How the best do it
How great operators think
The mental models, the judgment calls, and the non-obvious moves behind good go-to-market.
What did Slack's "We don't sell saddles here" memo actually change about how they sold?
Stewart Butterfield sent the memo to the Tiny Speck team on 31 July 2013, two weeks before Slack's preview release, and published it later. Its arg...
What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning?
Dunford's core claim, after working with over 300 technology companies, is that positioning is not a tagline, not branding, and not messaging. It i...
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...
When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it?
Elena Verna's rule is that most companies do this too soon and for the wrong reasons. The signals that sales will actually help are an average orde...
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...
Why do the best operators settle pricing before the product is finished?
Madhavan Ramanujam's position, from Simon-Kucher and Monetizing Innovation, is that willingness to pay is a product design input, not a launch deci...
What did Claire Hughes Johnson learn about scaling a go to market org, taking Stripe from under 200 people to over 7,000?
Claire Hughes Johnson was COO of Stripe from 2014 to 2021 and had spent a decade at Google before that running business and sales teams. Her argume...
What do Indian SaaS operators say it actually takes to win US customers while building from India?
The recurring advice is that global is a starting position, not a later phase. Manav Garg built Eka out of India when SaaS was not yet a word and h...