Getting Started

How it works

A beginner-friendly walkthrough of how GTM Brain goes from defining an ICP to generating leads, step by step.

This page explains the complete journey from defining who you want to reach to getting qualified leads in your inbox. If you are new to GTM Brain, start here.

If you are connecting an external or Fabric Harness agent, read Agent-led GTM lifecycle alongside this operator walkthrough. It identifies the same governed stages, the exact source and delivery boundaries, and the situations that still require a person.

The big picture

GTM Brain runs a daily loop that turns market signals into governed outreach. You set the policy (who counts as a good fit), connect your data sources, and the system does the research, scoring, and drafting. You approve every message before it sends.

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Each step is explained below.

Step 1: Define your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Your ICP is the policy that decides which companies are eligible for outreach. It is not a prompt or a suggestion — it is an enforced boundary that the judge uses to qualify or reject every account.

A complete ICP includes:

  • Company size — employee count or revenue bands (e.g., 250–2,500 employees).
  • Geography — which countries or regions are eligible.
  • Industries — preferred or excluded industries.
  • Buyer roles — which seniority levels and functions you want to reach.
  • Exclusions — customers, partners, competitors, and opt-outs that must never be contacted.
  • Required evidence — the minimum market signal needed before a first touch.

Your ICP is versioned and immutable once activated. If you need to change targeting, you create a new version, bind it to a new campaign version, and activate. Old verdicts retain the version that produced them, which keeps audits understandable.

How to do it in the console

  1. Open Audience in the sidebar.
  2. Create a draft ICP version with your targeting criteria.
  3. Review countries, employee thresholds, industries, buyer roles, and exclusions.
  4. Activate the version. The previous active ICP is automatically retired.

See Configure your ICP for the complete reference.

Step 2: Connect your data sources

GTM Brain needs a signal source to discover accounts and a delivery provider to send approved messages. Each organization brings its own vendor credentials.

Signal source: Apollo

Open Workspace → Operations → Integrations, choose Apollo, enter your API key, and select Connect & test. Apollo supplies:

  • ICP-filtered companies (the initial account universe)
  • Job postings (produce job buying signals)
  • Funding rounds (produce funding buying signals)
  • Contact lookup (attaches the best available person to actionable signals)

Delivery: Instantly

Open Workspace → Operations → Integrations, choose Instantly, and provide your API key and campaign ID. Connecting Instantly does not make sends live — every pass starts in dry-run mode by default.

Reply webhook

In the Webhooks section of Integrations, generate a secret and copy the webhook URL into your Instantly webhook settings. This ensures replies, bounces, and unsubscribes flow back into GTM Brain.

See Integrations for field-level configuration and troubleshooting.

Step 3: Create a campaign

A campaign binds together everything the system needs to run a pass:

  • An ICP version (who to target)
  • A messaging policy (voice, value proposition, call to action)
  • Governed offers and proof assets (what claims you can make and the evidence behind them)
  • Execution artifacts — a campaign brief, audience definition, email sequence, and reviewer policy
  • A delivery provider and daily cap
  • A dry-run setting and mandatory approval policy

How to do it in the console

  1. Open Campaigns and create a draft campaign version.
  2. Bind your active ICP version.
  3. Author, independently evaluate, and approve the four execution artifacts: campaign brief, audience definition, email sequence, and reviewer policy.
  4. Select Confirm campaign details to freeze those exact revisions into the execution manifest.
  5. Activate the campaign. A campaign without a current valid manifest cannot run.

See Artifacts for the complete artifact lifecycle.

Step 4: Run a campaign pass

A campaign pass is the unit of GTM work. It runs as a durable Temporal workflow, so retries, app restarts, and approval delays do not erase the execution state.

How to start a pass

  1. Open Today.
  2. Confirm the readiness card says Dry run ready and Live delivery off.
  3. Start the dry run from that card.

The button pins the exact active campaign version and cannot send email. The pass proceeds through sensing, judgment, and drafting, then parks durably in awaiting-approvals. Closing your browser or restarting the app does not discard the queue.

Step 5: Sense — find buying signals

The signal adapter (Apollo by default) fetches market events that match your ICP:

  • Searches for companies in the employee bands allowed by your ICP.
  • Looks for evidence-bearing job triggers (Databricks, Unity Catalog, migration, AI-platform roles).
  • Emits recent funding rounds as separate signals.
  • Uses the People API to identify an eligible buyer and enriches at most one work-email per account.
  • Deduplicates by stable source ID so repeated sweeps do not create duplicate work.

Each signal is normalized with a source ID, account domain, display name, bucket (job, funding, company, social), summary, occurrence time, and optional contact.

You can review signals in Workspace → Intelligence → Signals.

Step 6: Judge — score each account

For each account, the judge receives:

  • New signals
  • Prior signal history
  • Past touches and outcomes
  • ICP configuration
  • Learned bucket weights (currently shadow-only)

It returns a bounded result:

  • Score (0–100) — a deterministic qualification score, not a contact count.
  • Play — which of the four service plays fits this account.
  • Why now — a short explanation referencing the specific trigger.
  • Confidence — how certain the judge is. Low confidence (< 0.6) escalates for human review.

Accounts that do not match the ICP, lack required evidence, or have missing firmographics receive skip or abstain — the judge never asks a model to invent missing data.

You can inspect verdicts in Workspace → Records → Accounts by opening any account record.

Step 7: Draft — write a personalized message

The drafter receives the verdict, contact, and actual trigger. It writes a first-touch or follow-up message that:

  • Leads with the account's exact observed trigger (e.g., "I noticed Travelers opened a Director of Data Platform search").
  • Uses only the proof wording approved for the selected offer.
  • Does not infer endorsements, customer adoption, guaranteed outcomes, or savings.

The draft is persisted with pending status. It includes the prompt version, proof version, content hash, and revision number — all immutable for audit purposes.

Step 8: Approve — human reviews each draft

Every draft parks inside its running Temporal workflow until an authorized person decides. The approval workspace shows:

  • Draft — preview, edit, or compare the subject and body.
  • Why this account — the trigger, ICP fit, score dimensions, and source evidence.
  • Suggested play — the selected offer and governed proof version.
  • Audit details — workflow, draft, policy, and content-hash lineage.

You can:

  • Approve the draft as written.
  • Approve edited — change the subject or body, preview the result, and approve the edited version.
  • Reject — close the draft with a recorded reason.

The decision becomes a Temporal signal. The workflow then runs the governed action pipeline.

See Approvals for the complete review workflow.

Step 9: Policy checks and delivery

After approval, the workflow still runs policy checks before anything sends:

  1. Suppression — is the domain or contact suppressed?
  2. Touch frequency — has this account been contacted within the cooldown window?
  3. Inbox ramp — is the daily send cap within the warmup ramp?
  4. Idempotency — has this exact action already been performed?
  5. Proof currency — is the referenced proof still valid and unexpired?

If all checks pass, the delivery adapter hands the lead to Instantly. Note: GTM Brain hands off a lead to Instantly; Instantly controls when the email actually goes out based on its campaign schedule.

In dry-run mode, delivery is simulated and recorded as a dry-run touch — no real message is sent.

Step 10: Reply — prospect responds

When a prospect replies, the Instantly webhook ingests the response into GTM Brain:

  1. The webhook authenticates with your organization secret and deduplicates by source ID.
  2. A classifier proposes an interpretation (positive, negative, unsubscribe, neutral).
  3. The reply appears in Inbox for human review.
  4. You confirm the outcome: Meeting, Unsubscribe, or Dismiss.

The account state transitions automatically based on the confirmed outcome (e.g., contacted → replied).

See Replies for the complete review process.

Step 11: Learn — record the outcome

Each touch snapshots the signal subtype, service play, offer, prompt version, proof version, and scoring policy version. Shadow reports group those snapshots and compute which signals and copy correlate with positive outcomes.

Learning is reporting-only in the current release. It cannot change production scoring, offers, contacts, or copy. A future activation requires a separate accepted decision with calibration thresholds and rollback rules.

See Outcomes and learning for the complete model.

What to do next

What is GTM Brain?

Learn what GTM Brain does, the operating loop, key terms, agent roles, and where to begin as a new user.

Configure your ideal customer profile

Define the versioned company, buyer, evidence, and exclusion policy that controls which accounts GTM Brain can qualify.

On this page

The big pictureStep 1: Define your ideal customer profile (ICP)How to do it in the consoleStep 2: Connect your data sourcesSignal source: ApolloDelivery: InstantlyReply webhookStep 3: Create a campaignHow to do it in the consoleStep 4: Run a campaign passHow to start a passStep 5: Sense — find buying signalsStep 6: Judge — score each accountStep 7: Draft — write a personalized messageStep 8: Approve — human reviews each draftStep 9: Policy checks and deliveryStep 10: Reply — prospect respondsStep 11: Learn — record the outcomeWhat to do next