Leading a GTM team

When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it?

The short answer

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 order value above roughly 10,000 dollars, real product complexity, end users who do not have buying authority, and a category that needs explaining. The critical part is that you layer sales onto the product motion rather than replacing it, because the pipeline sales works was built by the product, and companies that pivot away watch it dry up. Postman is the clean example: it waited until around 2018 and then triggered outreach on signals like many developers active at one account or a CTO writing in. Datadog does it in parallel, selling to the executive while the developers who already use the product become the champions in the room.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How how great operators think reads from a different seat.

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Terms in this answer

Average Order Value

People also ask

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