Breaking into GTM

SDR, AE, AM, growth, PMM, RevOps: what do these people actually do all day?

The short answer

An SDR finds and opens conversations, mostly by email, calls and LinkedIn, and hands over meetings, while an AE runs those conversations to a signature through discovery, demo, pricing and procurement. An AM keeps and grows the account after the sale, and growth or demand gen builds the machine that makes strangers show up in the first place. A product marketer decides what the company says and arms everyone else to say it. RevOps owns the plumbing and the numbers so all of the above can be measured. In small companies one person wears three of these hats, which is exactly why the labels confuse newcomers.

Go deeper, your way

5 hand-picked resources, 5 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How gtm roles and career paths reads from a different seat.

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People also ask

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 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 → 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 → How do I decide which GTM roles to hire, and in what order? Hire against the bottleneck you can prove, not the org chart you eventually want. If you have more conversations than you can run, hire a closer; i... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I set quota, comp and ramp for my first sales team in India without copying a US template that does not fit? Anchor on your own deal data, not on a benchmark deck. A workable starting point is a quota of roughly four to five times on-target earnings, a bas... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → What separates a great VP of Sales from a merely good one? A great one recruits. If they have not personally hired and carried two or three quota-carrying reps before, they are a manager of a system somebod... How the best do it 4 resources →
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