GTM Atlas — Start with the Data

Author: Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com
Source: atlas.attio.com/start-with-the-data
Date: May 6, 2026

Who is Kyle Norton

CRO at Owner.com, where he took the go-to-market team from $2.5M to nearly $100M ARR in under four years. Before that, built Point of Sale go-to-market at Shopify. Longtime LP at GTM Fund and Stage Two Capital. Hosts The Revenue Leadership Podcast.

Core Thesis

"Whenever I talk about outbound, I come back to one thing: start with the data."

Outbound has one point of failure: the data. Give reps better data, automate prep, centralize the system-building, and outbound efficiency improves dramatically.

The Problem: Bad Data Wastes Everything

BDRs spend 70% of their day researching leads and calling contacts who aren't the real decision makers. You can maybe book a meeting every two days. If you tier those leads — 25% A, 50% B, 25% C — Tier C is who you will never close. The dial number gets hit, but you've wasted your time.

No training, hiring profile, call volume, or slick techniques can overcome giving your team bad data.

The Fix: Lead Tiering + AI PCR

Lead Tiering

Divide leads into A/B/C tiers before any rep touches them:
- Tier A — perfect ICP fit, verified decision-maker, clear buying signal
- Tier B — decent fit, some unknowns
- Tier C — poor fit, wrong title, no signal

Only Tier A gets full outbound effort. Tier C gets nothing.

AI PCR (Pre-Call Research)

Collapsed everything into one box: AI PCR. The applied AI lead watched BDRs work and set it up to capture everything between calls. Now outbound BDRs make 150 to 250 calls in a day and are still hyper-prepared.

Build it in-house, use Clay, hire a GTM engineer, or pay a consultant. The point is: once data is right, start enriching your ICP. Build a score — deterministic or ML-based — that tells you which leads are worth calling.

Keep filling in the map of your target market: who they are, what they use, who you can win against.

Results

Metric Before After
BDR closed-won ARR $72K/rep/month $120K/rep/month
Top BDR (cold) — $174K closed-won ARR in one month
Top BDR annual pace — $2M ARR/year
Calls/day capped by research time 150-250 calls/day + prep

Centralization: One Person Must Own It

A lot of teams give every rep a Claude skill and let them generate their own lead lists. It's not. Maybe if you're really small you have to start there. But somebody has to own the centralization:

"Take in all the good ideas, build them to higher production quality, and deploy one version at scale to every single rep."

And it has to be a specialist. Someone trained in AI doesn't just get output that's 50% or even 100% better. It's 20x better. Expert versus non-expert is so divergent that you need to go get expertise.

Build vs buy math: The money you would have spent on half your BDRs, spend on a GTM engineer. A GTME is twice the cost of a BDR. Take two BDR headcount and put it into one GTME. Fix the data first, and everything else gets better.

Who to Hire First

Kyle's take: applied AI before more reps.

  • Don't hire more AEs and expect AI to move the needle for them
  • Hire applied AI early — alongside RevOps, sometimes ahead of it
  • If hiring a RevOps leader at early-stage, they need to be applied AI capable
  • Build the system first, then scale the outbound motion