the next question can go to a cloud agent on that repo. Claude Code cross-referencing Metabase, HubSpot, and Gong is how he checks that the outbound line is what the accounts think. For an MSP sales team he puts a caveat up front: he has never worked at one or sold for one. The move he would make this week is a better account list. With Jeffrey Newton he used Serper, from Claude Code, to pull dental offices inside 100 miles with more than 20 people. He would bet that lifts coverage 10 to 15 percent, and he called that conservative.

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