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 6 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 4 resources → What is a channel partner, and why would a software company hand over 30% of the price? Because the partner is selling you something cash cannot buy: an existing trusted relationship with a customer, in a market or segment where you ha... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → When should I hire my first customer success person? Earlier than feels comfortable. The usual trigger is two or three customers big enough that losing one would hurt, plus a founder who is spending m... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I have been handed a comp plan. How do I work out what I will actually earn? Ignore the OTE headline and find four things: the base, the quota, what percentage of a deal you get, and when you get paid. Multiply your realisti... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What is pipeline coverage and how much pipeline do I actually need to hit my number? Pipeline coverage is qualified open pipeline divided by the target for the period, and the honest answer to how much you need is one over your win ... Breaking into GTM 4 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 → Referral, tech partner, reseller, SI: someone offered us a partnership, which one is it? Ask one question: who owns the customer relationship and who takes the money. A referral partner sends you a name and takes a cut while you do ever... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What do OTE, pay mix, accelerator, draw and clawback actually mean? OTE is base plus variable if you hit exactly 100 percent of quota, nothing more. Pay mix is how that splits: closing roles are usually around 50:50... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is a cloud marketplace and why does everyone tell us to list on AWS? A cloud marketplace is a catalogue inside AWS, Azure or Google Cloud where a customer buys your software through the procurement they already use f... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I just got handed my first set of accounts. What do I actually do in the first 30 days? Read the deal before you talk to anyone. Find out what the customer was promised, who signed, who will actually use it, and what they said success ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What does land and expand mean, and does it apply to my company? Land and expand means you deliberately sell a small first deal to one team, prove it works, and grow from there into more seats, more teams or more... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I have been offered the first sales hire job at a startup. What should I check before I say yes? Ask how many customers the founder closed personally and what the last five deals looked like. If the answer is under ten, you are the experiment, ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder selling this myself. What GTM tools do I actually need right now? Fewer than you think. Before roughly fifty customers you need one CRM, one email sending setup with warmed domains, one calendar booking link, and ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I write the one line that says what category we are in? Write it as a comparison, not a description. The formula that works is simple: who it is for, what kind of thing it is, and why it beats the altern... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I just joined a PLG company as my first GTM job. What do I actually do all day if the product sells itself? You spend your days on the parts of the journey the product cannot see. Someone has to figure out why 80 percent of signups never come back, write ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What is a fair quota for my first rep when we have no history to go on? Start from cost, not from ambition. The common anchors are quota at four to six times OTE, or David Sacks's rule of 10 where quota is about ten tim... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → Buyers keep comparing us to a big incumbent. How do I even respond in a first call? Do not dodge it and do not claim you beat them everywhere, because the buyer knows you do not and you lose credibility instantly. Name the incumben... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am an engineer, a consultant, or fresh out of an MBA. How do I actually switch into GTM? Your background is not a handicap, it is your entry ticket, but only if you aim at the door it opens. Engineers should look at sales engineering, s... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → The person who uses our product every day is not the person who pays for it. Which one is the ICP? Neither, on their own. The ICP is the company you want, and inside it you have to name two people: the user who feels the pain and the buyer who ow... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → The buyer said yes, and now it is going to legal and security. What actually happens next? Two parallel reviews start, and neither of them is your buyer. Legal sends redlines on your MSA (usually liability caps, indemnity, data processing... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Big company or startup for my first GTM job? The trade is training versus autonomy, and for a first job training usually wins. A larger company gives you a real onboarding programme, managers ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Every deal seems to have five people in it. Who actually signs, and who am I wasting time on? In B2B almost nobody signs alone. You are usually dealing with a champion who wants it, an economic buyer who can release the money, a security or ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → Is LinkedIn a real outbound channel or just noise? Should I be using it alongside cold email? LinkedIn is real, but it is rarely the channel that books the meeting on its own. In Cognism's 2026 data across roughly 450,000 calls, phone was 57... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Everyone says find a champion. What does that actually mean, and how do I know if I have one? A champion is not the person who likes you. It is the person who will spend their own credibility inside their company to get you bought, which is ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is a strategic narrative and how is it different from our pitch deck? A pitch deck is about you, a strategic narrative is about a change happening in the world that your buyer is living through. The structure Andy Ras... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → Everyone says post on LinkedIn. What do I post if I am not an expert yet? Post what you are seeing, not what you have concluded. You sit in more conversations with buyers in a week than most commentators do in a month, so... 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 5 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 4 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 4 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 5 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 5 resources → How do I get a partner's reps to actually mention us in their deals? Partner reps do what pays them and what is easy, in that order. Make the ask absurdly small: one sentence they can say, one slide, one person on yo... Doing the work 4 resources → How do we actually list on AWS Marketplace, and what changes in our sales process? The listing itself is a few weeks of work: register as a seller, choose a delivery method (SaaS is usually contract or metering based), write the l... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I spot which accounts are actually ready to expand? Look for accounts that are pressing against a limit and accounts that are spreading sideways. Hitting a usage ceiling, adding users faster than the... Doing the work 5 resources → What should a new rep's first 90 days actually look like? The first 30 days are absorption: product, market, recorded calls, and shadowing you on live deals until they can pitch it back without notes. Days... Doing the work 5 resources → A reseller has signed. How do I make them actually productive? Assume two months of your time before they sell anything, and plan for it from the day the contract is signed. They need exactly what your own reps... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I run a QBR that the customer does not find a waste of time? Stop opening with your usage dashboard. Open with the outcome they told you they were buying, and show progress against it in their numbers, not yo... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I run an upsell conversation without sounding like I am shaking them down? Earn it first. If you cannot show the customer a result they got in the last quarter, you have not bought the right to ask for more money, and they... Doing the work 5 resources → I am the first AE and my founder still runs half the deals. How do we split it? Split by stage, not by account, at least at first. The founder stays on the parts only they can do, the vision framing, the pricing exception, the ... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I forecast my own quarter as an AE so my manager stops overriding my number? Forecast the evidence, not the vibe. A deal belongs in commit only if you can name the economic buyer, point at a written next step with a date, an... Doing the work 4 resources → How did Chargebee get its first paying customers after 18 months with none? Chargebee was founded in 2011 in Chennai by four friends, two of them from Zoho, and spent about 18 months building before a single customer paid. ... Doing the work 5 resources → Sales wants to call every signup. How do I decide which ones deserve a human? Score on three things and only three: does the account look like someone who buys from us, have they done the thing inside the product that predict... Doing the work 6 resources → How do I run account mapping with a partner without giving away our pipeline? Account mapping is just comparing customer and prospect lists to find overlap, and tooling exists precisely so neither side has to email a spreadsh... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I work with a system integrator without losing the customer relationship? Write it down before the first deal: who holds the software contract, who does implementation, who the customer calls when something breaks, and wh... Doing the work 5 resources → My champion at a big account just left. What do I do? Move within 48 hours, before someone else defines your product for the new person. Send a short personal note to the incoming contact congratulatin... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I convert more trials without turning the product into a nagging upgrade prompt? Tie every prompt to something the user just did. A message that appears because someone hit a limit, finished a project, or invited a third colleag... Doing the work 5 resources → A big account has gone quiet and I think they are going to churn. What do I actually do? Get the honest conversation on the calendar rather than sending another check-in email. Ask directly whether they are still getting what they bough... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I tell whether my pipeline is real or just hopeful? Age it and test it. Pull every open opportunity, sort by days since the last customer initiated action, and treat anything past two normal sales cy... Doing the work 4 resources → How is GTM different before product market fit versus after? Before PMF, GTM is a learning function and after PMF it is a manufacturing function, and confusing the two burns most of the money startups lose. B... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I judge a startup's GTM before I join it, so I am not walking into an unhittable number? Interview them harder than they interview you, and ask for numbers rather than stories. The four that matter most: what percentage of the team hit ... Doing the work 3 resources → My list of target accounts is enormous and mostly cold. How do I find the ones that are ready to buy right now? Fit tells you who could buy. Timing tells you who will. The bridge between them is a trigger, some event that just made your problem urgent inside ... Doing the work 4 resources → Everyone we sell to already uses the big incumbent. How do I position against them without trashing them? Never attack the vendor, attack a specific frustration their own customers already voice, in their words, lifted from review sites and your win and... Doing the work 5 resources → One email is not a sequence. How many follow-ups, how far apart, and what should go in each one? Four to seven touches over two to three weeks is the honest range: fewer and you quit before they noticed you, more and you are just annoying peopl... Doing the work 3 resources → They want a pilot before they commit. How do I run one that ends in a contract instead of a shrug? Most pilots fail because nobody wrote down what winning looks like, so at the end everyone says nice things and nothing happens. Fix that at the st... Doing the work 4 resources → How did Whatfix manufacture its first ten customers with cold email, then find out it was underpricing by twelve times? Whatfix did not wait for inbound. Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu sent 500 personalised cold emails to SaaS product managers from Bengaluru, an... Doing the work 4 resources → What does a GTM career actually pay in India over ten years? Ignore the broad job title averages you will find online, because they mix B2B software sellers with FMCG and ad agency account executives and come... Doing the work 4 resources → My champion went quiet and the deal stalled. How do I multithread an account without going over their head? A deal riding on one person is not a deal, it is a favour. Gong's data is blunt about this: winning deals average around eight contacts on email ve... Doing the work 4 resources → Procurement has entered the conversation and wants thirty percent off. How do I negotiate without gutting the deal? Understand what is happening: procurement is usually measured on the savings they extract, so they are going to ask for something no matter how fai... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I turn a point of view into content that actually helps sales close deals? Write for the moment in the deal where a rep gets stuck, not for the top of the funnel in general. Ask your AEs which three objections kill deals, ... Doing the work 4 resources → US buyers hesitate when they learn we are an India based team. How do I handle that in our messaging? Answer the real worry, which is almost never about India and almost always about support coverage, security posture, data residency and whether you... Doing the work 4 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 4 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 → What separates a best-in-class QBR from a status update? Benchmarking and a point of view. The best QBRs tell a customer where they sit relative to comparable customers, then say plainly what the top perf... How the best do it 5 resources → A big share of our losses are to nobody at all. How do the best companies write and sell against doing nothing? First split the two things hiding behind no decision. Some buyers genuinely prefer the status quo and need the cost of staying put made concrete an... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best teams expand beyond the first team that bought? They stop treating the account as one relationship. The best operators map the organisation the way they would map a new deal, find the teams with ... How the best do it 5 resources → What do elite revenue teams do in the last three weeks of a quarter that ordinary teams do not? Very little that is dramatic, which is the point. The work that decides the quarter was done in weeks one to four, so the last three weeks are spen... How the best do it 4 resources → Who should I actually learn cold outbound from, and what do the very best do differently on a call? Three names cover most of it. Armand Farrokh and Nick Cegelski of 30 Minutes to President's Club teach a context-first opener, a problem propositio... How the best do it 4 resources → AI is in every sales stack now. What does it actually change about discovery, demos and the deals we run? Two things changed and they pull in opposite directions. On the buyer's side, most of the evaluation now happens before you are in the conversation... How the best do it 4 resources →