Running the engine
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.
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.
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.
Writes Growth Unhinged, the working reference on product led growth, pricing and packaging
He publishes the actual benchmarks and teardowns behind PLG rather than the theory: free to paid conversion rates by category, what usage based pricing does to net revenue retention, and how specific companies structured their packaging. His pricing work is the strongest public material on changing a price without breaking your funnel.
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.
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.
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Leading a GTM team
You hire, ramp, and own the number. The questions here are about building an engine that works without you in every deal.
Understand the job
When do I stop selling myself and hire the first person, and what kind of person should that be?
Hire when you have closed roughly ten to twenty deals yourself, can describe who buys and why in one paragraph, and are spending more than a fifth ...
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...
How do I turn the thing that worked when I did it into an engine someone else can run?
Write down what you actually do, not what you think you do. Record your own calls, listen back, and pull out the four or five moves that keep showi...
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...
Who you sell to, and why they care
How do I get the team to actually use the ICP instead of nodding at a slide and then doing what they want?
An ICP that lives in a deck is decoration. Make it operational: turn it into fields in the CRM, into the lead scoring, into the list an SDR is allo...
We are changing our positioning. How do I roll it out without breaking the pipeline mid-quarter?
Sequence it: sales first, marketing second, brand last. Reps carry the new story to live deals before the website changes, because they can adapt i...
Should we sell to Indian SMBs, Indian enterprises, or skip India and go straight at US buyers?
Pick on payback and on where your product is genuinely better, not on prestige. Indian SMB gives volume, fast feedback and brutal price sensitivity...
Do we need to create a new category, or should we position inside one that already exists?
Default to an existing category. Categories are expensive: you are paying to teach a market a new word, and you only earn that back if buyers genui...
Build pipeline
When do I hire SDRs, and how many AEs can one SDR feed?
Hire SDRs after you can point at a message and a segment that reliably produce meetings, not before. If a founder or AE cannot book meetings from c...
How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel?
Early on almost every B2B company grows through one dominant channel, so the wrong move is to run four at half strength. Name your primary channel,...
Should my outbound team sit in India while my buyers are in the US?
Yes for most of the funnel, and this is a genuine structural advantage rather than a compromise. Indian SaaS companies have built pipeline into the...
I run demand gen for an Indian SaaS selling globally. Does the US content playbook work here?
Partly. If you sell to the US and Europe, the standard playbook applies because you are competing in the same search results as everyone else, and ...
Close deals and price right
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 ...
Should I price in rupees for India and dollars for everyone else?
If you sell to Indian SMEs, price in rupees, include GST in the displayed number, and support UPI and domestic cards, because dollar pricing on a c...
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...
Buyers always ask for a discount. How much do I give, and how do I stop it eating my ARR?
Assume discounting will happen and price for it rather than trying to hold an imaginary line. Jason Lemkin's practical version: mark list up so a s...
How the best do it
What does April Dunford say most teams get wrong about positioning?
Dunford's core claim, after working with over 300 technology companies, is that positioning is not a tagline, not branding, and not messaging. It i...
When should you add a sales team on top of a self serve product, and how do you avoid breaking it?
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 orde...
When does a founder stop selling personally, and why do the best ones hire two reps instead of one?
Jason Lemkin's marker is that the founder closes the first batch themselves, roughly the first ten customers, because if you have not done it you w...
How does Datadog run bottom up and top down selling at the same time without the two fighting?
Datadog does both deliberately. Individual developers install the agent and get value in about 15 minutes with no salesperson, while the sales team...
People worth learning from here
What each one is known for, and where they publish.
April Dunford
Pete Kazanjy
Jason Lemkin
Kyle Poyar
Emily Kramer
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy
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