The high bar

How the best do it

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

Understand the job

What do the very best GTM teams do that everyone else does not? They treat GTM as a system they design rather than a set of tactics they copy. The best teams pick one narrow group of buyers and go absurdly deep,... How the best do it 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 → How do the best companies decide to change their GTM motion instead of just grinding the current one harder? They watch for the signal that effort and outcome have decoupled: same activity, worse conversion, longer cycles, more discounting. That is a motio... How the best do it 4 resources → What does world-class RevOps look like, and when does a company actually need it? World-class RevOps is not CRM administration, it is one person or team owning the definition of truth across marketing, sales, success and finance ... How the best do it 4 resources →

Who you sell to, and why they care

How do the best companies keep their ICP sharp as they grow instead of letting it blur into everyone? They re-derive it on a schedule from data they already have: which segments renew, which expand, which churn, which cost the most to serve. Then th... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best B2B companies get positioning agreed when product, sales and the founders all disagree? They stop arguing about opinions and go find the buyer's view, because the only competitive alternative that matters is the one the prospect would ... How the best do it 4 resources → When is it right to move upmarket, and how do the companies that pull it off actually do it? Move when the demand is systematic, not when two large logos email you. The signal is a pattern of bigger accounts arriving on their own and hittin... How the best do it 5 resources → We are an Indian company selling to global buyers. How do we position so that being from India reads as an asset rather than a question mark? Do not hide it and do not lead with it. Buyers care about outcome, support and trust, so answer those directly: publish your response times, staff ... How the best do it 5 resources →

Build pipeline

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 → What do the companies with genuinely great inbound do differently? They pick one content strategy and commit to it for years instead of sampling five. Lenny's breakdown of content-driven growth is a useful map: edi... How the best do it 4 resources → Enterprise CIOs say they find most vendors through outbound. What does great outbound into a big company look like? Zuora's CIO puts it plainly: roughly eighty percent of the startups he ends up evaluating were discovered through outbound channels, whether that i... How the best do it 4 resources → Is there a way to build demand before the product even exists? Yes, and Rocketlane is the cleanest Indian example. Srikrishnan Ganesan started a community and a podcast for his buyers nine months before the pro... How the best do it 3 resources →

Close deals and price right

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 → How do the best companies raise prices without losing customers? They change price alongside a visible change in value, they tell people early, and they stage it. Grandfather existing customers for a defined peri... How the best do it 4 resources → How do the best teams sell into large Indian and global enterprises where procurement runs the show? They treat procurement as a stage with its own owner, timeline and artefacts, not as an annoyance at the end. A CIO's process typically runs experi... How the best do it 4 resources → AI is breaking per-seat pricing. What are the best companies charging for now? The direction of travel is away from seats and towards usage and outcomes, because when software does the work, charging per human is charging for ... How the best do it 4 resources →

How the best do it

How did Freshworks sell to the US from Chennai without a US sales team? Freshworks started as Freshdesk in Chennai in 2010 and decided early that inbound would be the engine, not field sales. Girish Mathrubootham has sa... How the best do it 2 resources → 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... How the best do it 2 resources → How did Zoho build a global GTM engine without ever raising money? Zoho never took outside capital, so it could never buy growth, and that constraint shaped everything. Sridhar Vembu funded the early years from the... How the best do it 4 resources → What did Postman do differently to get developers to adopt before it ever sold anything? Postman began in 2012 as Abhinav Asthana's side project, a small HTTP client he put on the Chrome Web Store to fix his own API testing pain. Adopti... How the best do it 2 resources → How did BrowserStack get to millions in revenue on word of mouth alone? Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal built BrowserStack for a pain they had felt themselves, testing sites across browser versions, and their first dist... How the best do it 2 resources → How did Zerodha become India's largest broker with no ads and no sales team? Nithin Kamath has written it plainly: Zerodha does not advertise, does not have a sales team with targets, and does not do much marketing. What it ... How the best do it 2 resources → How did HubSpot turn a marketing idea into a distribution advantage nobody could copy? Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah started from an observation, not a product: buyers were finding answers on blogs, forums and search engines long b... How the best do it 2 resources → 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... How the best do it 3 resources → 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... How the best do it 2 resources → 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... How the best do it 4 resources →

People worth learning from here

What each one is known for, and where they publish.

April Dunford Toronto
The person most B2B teams learn positioning from, and the author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch She turns positioning from a vague branding exercise into a repeatable exercise: list your true competitive alternatives, isolate the features only you have, work out the value those unlock, and name the market segment that cares most. Her Sales Pitch work is the rare material that connects that positioning to the actual words a rep says on a call. PositioningICPSales processCategory design
Jason Lemkin SaaStr · San Francisco
Founder of SaaStr, the largest body of public writing on scaling B2B SaaS revenue He answers the operational questions almost nobody publishes numbers for: when to hire your first VP of Sales, what a rep should actually close, how long ramp really takes, and why most VP hires fail in the first 90 days. Read him for benchmarks and hiring sequencing rather than for strategy. GTM hiringEnterprise salesSales processPricing
Sajith Pai Blume Ventures · Bengaluru
Author of the Indus Valley Report and the India1, India2, India3 market segmentation most India GTM plans now borrow from If you are sizing an Indian market, he is the source that stops you from multiplying 1.4 billion by a conversion rate. India1, India2, India3 forces an honest answer on who can actually pay you, and the Indus Valley Report gives you the underlying numbers to argue with. ICPPositioningCategory designPricing
Girish Mathrubootham Together Fund · Chennai
Founded Freshworks in Chennai and took it to a Nasdaq listing, the reference case for selling globally from India Freshworks is the most studied GTM story in Indian software: inbound and freemium first, priced deliberately below the incumbent, selling into the US and Europe with the team sitting in Chennai. He talks openly about the specific mechanics, why they picked a category with an obvious incumbent to position against, and what breaks when you move upmarket. Inbound & contentPricingEnterprise salesGTM hiring
Manav Garg Together Fund · Bengaluru
Built Eka Software into a global enterprise platform from Bengaluru, now backs Indian GTM teams through Together Fund Eka sold six and seven figure enterprise contracts to commodity traders in Geneva and Singapore out of Bengaluru, so his material covers the hard version of Indian GTM: long cycles, on the ground presence, and hiring your first senior seller in a market you do not live in. He is also unusually direct about how long co-founder and first leadership hires take to get right. Enterprise salesGTM hiringICPPartnerships
Sridhar Vembu Zoho · Tenkasi
Founder of Zoho, which sells to over 100 million users worldwide without venture funding or a heavy sales machine Zoho is the strongest working argument that price, product breadth and patience can substitute for a large sales and marketing budget. He is explicit about the tradeoffs: slower growth, no funding rounds to buy distribution, and a bet that owning the whole stack lets you undercut everyone permanently. PricingPositioningRetention & expansionCategory design
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The other levels

Breaking into GTM Doing the work Leading a GTM team
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