GTM for SDR or BDR

Breaking into GTM

You are trying to land your first GTM role, or you are a founder selling for the first time. Start with what the job actually is.

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 → 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 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 →

Doing the work

You run the motion day to day. The questions here are about making it repeatable instead of lucky.

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 → 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 → 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 the best do it

Teardowns of how specific companies actually did it, and the judgment calls great operators make that nobody writes down.

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 3 resources →