Hey! I’m Justin 👋

I founded Starbridge to help businesses win more government and education deals.

Welcome to the Public Sector Sales Brief — a newsletter for sales leaders selling into government and/or education.

This week, we’re diving into a topic that’s been top of mind for me: what the future of outbound looks like for businesses selling to government and schools.

It also happens to be the core product thesis behind why we believe Starbridge will be the best solution 5–10 years from now.

Let’s dive in.

The future of outbound is GTM engineers

I’m 100% convinced: in 3–5 years, most companies selling into this space will have a GTM engineer—and the traditional BDR role will look completely different.

At Starbridge, one GTM engineer is generating more opportunities than the 10+ BDRs I managed at my last company. More founders in my network are moving to this approach every day.

A strong GTM engineer knows how to run calculated outbound experiments, leverage large datasets, and drive deep customization at scale. They’re experts in email copy and masters of optimizing conversion.

The ROI is obvious.

But if you already have a BDR team, shifting to a GTM engineer model overnight is risky.

It takes time to get this approach right

Yes, I believe most companies will move to a GTM engineer model eventually. But it’s not a switch you can flip—especially if you already have an established BDR team.

There’s a high administrative cost to learning this new motion. You either need to upskill internally or bring in outside help.

When we first started prototyping Starbridge with design partners, we kept running into the same issue: our early version assumed companies already had GTM engineering capabilities—which just isn’t realistic for 99% of teams today.

Which leads to my next point...

You need a bridge that doesn’t hurt your pipeline

Through dozens of conversations with sales leaders, it became clear: you can’t transition overnight.

You need a clear, incremental path that improves pipeline outcomes over time—not one that puts your pipeline at risk.

Most companies aren’t ready to fully automate outbound with AI. The question is: what are the small steps you can take today to get there?

For example, start by aggregating intent signals specific to your ICP and testing them in outbound campaigns. Even if your BDRs are still sending emails manually, you’re laying the data foundation for a future GTM engineer model.

This is our core product thesis at Starbridge: building the bridge to a GTM engineer future for public sector sellers.

We reduce the administrative burden by pre-building data sets and workflows tailored to this market—so reps can wake up to a ready-to-go list of top signals and leads, without needing to build it all from scratch.

If I were Starting the Transition Today…

1. Start with your ideal email — then work backwards to automate it.

Most teams get stuck thinking about what’s possible today. Instead, write your dream outbound message. Then break it into parts and test how to automate each piece.

2. Get comfortable leveraging data in outbound.

It drives me crazy how few sellers use data today. You don’t need deep customization at scale—start simple. Ask BDRs to spend 5–10 minutes researching their top 10 accounts and incorporate one insight into their messaging. Build the muscle.

3. Track and learn from every experiment.

Too many teams treat outbound like a shot in the dark. Every campaign is a learning opportunity. If you’re not tracking results closely, you’re leaving improvement (and pipeline) on the table.

Feature Spotlight: Identify New Grant Funding

Trigger outbound based on grant & budget approvals at scale.

Here’s the play:

1.) Create a ‘bridge’ with your target list of accounts

2.) Use the AI Analysis agent to search through each account’s URL to find mentions of new grants or budget approvals.

3.)Once you’re satisfied with the results, you can directly sync the data into Salesforce .

See a full demo here.

Thank you for reading!

Next week, I’m sharing our predictable revenue playbook 2.0 - how we’re revamping the traditional outbound motion to one that can take advantage of

As always my LinkedIn inbox is always open. Reach out if you have any questions.

See you next week,

— Justin