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Just starting

Breaking into GTM

You are trying to land your first GTM role, or you are a founder selling for the first time. Start with what the job actually is.

Understand the job

What does 'go to market' actually mean? People say GTM constantly and I still cannot define it. GTM is the whole answer to one question: how does a stranger who has your problem end up paying you and staying. That covers who you sell to, what ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → SDR, AE, AM, growth, PMM, RevOps: what do these people actually do all day? An SDR finds and opens conversations, mostly by email, calls and LinkedIn, and hands over meetings, while an AE runs those conversations to a signa... Breaking into GTM 6 resources → I am a founder and I have never sold anything in my life. Where do I actually start? Start by talking to twenty people who have the problem, with no intent to sell, and write down the words they use. Then go back to the ten who lean... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → 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 run a services or agency business, not a product. Does GTM mean anything different for me? It means the same thing, get the right people to know you exist and choose you, but the levers are different. In services your product is trust, so... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I am an engineer, a consultant, or fresh out of an MBA. How do I actually switch into GTM? Your background is not a handicap, it is your entry ticket, but only if you aim at the door it opens. Engineers should look at sales engineering, s... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → We are bootstrapped with no money for marketing. What does GTM look like without a budget? GTM without money is not GTM without work, it is GTM where your time is the budget. Pick one narrow group of people you can reach for free (a commu... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Big company or startup for my first GTM job? The trade is training versus autonomy, and for a first job training usually wins. A larger company gives you a real onboarding programme, managers ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources →

Who you sell to, and why they care

What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing. An ICP describes the company you want as a customer: size, industry, what they already use, what has to be true for your product to matter. A perso... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is positioning in plain English, and why does everyone insist we have got it wrong? Positioning is the context you give a buyer so that your strengths look obvious. It is the answer to 'what kind of thing is this and who is it for'... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → We have about fifteen customers and they are all different. How do I find an ICP out of that? Do not look at who bought, look at who is happy. Rank the fifteen by usage and by whether they would be annoyed if you disappeared, then take the t... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I write a one-line description of what we do that a normal person actually understands? Stop trying to be clever and name the category first. A stranger needs to file you somewhere in their head before they can care, so 'a CRM for fiel... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → The person who uses our product every day is not the person who pays for it. Which one is the ICP? Neither, on their own. The ICP is the company you want, and inside it you have to name two people: the user who feels the pain and the buyer who ow... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is the actual difference between positioning, messaging and copy? I keep being asked for all three and they feel like the same job. Positioning is a decision, messaging is a small set of sentences that carry the decision, copy is the words on a specific page. Positioning answers... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Every deal seems to have five people in it. Who actually signs, and who am I wasting time on? In B2B almost nobody signs alone. You are usually dealing with a champion who wants it, an economic buyer who can release the money, a security or ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → Does our name actually matter? We keep arguing about it and I cannot tell if it is important or a distraction. The name matters much less than the words next to it. Nobody bought Slack because of the word Slack, they bought it because the line underneath sai... Breaking into GTM 5 resources →

Build pipeline

I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start? Start with twenty companies, not two thousand. Pick people you can describe precisely (job title, company size, the specific problem you think they... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? Inbound means someone with the problem finds you while they are looking for an answer, and leaves you a way to follow up. For a startup with no aud... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder in India and my buyers are in the US. How do I get a stranger twelve time zones away to reply? Distance is not your problem, credibility is. A US buyer who has never heard of you needs a reason to believe you understand their world, so lead w... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I write blog posts and nothing happens. What am I doing wrong? Usually one of three things. You are writing for a persona you invented instead of a real person you have spoken to, so the piece is generically co... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → My cold emails keep landing in spam. How do I set up sending so they actually reach an inbox? Deliverability is plumbing, and you fix it before you touch copy. Never send cold mail from your main company domain: buy two or three lookalike .c... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → SEO used to mean ranking on Google. What does it mean now that buyers ask ChatGPT instead? The unit of visibility moved from a ranking to a citation, and the levers moved off your website. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found branded ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Is LinkedIn a real outbound channel or just noise? Should I be using it alongside cold email? LinkedIn is real, but it is rarely the channel that books the meeting on its own. In Cognism's 2026 data across roughly 450,000 calls, phone was 57... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Everyone tells us to start a podcast or a newsletter. Is that a real channel or a vanity project? It is real, and it is slower than anyone selling it to you admits. The honest version is that you are building owned distribution: an audience you ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources →

Close deals and price right

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 → I have no idea what to charge. How do I pick a first price? Find the right order of magnitude first and stop arguing about the exact number. Are you a ten dollar product, a hundred dollar product, a thousand... 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 → What is a value metric and why does everyone say it matters more than the number? A value metric is the thing you charge for: a seat, a thousand API calls, a gigabyte, a transaction, a resolved ticket. Patrick Campbell's line is ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → The buyer said yes, and now it is going to legal and security. What actually happens next? Two parallel reviews start, and neither of them is your buyer. Legal sends redlines on your MSA (usually liability caps, indemnity, data processing... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Free trial, freemium, or demo first? How do I pick which door people come through? Let the deal size and the product decide, not fashion. If someone can get real value alone in one sitting, a trial works and a sales call is an exp... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Everyone says find a champion. What does that actually mean, and how do I know if I have one? 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 ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Should I bill monthly or annually when I am small and every rupee of runway counts? Annual, upfront, and price it so annual is obviously the better deal. Twelve months of cash on day one is the cheapest funding you will ever raise,... Breaking into GTM 3 resources →

Let the product sell

What does product-led growth actually mean, and how is it different from just having a free trial? A free trial is a tactic. Product-led growth is a decision about who does the convincing. In a PLG business the product is the main way people find... Breaking into GTM 6 resources → Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours? It is the first moment a new user gets something real out of your product, and you find it by looking at what people who stuck around did in their ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → We are about to launch. Should we go with freemium or a free trial? Start with a free trial unless you have a specific reason not to. The benchmark data is consistent: freemium brings in more signups but converts fa... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → Our activation rate is 18 percent. Is that terrible, or is that just what it is? It is below average but not alarming. Across 500 plus products the average activation rate sits around 34 percent and the median around 25, with Sa... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → How do I know whether my product can even work self-serve? Three things have to be true at once. A single person has to get real value on their own, without their IT team, their manager, or a data migration... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What should a brand new user see in the first minute after they sign up? Something that already works. The best first screens hand the user a filled-in example rather than an empty box, because a blank canvas asks a stra... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I just joined a PLG company as my first GTM job. What do I actually do all day if the product sells itself? You spend your days on the parts of the journey the product cannot see. Someone has to figure out why 80 percent of signups never come back, write ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → Almost nobody finishes our onboarding flow. Is that an onboarding problem or a product problem? Look at where they stop. If people drop at the same screen every time, it is an onboarding problem and usually a specific one: a required field the... Breaking into GTM 5 resources →

Sell through other people

What does a partnerships person actually do all day? Mostly three things: finding companies whose customers overlap with yours, getting people at those companies to trust you enough to make introducti... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is a channel partner, and why would a software company hand over 30% of the price? Because the partner is selling you something cash cannot buy: an existing trusted relationship with a customer, in a market or segment where you ha... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → Referral, tech partner, reseller, SI: someone offered us a partnership, which one is it? Ask one question: who owns the customer relationship and who takes the money. A referral partner sends you a name and takes a cut while you do ever... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Is our product even ready for resellers? Probably not, if you are still learning how to sell it yourself. Channel accelerates a motion that already works; it does not create one. SaaS Capi... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → A much bigger company wants to partner with us. Should we say yes? Usually the honest answer is yes to a pilot, no to a program. Big companies sign a lot of partnerships and staff very few, so the announcement cost... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is a cloud marketplace and why does everyone tell us to list on AWS? A cloud marketplace is a catalogue inside AWS, Azure or Google Cloud where a customer buys your software through the procurement they already use f... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → I have just been handed partnerships as my job. What do I do in the first 90 days? Do not launch a program. Spend month one finding the five to ten companies that already show up inside your won deals, because your customers have ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → App store, app directory, cloud marketplace: which of these actually matters for us? They share a name and almost nothing else. An app directory (HubSpot, Slack, Freshworks) is a discovery surface for that platform's existing custom... Breaking into GTM 4 resources →

Keep and grow the customers you win

When should I hire my first customer success person? Earlier than feels comfortable. The usual trigger is two or three customers big enough that losing one would hurt, plus a founder who is spending m... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What is net revenue retention and why does every investor keep asking me for it? NRR is what happens to the revenue from one group of customers over a year, with no new logos counted: start with what they paid, subtract what chu... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What is the difference between customer success and customer support? Support is reactive and ticket shaped: the customer has a problem, you solve it, you close it. Customer success is proactive and outcome shaped: yo... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is the difference between gross retention and net retention, and which one should I watch? Gross retention counts only what you lost: churn and downgrades, capped at 100 percent. Net retention adds expansion on top, so it can go above 100... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I just got handed my first set of accounts. What do I actually do in the first 30 days? Read the deal before you talk to anyone. Find out what the customer was promised, who signed, who will actually use it, and what they said success ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What does land and expand mean, and does it apply to my company? Land and expand means you deliberately sell a small first deal to one team, prove it works, and grow from there into more seats, more teams or more... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What does a good customer onboarding actually look like? Good onboarding is measured in time to first real value, not in how many training sessions you delivered. Pick one observable moment that means the... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → How much churn is normal, and is mine bad? For software, annual churn above roughly 6 percent is the point where people start calling it high, and monthly churn benchmarks vary hugely by who... Breaking into GTM 5 resources →

Build the team

When do I stop selling myself and hire my first salesperson? Not when you are tired of selling. When you can predict it. The honest test is whether you can write down who buys, what makes them buy now, the th... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I have been handed a comp plan. How do I work out what I will actually earn? Ignore the OTE headline and find four things: the base, the quota, what percentage of a deal you get, and when you get paid. Multiply your realisti... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What does a good first sales hire actually look like, and what should I not fall for? You want someone who will do their own button clicking. The single most common mistake is overshooting seniority: hiring a person whose last three ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → What do OTE, pay mix, accelerator, draw and clawback actually mean? OTE is base plus variable if you hit exactly 100 percent of quota, nothing more. Pay mix is how that splits: closing roles are usually around 50:50... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I have been offered the first sales hire job at a startup. What should I check before I say yes? Ask how many customers the founder closed personally and what the last five deals looked like. If the answer is under ten, you are the experiment, ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder writing my first sales comp plan. What is the simplest thing that works? One page, one number, one rate. Base plus variable at roughly 50:50 for a closer, a single quota on new ARR, a flat commission rate, and an acceler... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I interview a salesperson when I have never sold for a living? Stop trying to judge charisma and start judging evidence. Write a scorecard first: three or four outcomes you want in twelve months and the handful... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → What is a fair quota for my first rep when we have no history to go on? Start from cost, not from ambition. The common anchors are quota at four to six times OTE, or David Sacks's rule of 10 where quota is about ten tim... Breaking into GTM 5 resources →

Run it on real numbers

What does a RevOps person actually do all day? Mostly three things: keep the systems of record honest, make the process the team follows visible, and answer the questions leadership asks with nu... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is pipeline coverage and how much pipeline do I actually need to hit my number? Pipeline coverage is qualified open pipeline divided by the target for the period, and the honest answer to how much you need is one over your win ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I just joined as the first ops hire and the CRM is a total mess. Where do I start? Do not start by cleaning records. Start by stopping the bleeding at the point of entry, because a cleanup on a leaky system just gets dirty again i... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I work out CAC payback when I do not have a finance team? Take everything you spent on sales and marketing in a period, divide it by the number of new customers you won in that period, and you have CAC. Th... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → I am a founder selling this myself. What GTM tools do I actually need right now? Fewer than you think. Before roughly fifty customers you need one CRM, one email sending setup with warmed domains, one calendar booking link, and ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is the magic number and should I care about it at my stage? The magic number is how many dollars of annualised new revenue you generated for each dollar of sales and marketing you spent in the previous perio... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I break into RevOps when I have never had the title? Almost nobody starts in RevOps. People arrive from sales development, marketing ops, customer success ops, finance, or a Salesforce or HubSpot admi... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Which handful of GTM numbers should a first time founder actually track? Five is plenty in the first couple of years. New ARR added this month, gross and net revenue retention, CAC payback, pipeline coverage for the comi... Breaking into GTM 6 resources →

Own the story

What does category actually mean in go-to-market, and why does everyone keep telling me to pick one? A category is the mental shelf a buyer puts you on before they judge anything else about you. The moment someone hears what you do, they reach for ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → Should we create a new category or just say we are a better version of something that already exists? For almost everyone at the start, the answer is the existing category. April Dunford's own count is that around 90 percent of recently public tech ... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → How do I write the one line that says what category we are in? Write it as a comparison, not a description. The formula that works is simple: who it is for, what kind of thing it is, and why it beats the altern... Breaking into GTM 5 resources → Buyers keep comparing us to a big incumbent. How do I even respond in a first call? Do not dodge it and do not claim you beat them everywhere, because the buyer knows you do not and you lose credibility instantly. Name the incumben... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → I am a founder with no marketing team. Is my own story actually a GTM asset or just vanity? It is an asset, but only the parts of it that are useful to a buyer. Nobody outside your family cares about your journey, they care about what you ... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → What is a strategic narrative and how is it different from our pitch deck? A pitch deck is about you, a strategic narrative is about a change happening in the world that your buyer is living through. The structure Andy Ras... Breaking into GTM 3 resources → Everyone says post on LinkedIn. What do I post if I am not an expert yet? Post what you are seeing, not what you have concluded. You sit in more conversations with buyers in a week than most commentators do in a month, so... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What is the difference between brand and demand, in plain terms? Demand capture reaches the small number of people shopping right now, brand building reaches the far larger number who will shop later. The Ehrenbe... Breaking into GTM 4 resources →

How the best do it

How did Meesho find its first sellers by watching what people already sold on WhatsApp? Meesho's first product, Fashnear, was a try-at-home fashion marketplace and it failed. While visiting Bangalore shopkeepers, Vidit Aatrey heard one... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What does Emily Kramer say your first marketing hire must already be able to do? Emily Kramer, who led marketing at Asana and Carta and now runs MKT1, names the number one mistake as hiring someone with too many firsts. She scor... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How did Wingify get its first paying customers by writing for someone else's audience? Paras Chopra had no budget and no audience, so he borrowed one. He read 10 to 15 academic papers on conversion rates through Google Scholar so he w... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Why do operators like Nithin Kamath and Sridhar Vembu refuse to buy growth? Nithin Kamath states it as a freedom rather than a sacrifice: it is a good place to be when you do not have to look at customers in terms of acquis... Breaking into GTM 5 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
Pete Kazanjy Atrium · San Francisco
Author of Founding Sales, the handbook that popularised founder led sales Founding Sales is the most concrete text available on the exact stretch most founders get wrong: your first 10 customers, your first rep, and the handoff between the two. He is unusually specific about call structure, discovery questions, and what a founder should measure before hiring anyone into sales. Sales processOutboundGTM hiringEnterprise sales
Emily Kramer MKT1 · San Francisco
Writes MKT1, the reference on how an early B2B startup should actually build marketing She writes the thing almost nobody else does: what the first marketing hire should actually do in what order, how to scope the role, and how to tell a growth marketer from a product marketer when you have budget for exactly one. Her templates and org charts are directly usable rather than illustrative. PositioningInbound & contentGTM hiringICP
Sunil Neurgaonkar Adopt AI · Bengaluru
Host of SaaS Sessions, India's longest running SaaS podcast, and a working field and community marketer He is one of the few India based GTM people publishing at the practitioner altitude rather than the CEO altitude: what a first growth hire actually does in month one, how field marketing and events convert in Indian SaaS, and what a lean team runs instead of a paid budget. The podcast archive doubles as a decade long record of how Indian SaaS GTM changed. CommunityInbound & contentICPPartnerships
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy Upekkha · Bengaluru
Managing Partner at Upekkha and one of the clearest voices on capital efficient SaaS GTM from India He works with dozens of early Indian SaaS founders at the same time, so his public material is grounded in patterns rather than one company's story: how to pick a wedge ICP, what a founder should personally close before hiring, and where India based teams typically stall selling into the US. His framing of efficiency as a GTM choice, not a constraint, is the useful contrarian bit. ICPPositioningPricingSales process
Avinash Raghava SaaSBoomi · Bengaluru
Built SaaSBoomi, the community that most Indian SaaS founders learned go to market inside He is the working example of community as a go to market channel rather than a marketing garnish: how peer groups get built, why a pay it forward norm compounds, and how a conference becomes a distribution asset. Useful if your GTM plan involves earning a place in an ecosystem rather than buying attention. CommunityPartnershipsGTM hiringInbound & content
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The other levels

Doing the work Leading a GTM team How the best do it
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