GTM engineering glossary

The Bowtie is Winning by Design's model of the whole customer journey. The left side covers winning a customer (awareness, education, selection, commit), and the right side covers what happens after the sale (onboarding, impact, growth). It's a reminder that retention and expansion signals matter as much as new pipeline. HeyThere isn't affiliated with Winning by Design.

Where the Bowtie fits in the HeyThere GTM System

A buying signal is a dated event that makes a purchase more likely soon: a new sales leader, a funding round, hiring for a relevant role, a technology change, a champion changing jobs or repeat visits to your pricing page. Every signal expires, so it's only useful if someone acts on it within its window.

Ten buying signals SaaS sales teams should track

Closed-lost reactivation means going back to deals you lost once something has changed: the loss reason no longer applies, enough time has passed, or a new buying signal has fired. Those accounts already passed your qualification and told you about their situation, so a scored closed-lost list is often the cheapest pipeline a sales team has.

Closed-lost deals: the pipeline already in your CRM

A fit score rates how closely an account matches your ideal customer profile, usually on a scale of 0 to 100, from traits such as industry, size, region and tech stack. A useful fit score is tested first: it should rank your past wins well above your past losses before you trust it to score the rest of your market.

The Market layer of the HeyThere GTM System

GTM engineering builds the data, scoring and signals that tell a sales team who to contact next, when and why. It turns your sales history into a scored market, watches that market for buying signals and gives each rep a researched brief, inside the CRM and tools the team already uses.

GTM engineering for SaaS sales teams

An ICP describes the companies you win most often and keep longest. Built from closed-won data rather than a persona workshop, it lists the traits that are over-represented among your good wins compared with your market, such as industry, company size, number of sites or the tools a company already runs.

How to build your ICP from closed-won data

An intent score rates how likely an account is to be in a buying window now, based on dated buying signals such as hiring, funding, a leadership change or repeat visits to your pricing page. Fit says whether an account is worth selling to; intent says whether this is the moment. Recent, stronger signals score higher.

Ten buying signals SaaS sales teams should track

A sales-ready lead brief is a one-screen summary a rep reads before first contact. It has seven parts: fit and why, the signal and its date, why now, who's involved, the suggested angle, three first-call questions, and past touches to avoid. It turns a contact record into a reason to talk today.

The anatomy of a sales-ready lead

SAM is the part of your TAM that your fit score says is worth pursuing: every account above a threshold you've tested against past wins and losses. It's a scored list rather than a percentage of a category, so it changes when your data, your product or your winning pattern changes.

How to score a TAM down to SAM

The signal and warming gap is HeyThere's name for a common GTM problem: nothing captures buying intent and nothing warms accounts before contact. Deals arrive cold or by chance, and reps keep contacting the same people every month until they're ready. The signal gap scorecard shows how big your gap is.

Take the signal gap scorecard

A signal layer is the part of a GTM system that watches your fitted accounts for buying signals and surfaces them to reps with a date and a reason. It replaces working the same list every month with contacting an account when something has changed. In the HeyThere GTM System it sits between the Market and Warming layers.

The Signal layer of the HeyThere GTM System

SOM is the fitted accounts your reps can properly work this month. It's the smaller of two limits: the accounts your team has the capacity to work, and the SAM accounts showing a buying signal right now. Because both limits move, SOM is recalculated every month rather than set once a year.

Sizing SOM by capacity and timing

SPICED is Winning by Design's framework for customer-centric selling: Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical event and Decision. Reps use it to structure discovery, and it gives a CRM consistent fields to capture on every deal. HeyThere builds on SPICED when it audits sales history and writes first-call questions. HeyThere isn't affiliated with Winning by Design.

Where SPICED fits in the HeyThere GTM System

For a sales team, TAM is every company that matches the pattern of customers you already win: the industries, sizes, regions and tech stacks in your closed-won deals. Built this way, it's a list of accounts you can load into a CRM, assign to reps and refresh, not a revenue figure on a slide.

TAM, SAM and SOM for B2B SaaS

Warming means making sure an account knows who you are before a rep's first call, through relevant content, ads or events aimed at fitted accounts that don't show a buying signal yet. When a signal does fire, a warmed account doesn't arrive cold. It works best when marketing and sales share one scored account list.

The HeyThere GTM System