Why Your GTM Team Is Wasting Time Building Playbooks From Scratch

On the latest episode of What The Tech, we welcome to the show Cleanlist AI Co-Founder and CEO Levon Adamyan! At Cleanlist, Levon and his team are building the world's smartest agents that run GTM for you, giving teams a powerful way to build and execute Go-To-Market playbooks at scale without needing engineers or complex workflows.  

Levon brings a wealth of experience work at all levels of GTM to his mission at Cleanlist, having started on the Outbound frontlines before eventually lead Growth functions and acting as a Growth Advisor at some of Canada’s most exciting businesses. It’s this expertise combining “systems thinking” with hands-on execution that has informed the vision at Cleanlist to develop powerful GTM solutions that deliver results for teams faster, cleaner and with less friction than legacy tools.  

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

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Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello and welcome to Let the Tech from Boast, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. I'm Paul Damport, Post Resident Tech Journalist, and today I'm thrilled to welcome to the show Cleanlist AI co-founder and CEO, Lev Adamion. At CleanList, Lev and his team are building the world's smartest agents that run GTM for you, giving teams a powerful way to build and execute go-to-market playbooks at scale without needing engineers or complex workflows. Lev brings a wealth of experience working at all levels of GTM to his mission at Cleanlist, having started on the outbound front lines before eventually leading growth functions and acting as a growth advisor at some of Canada's most exciting businesses. It's his expertise combining systems thinking with hands-on execution that has informed his vision at Cleanlist to develop powerful GTM solutions that deliver results for teams faster, cleaner, and with less friction than legacy tools. It's an impressive mission, and I can't wait to pick Lev's brain on his journey through the tech ecosystem, his experience building Cleanlists, and what's on deck as the business grows. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Lev.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Hey, how are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:07

I am doing great. It is so happy to finally connect with you again on the show. I didn't mention this in the beginning, but we actually met about a month or so back. Oh my god, it's probably been two months now, at Web Summit up in Vancouver. How have things been since the show?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

It's been good, man. It's been good. We've been growing a lot. Um, business has been really good. We've uh um we had a couple big launches, a couple big product launches. I think we're you've been tracking towards doing almost 100k this month. So uh yeah, pretty big uh jump since we last spoke. Uh but yeah, everything's been good. How about you?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

That is music to my ears. So tracking towards 100k. I want to pull on that one later, but like we were discussing when we met at Web Summit, I'm on the marketing team here, so it's no joke and it's no question to anybody listening that GTM workflows and improving the GTM process, it's near and dear to my heart. It's something that a lot of the team who you also saw at Web Summit can relate to, since it was my sales guys and it was a lot of my marketing co-parts. So I loved here specifically what was the Genesis for Clean List? Why did you get it going? What were the tools that you brought to it? Just how did this come together and how did you get to the almost 100K that were at last month?

SPEAKER_00 2:19

For sure. Um, I think, well, having a go-to-market background, uh, it was really insightful having to build all these sort of playbooks and all of these manual processes by hand that it's not like a scalable um solution for most go-to-market orgs. And I think like uh I obviously started my career as a BDR at a company called Litmus, and that's like around five years ago. Um and you know, you can do a lot of stuff by hand. It's a lot of manual prospecting, a lot of manual workflows that you go through, but you don't realize like how mundane this is and how really like inefficient you're being. Um, ideally, you want all your sellers spending all their time doing high ROI activities, right? Anything revenue generating, calling, emailing, um, following up with prospects, listening to gong recordings, figuring out how to improve, all that sort of stuff. Um and, you know, it didn't really hit me until I started my own lead gen agency, and we were growing really quick. Within that's when we also partnered with Boast for Hugh Consulting, but we had 25 fractional reps at one point. Um, and it was like this is not a sustainable way of doing things, the manual processes, workflows, you know, for 25 people. It was uh it was genuinely absurd. And so, you know, it was like the build versus buy sort of debate. I taught myself how to use all the tools in the market, you know, was an early adopter of Clay, um, you know, figured out how to build a lot of these processes, workflows, but the reality is that it's just still not scalable. And uh, you know, that's how I also found myself going to keep and flow afterwards to lead growth and GTM operations there. Um, they wanted to bring someone in who'd done it before and it could help them scale their internal workflows and um go-to-market operations. Uh so I took all that wealth of knowledge from my lead gen agency and my time at Litmus as a growth manager BDR, uh, and kind of implemented it at both companies really successfully. Um and so those workflows that I had built like 3-4X all the results that we were having in terms of like pipeline generated, meetings booked, um, qualified opportunities, increase in show rates, number of like inbound pipeline being converted. Um and it really was just kind of synthesizing all of these different operations into repeatable, executable playbooks. And I think that's where a lot of GTM teams really struggle and really go wrong. You try to like build on a flimsy foundation rather than first hardening your your base that you're building on. Uh, and that's essentially what Cleanlist is. So um took all that wealth of experience um and uh got together with a couple of the smartest people I know. My co-founders, Victor, um, Erwin and Sal, and we we got to work building Clean List.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

All right, we'll love it. So I'm gonna pull back on a few things you mentioned there that I want everyone in the audience listening. So for starters, repeatable, executable playbooks. That is one thing that I know, just having worked at multiple tech companies, and this isn't shading anybody who I've worked with in the past, but you're hitting the nail on the head. I think that's where the biggest problem is in any kind of GTM function. It's not necessarily about like the markets changing so much as just you need something that you can repeat because, like you said, that flimsy foundation isn't going to get you anywhere and you're gonna be constantly having to rebuild your house every time. Make a strong foundation that you can bring everybody up with. I think that is fantastic. And it also speaks to what separates Cleanlist, what I think, from others that are kind of in this ecosystem that are providing GTM solutions. You actually built these systems and you made it so that they worked for companies that have that track record of success that you can point at. Like you said, float. Look at them. You made it work for them. The proof is in the pudding. It was Forex solutions when you actually deployed the systems that you developed. So I think a big distinction here is that it was a human who actually had their hands and was thinking about the systems and thinking about building things that developed a lot of what works. I think a lot of people see AI and they think, oh, okay, so I can go to an agent and I can just have them type in, oh, I'm having GTM struggles, make a foundation for me. Not necessarily the case. I'd love if you could maybe talk a little bit about that human experience and that expertise and what you built, just getting your hands dirty and actually working in the field and working in the front lines of outbound and all the above, versus what I think people think of when they think of an AI tool to help with their GTM uh activities today. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Totally. That's a great question. I think like um, you know, for anyone listening, like you can tie it back to Boast as well. Boast solves a similar problem, especially for businesses in Canada, um, where it's just like all the solutions available, especially as like founders, you know, getting um VC funding, whether you're bootstrapping, whatever it is, it's just like so hard to navigate this like tax uh ecosystem, understanding like, you know, how how do these tax credits work? How do I actually qualify? Uh, did I document everything enough? Uh, and that comes from that plethora of like experience that you really need to have to be able to execute it correctly. And I think like touching on the question you asked is like what actually separates an AI tool, which there's millions of, from something which is a standout platform. And I think it's that uh understanding of the end user, and that's like something that Cleanlist was is built on from day one. Um, all design decisions, all internal decisions we make regarding the product's vision and the product's uh roadmap are all like extremely heavily um deliberated and documented. Like uh I learned this from Float uh in my my time there, but one really big thing that we always did at Float was everything needed a memo. So any decision you wanted to make, you need to do a big write-up for. You need to have data that backs your decision. And if you don't have data, then you at least need to have uh general market consensus and understanding of why this would be the right decision to make. I think a lot of companies, especially early on, they just go vibe space. So, you know, you see a post on LinkedIn and you're an early stage founder and you're like, oh my God, I need to jump on this right now. Whereas um for us, we have that understanding of who the end user is, how cleanlisted going to be used. And it's really important to, you know, stick to that original thesis and make sure that we build around our users. So uh anything from like how is the product going to be uh used by uh a BDR versus let's say uh go-to-market engineer. Uh, it's really important that, like, for example, you make product decisions. Do you have a closed schema or an open schema? Can people just bring in any data they want, or do you stick to your internal data structures? And those are the sort of things which will, you know, a lot of people think like, oh, let me just quickly uh pump something out, get it to the market. But those have underlying consequences which you carry with you going forward.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

I was literally just gonna say that that is kind of debt that you carry with you and that compounds after the fact if you don't get that off to the races from the gate. And then even like you were saying, it like it's uniquely B2B, but like when we're saying end users in this context too, we're not even necessarily talking about the customer, if I'm understanding, right? It's for that BDR, it's for that engineer to make sure that they're getting the tools that they need to address them in the market. Is that correct? Or did I misunderstand what you're saying?

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh I think you're like hitting the nail on the head. Like cleanless purpose is that go-to-market teams don't have to spend weeks and weeks, months building out these playbooks, which they inevitably don't even know are going to be successful. I mean, um the average time to stand up a successful uh BD or inbound BD function is like three to six months. And so by the time you hire everyone, train everyone, and then get all the systems and workflows built out. Well, you know, how many people did you hire? How much money did you spend? And it's like, you know, um hopefully it doesn't happen, but most times it does uh at a lot of especially fast growing companies, you hire, you hire, you realize that it's not the right decision, and within three months you've you've kind of churned and lost all of that momentum. And so it's like time that's wasted both on your resources to get it going and also in regards to the financials of actually hiring all those people. With Cleanless, we're looking to build this all into repeatable motions because we understand the similarities between all the different companies and the playbooks you want to run and how we can actually turn them into things which are like a one-click play. Um so I'll give the example of like uh what we're building right now is like the future version of Cleanlist is that day one, any user who connects to CleanList, if you're a company with 300 employees, let's say, will go through, we'll analyze all of your recent close one deals, all of your close loss deals, all your open opportunities, figure out what actually makes your business tick. Why are you winning deals? Why are you losing them? Who should you be prioritizing and who shouldn't you? And just like a simple thing like that gets so easily missed. You know, you'll find your rep spending equal amount of time on opportunities which have, you know, 10x differences in likelihood of closing. Um, and that will help prioritize which deals to focus on, which deals to deprioritize, uh, and will also help us build playbooks for you for the future state of your go-to-market. So um for outbound, which sort of look-alike company should we target, what sort of funding stage, what sort of head count, uh, what job titles convert the best. All of this is the stuff that will help us deliver to the user um sort of like a seamless, self-evolving um go-to-market experience, which you really can't find.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

As you see, I take notes while we're talking. So if it looks like I'm going into a fugue state, that just me uh jotten down my next question. But yeah, there were several things that you said there that I want to make sure that we pulled back on. First, I'm gonna, because I can't help myself, bring it back to what you were saying about boast and the sympathy between what I see you doing at Clean List, and again, what our mission here is at Boast. Because, like you were saying, like when you're a fast-growing business and every employee is a high value employee, um, especially when you're in an early stage or something like that, you don't have a quarter or two quarters to start getting it right and then churning things out. Like that changes your business prospects in a huge way at that early phase. You want the people who you hired to do the job to be able to do the job with all their superpowers at hand, not getting bogged down in minutiae if there is a solution that can help simplify some rote work. Or at the same time, bogged down chasing a lead that doesn't actually have what you want. It's not actually in your ICP. You didn't actually necessarily get all the data, and it's not any fault of yours as an individual, but it might not have been available, or you just didn't have the tool to actually get that information that you need to more effectively reach who you actually want to talk to. At most, we don't want a founder who maybe is the entrepreneur of their founding team and is focused on doing some of that glad hand and doing some of the actual getting out there and product advocacy, bogged down writing shred claims. Same with the CFO who has nothing to do with the RD process, translating that vernacular into financial terms that the CRA is going to accept. That's not something that they should get bogged down on, and it becomes a very, very costly exercise if you have the wrong people working on all of that. So again, while BOST has the tools and people when it comes to the RD tax credits, you have the actual solutions to build those systems and to build those frameworks that give those GTM teams their superpowers. So I know that was a long route back to kind of where I see us meeting in the middle, but it's very of a theme. And I think it actually, again, goes back to the same way that like we view AI. I think it's very, again, sympathetical with clean list. There's human thought behind this. There is experience. There is decades of combined experience between all the experts on our team on RD tax credits. And again, we know from working with you and even just seeing your resume and even your co-founders, you guys have that expertise. So it's not just coming in from, okay, let's throw AI at the GTM problem. No, no, we think we know how to get this done. We've seen the proof in the pudding. Now let's add some fire to it and accelerate it and make it a simpler process where, like we were saying earlier, you don't have to bring in engineers necessarily. You can work with clean list. More simplified, get those results faster. So nope, I'm not putting words into your mouth with all of that.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

A lot of one that I was jotton down because it's sounding.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Well, like, you know, you what you're saying is actually so interesting because internally I always tell the team, and this is how we always, you know, when we were shaping up the vision of cleanless coming up with it, is like all the other platforms and all the other tools in the market, they give you a bunch of tools and then they say go build, you know, go build a house. Whereas with Cleanless, the goal is that like we are the builder. That house is being built like hand in hand with you. Um, and I know Boast is the same as well. Um, and also like regarding AI, AI is extremely important, but I think what people don't really understand is that you don't necessarily want AI doing everything out there. Like, for example, especially with cleanless, you know, we might be cleanless AI, but at the end of the day, clean AI is the layer on top of the platform, which is just the contextualization layer that actually helps us to um make these autonomous decisions or improve your workflows, run agents, uh, these sort of things. But a lot of companies, what they're trying to do is like take AI and have it do the full A to Z. Uh, but you don't realize that, you know, there's databases that you need to have. You need to have access to different schemas, you need to have access to a bunch of workflows and plays that already run. Um, and so I think it's not exactly the AI, which is the special thing in go to market and the future of what's to come, but it's actually those underlying layers which will come regarding those workflows, playbooks, and how they all tie in together to actually give the AI what it needs to successfully uh operate on.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Again, it it's sounding like a love fest between Boast and Cleanless, but that's exactly how we look at it. We even call it the same thing. Again, it's that contextualization layer. It's not actually the thing that's I don't want to say it's not intelligent, but it's streamlining access to the intelligence that we need to help get that RD tax credit clan. I see it very similar with you guys. You are building that house. AI is that layer that contextualizes all that access that you guys need to build those systems and to actually do it efficiently and without, again, needing it to become a very intensive build process uh out the gate. And another point that I want to pull back on too, I had mentioned your founders, and this is actually a bit of a diversion, but it's a theme that comes up a lot on this podcast when we're talking to people who reach out to folks who kind of complement their skill set. So it's one thing if, like, let's say you are an engineer and your best buddy's an engineer, and you guys both geek out on the engineering. Are you the best founders for the company, or should you get somebody who, again, might be that entrepreneur who can go do that brand advocacy, who can go do the pitch competitions for you or the demo days, or go actually talk to funders at the end of the day? How did you come about building your team internally? I'd just love to know. I think you said Victor, Irwin, and Sal. I hope I didn't get that wrong, but how did this dream team come together and why was this the team that you wanted to bring with you while you were building Clean List?

SPEAKER_00 17:17

For sure. Um, so I grew up with Victor on the same street, actually, funnily enough. We grew up uh in Oakville together uh from like 13 years old all the way until we were like 19. And so we've known each other each other for a long time and like uh we worked together in the past. We've had a digital marketing agency together, like uh e-commerce business together. We were both leading um leading um growth and and marketing for an e-commerce company in Toronto. We helped them scale to like over a million dollars in annual revenue when we were like, what was it, 19 years old or something. So uh we've been together for a real long time. We worked together at Litmus as well. Uh and it was just kind of like written in the stars. We knew that like whatever we did was gonna be together. Um, I'm much more of that like strategic and like uh out there mind. I'm always coming up with the ideas, and you know, I can like get something from zero to one, but Victor is that guy who can take things and actually scale them fully. Uh he's got an incredible mind and he's really process-oriented. Um, and then I met Sal and Erwin through Victor's, so all three of them went to UFT together. Uh obviously Rottman Commerce, uh, Toronto's also UFT's engineering department, like really excellent school. So uh really excellent like backgrounds for all of them. And Irwin already had a startup before a clean list, they raised around like three million dollars. Um, and so we all kind of came from the same space. Sal, he's he's a dev, he had a dev agency, they do really well. Um, and it was like the perfect team to bring together, especially for this vision I had. Like uh a lot of times not only do you need people who compliment each other, but you also need that level of trust with your co-founders. Uh otherwise you have a lot of problems that start arising. And um, that's kind of like the great thing with the team we have is like we've been together for a long time, know each other um for probably too long. And uh yeah, it's like the perfect combination. And uh one funny thing I'll say is like a lot of founders they start off and you know they hit like a good run. Like, so you know, you got two or three co-founders, you guys launch the product, you have some great success right away. Um product's maybe not there, but you're like building it out, you're shaping the vision, but then issues will arise. Maybe development slows down, maybe funding runs out, anything like that. Um, and those are the tough times that you need to kind of navigate through. And I think the perfect kind of fairy tale story for Cleanlist is we started this when Victor and I were 21. I think Erwin and Sal were 23, something like that. Um, we started working on the idea of Cleanlist around like three years ago. Um, and it kind of just like, you know, we started and from day one we kind of hit rock bottom. You know, like we started building, but no one really knew exactly what we wanted to build. We just had like kind of an idea. It's like something go to market related. And so it took us a lot of time to actually shape that together, to go through that adversity, figure things out, spend a lot of our own money. Um, you know, we put in like over a hundred K of our own money to to get clean list up and running. And that was like really important times to like actually shape something, and that's like the confidence that you get in your co-founders that like these are the right people that like um, you know, you can adhere through anything.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

Oops. I mean, of course, I don't want to root on that. You got thrown into the deep end right out the gate, but I feel like it's built a better business, it's made you guys very resilient and fortified that relationship. Like you already obviously had a great one. You and Victor go back. He can vouch for the other guys because he's worked with them in the trenches too. But because you had to go through and kind of face those toughest questions out of the gate, right when you guys were getting started, it's probably made you pretty resilient and probably game for whatever. I mean, I don't want to say anything that could happen in the business world because that's being way too ambitious. But because anything could happen. And again, 2026, who knows what three months from now is gonna look like, let alone six months. But that's exactly the type of treat trust you want to have with your team too. You don't have to be friends since you guys were preteens necessarily, but you do need to be with people who you can trust have tough conversations with, who you maybe want to be on a sinking ship with, because they will maybe help find a solution to maybe not cat rescue everybody, but get as many of the good pieces onto a safe harbor as possible. I'm abusing a lot of cliches here, but it's a point worth repeating. You want that complimentary skill set, but you also want people you actually like being with. I hate when people say businesses are like a family or a partnership or a founding team is like a marriage, but a founding team is actually like a marriage. And like You you and Victor have gone through the test of time at this point when your relationship. Sounds like you guys are ready for whatever uh curveballs might get thrown at you coming down. But that said, I'd love to know what is on deck uh for the future of Clean List. I know again, we talked about 100K at the beginning of the show, but what are you looking forward to as you guys maybe roll out, achieve growth, any milestones we can look forward to over the next year or just a few months?

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Yeah, I think uh obviously we're gonna continue to scale and we're you know, we're looking to take this uh really far. We wanna build, we're really passionate about this. This is our like passion, and um, there's nothing else, you know. We're not like the founders who it's like we could just be repeat founders, go and build like uh something fails and then start another thing. Like go to market is our passion, that is our expertise, and that is what we're fully committed to. Um and so where we're taking clean list is we want this to be the next unicorn. We uh it might sound a little crazy, but we want to be make this the next thing that um I guess replaces the existing players in the market and kind of um solves go-to-market for all of the companies that are in that SMB mid-market range that are currently struggling to find the solutions that actually are going to s uh fit their needs and the the thing that they inevitably need to scale and succeed.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

I love it. So that's what we got on the roadmap. Clean list AI is gonna be the next unicorn. You heard it here first, folks. And again, we have seen the proof in the pudding. You have some history with both, so we know that it's got the right leadership to actually see some go-to-market momentum because we've seen it live in practice. Lev, I think you have the team for it. I think you got the solution for it. And like you were saying, you have the passion for it. You do kind of have to be a little singularly focused when it comes to not just wanting to be a founder for the sake of being a founder or an entrepreneur for the sake of being an entrepreneur. You know what problem you want to solve, and that is making sure go-to-market teams have the insights they need to be successful. So that is what you're developing, that's what you're bringing to market. And again, I think you have that line of sight. So I I'm throwing my money behind your unicorn. It's gonna happen soon. So yeah, not tomorrow, but soon. I can't thank you enough for joining us. I know we're just at about time. Before I do a formal sign-off, was there anything else you wanted to uh maybe say to founders in the audience or anybody who's either, hey, building a business today as a founder or maybe want to explore Clean List.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Yeah, I think um what I'll say to founders in the space is like nothing is ever gonna go the way that you expect it. Like, whatever you're envisioning, times that by 10, and that's probably what it actually looks like. Um, and a great piece of advice I got from Rob Casam, the founder of Float. Um, he told me when they were starting Float in the early days, and this is something that we do here at Cleanless too, is like uh write down all of the things that you need to accomplish to reach where you want to be in the next six to twelve months and take that and do it in the next quarter. Um, don't wait, just get it done, uh, and you'll get to where you want to be.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

So condense it into the next quarter. All right. I'm gonna hog my team to that task uh internally as well and pass that message on, Lev. Perfect words. I can't thank you enough for hopping on. And again, guys, you can contact Lev on LinkedIn. I'll put some more contact information to learn more about Clean Less in the show notes, but this was a fantastic chat. I can't thank you enough for joining me, Lev. Thanks, Paul.