SDR or BDR

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 → What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing. An ICP describes the company you want as a customer: size, industry, what they already use, what has to be true for your product to matter. A perso... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start? Start with twenty companies, not two thousand. Pick people you can describe precisely (job title, company size, the specific problem you think they... Breaking into GTM 4 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 → I want to start a GTM career in India but I have zero sales experience. What is the realistic first job? An SDR or BDR seat at a B2B software company is the standard front door, and it is genuinely open to people with no sales background because compan... 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 → 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 → 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 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 → How do I break into RevOps when I have never had the title? Almost nobody starts in RevOps. People arrive from sales development, marketing ops, customer success ops, finance, or a Salesforce or HubSpot admi... Breaking into GTM 4 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 → My cold emails keep landing in spam. How do I set up sending so they actually reach an inbox? Deliverability is plumbing, and you fix it before you touch copy. Never send cold mail from your main company domain: buy two or three lookalike .c... 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 → 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 →

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 → 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 → How do I build a target list that is worth working instead of scraping ten thousand random companies? A list is a hypothesis about who has your problem badly enough to pay, so write the hypothesis down before you open any tool. Start from the accoun... Doing the work 4 resources → How should inbound leads get routed, and how fast does it actually need to happen? Fast enough that speed stops being your problem. The classic Harvard Business Review study of 2.24 million leads found that firms contacting a pros... Doing the work 4 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 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 → 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 → 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 →

What are the best outbound teams doing in 2026 that the rest of us are not? They treat outbound as an engineering problem, not a headcount problem. The best teams have someone technical sitting inside GTM (the GTM engineer ... 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 →