Breaking into GTM

Everyone says find a champion. What does that actually mean, and how do I know if I have one?

The short answer

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 a much rarer thing. You test it, you do not assume it. Ask them to introduce you to the person who controls the budget: a real champion makes the introduction, a friendly contact goes quiet or offers to pass your deck along instead. Other tells are that they share things they should not (the real budget, who is against you, the competitor they are also seeing) and that they push back on you when you get something wrong. Once you have one, your job changes from selling to arming them: a one page business case in their language, the number their boss cares about, and a rehearsal of the conversation they are about to have without you in the room.

Go deeper, your way

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

The same ground, at another level

How running a sales process and closing reads from a different seat.

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 → How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run? Write it down, then make it boring. Take your last ten closed deals and map what actually happened at each stage, then turn that into templates: a ... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → What separates the top ten percent of AEs from everyone else? Discovery discipline, mostly. Top performers spread questions evenly across the whole cycle rather than front-loading a checklist on call one, and ... How the best do it 3 resources →

People also ask

I have a call booked with a real prospect tomorrow. What do I do on it? Ask questions and shut up. Gong's analysis of more than half a million calls found the sweet spot is somewhere around eleven to fourteen questions,... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Founder-led sales sounds terrifying. Why can I not just hire a salesperson? Because you have nothing to hand them yet. A salesperson needs a buyer profile, a set of common objections, a working pitch, a rough price and a de... Breaking into GTM 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 3 resources → My demos go well and then the deal stalls. How do I stop that? A demo that goes well and dies usually means you pitched your product instead of positioning it against what the buyer would otherwise do. April Du... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run? Write it down, then make it boring. Take your last ten closed deals and map what actually happened at each stage, then turn that into templates: a ... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → When do I hire a VP of Sales, and what happens to me after I do? Most founders are ready around one to two million dollars of ARR, once a couple of reps are already selling successfully and you have a process wor... Leading a GTM team 3 resources →

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The same ground, over in Money, pricing & model, our Starting Up track.

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Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Money, pricing & unit economics, our D2C track.

I'm not a finance person, what books/records do I actually need to keep from day one? At minimum: a sales register (every order, with GST split if applicable), a purchase/expense register (raw materials, ads, shipping, software), a b... 3 resources → What is cohort analysis, and why does it matter more than a single repeat-rate number? Cohort analysis groups customers by when they first bought and tracks how each group behaves over time - so instead of one blended '35% repeat rate... 3 resources →
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