Founding AE

What does 'go to market' actually mean? People say GTM constantly and I still cannot define it. GTM is the whole answer to one question: how does a stranger who has your problem end up paying you and staying. That covers who you sell to, what ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → SDR, AE, AM, growth, PMM, RevOps: what do these people actually do all day? An SDR finds and opens conversations, mostly by email, calls and LinkedIn, and hands over meetings, while an AE runs those conversations to a signa... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I have a call booked with a real prospect tomorrow. What do I do on it? Ask questions and shut up. Gong's analysis of more than half a million calls found the sweet spot is somewhere around eleven to fourteen questions,... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → How do I write a one-line description of what we do that a normal person actually understands? Stop trying to be clever and name the category first. A stranger needs to file you somewhere in their head before they can care, so 'a CRM for fiel... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder in India and my buyers are in the US. How do I get a stranger twelve time zones away to reply? Distance is not your problem, credibility is. A US buyer who has never heard of you needs a reason to believe you understand their world, so lead w... Breaking into GTM 4 resources →

How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals? Luck looks like revenue. Working looks like repeatability. Ask whether you can name the trigger that made each of the last ten buyers start looking... Doing the work 4 resources → I have been an SDR for about 18 months. How do I actually make the jump to AE? The promotion is not a reward for hitting meeting targets, it is a bet that you can close. So show closing behaviour before you have the title: sit... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I qualify a deal properly instead of just hoping the enthusiastic person can buy? Enthusiasm is not authority. Before you invest another hour, you want four things: a named pain the buyer can quantify, the person who controls the... Doing the work 4 resources → Our positioning reads fine on the website but every rep says something different on calls. How do I fix that? That gap is almost always a sign the positioning was written for the website and never translated into a conversation. Fix it by building the pitch... Doing the work 4 resources → My cold calls die in the first ten seconds. What do I actually say when they pick up? Stop asking whether you caught them at a bad time, because it hands them an exit and Gong's data across hundreds of millions of calls shows it cuts... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I know if a deal is real or if I am being strung along? Write down what you know against a qualification frame and the gaps become obvious. MEDDPICC is the common one: metrics they care about, the econom... Doing the work 3 resources → What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? Gong analysed over 519,000 B2B sales calls and found that success peaks when a rep asks roughly 11 to 14 targeted questions on a discovery call, an... Doing the work 3 resources → I am the first GTM hire at a startup. What is my job really, and how do I not get fired in 12 months? Your job is not to relieve the founder of selling, it is to prove the founder's selling can be done by someone else. So spend the first month ridin... Doing the work 4 resources → Half my pipeline is outside our ICP because those are the leads that came in. Do I chase them? Chase them to learn, close them only if they close fast. Off-ICP deals are seductive because they are there and someone said yes to a meeting, and ... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I build a sales deck that is not just a tour of our features? Open with a change in the buyer's world, not with your company. Name the shift, show that it creates winners and losers, describe the better state ... Doing the work 4 resources → My demos go well and then the deal stalls. How do I stop that? A demo that goes well and dies usually means you pitched your product instead of positioning it against what the buyer would otherwise do. April Du... Doing the work 4 resources → How did Chargebee get its first paying customers after 14 months with none? Chargebee was founded in 2011 in Chennai by four friends, two of them from Zoho, and spent over 14 months building before a single customer paid. T... Doing the work 2 resources →

When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one? Jason Lemkin's marker is that the founder closes the first batch themselves, roughly the first ten customers, because if you have not done it you w... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

What separates the top ten percent of AEs from everyone else? Discovery discipline, mostly. Top performers spread questions evenly across the whole cycle rather than front-loading a checklist on call one, and ... How the best do it 3 resources → Enterprise CIOs say they find most vendors through outbound. What does great outbound into a big company look like? Zuora's CIO puts it plainly: roughly eighty percent of the startups he ends up evaluating were discovered through outbound channels, whether that i... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best teams sell into large Indian and global enterprises where procurement runs the show? They treat procurement as a stage with its own owner, timeline and artefacts, not as an annoyance at the end. A CIO's process typically runs experi... How the best do it 4 resources →