We plan to bring eChai across 100 cities in India. It starts with eChai Startup Demo Day on 26 September, all in person. 11 cities confirmed, 304 founders registered. Any city that reaches 20 interested founders is on too. See your city
Running the engine

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 ... Leading a GTM team 6 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 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... Leading a GTM team 4 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 → We are a marketplace, not a software product. What actually changes about GTM? You are running two go to markets at once, and they are not equally hard. Work out which side is scarcer (usually supply) and go get it manually be... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Should I bring in a fractional or contract GTM leader instead of a full time one? Sometimes, but not for the reason most founders reach for it. A fractional leader is a good fit when you already have a working motion and need som... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How is AI actually changing what a GTM team does day to day? The honest picture is narrower than the headlines. Research, list building, first draft outreach, call notes and CRM hygiene are genuinely being au... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Which GTM roles is AI actually eliminating, and which are becoming more valuable? What is shrinking is volume work: high output cold outreach, list building, basic qualification, tier one support. Job posting data backs this up r... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We are a marketplace with buyers on one side and sellers on the other. Which side is the ICP? Both eventually, but only one at a time, and it is whichever side is scarce. Pick the constrained side and make it your ICP for now, because the ot... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We have three products now. Do we message them separately or tell one platform story? Decide by how they are bought, not by how they are built. If the same buyer, out of the same budget, buys them in one conversation, you need one po... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → We are winning in one segment. When is it right to add a second ICP, and how do I know we are not just bored? The honest signal is not excitement, it is repeatability. You have earned a second ICP when a rep who is not the founder can predictably find, win ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We sell in India, the US and the Gulf. How much should the messaging actually change per market? The promise stays the same, the proof and the packaging change. What genuinely differs by market is who holds the budget, what the buyer is afraid ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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,... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → 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 ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → We handed outbound to AI and reply rates fell. Where does AI actually help, and where does it backfire? AI is very good at the research and routing underneath outbound and quite bad at being the voice of it. Use it to find accounts, watch for triggers... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Inbound has dried up. Leads are down two quarters running and nobody knows why. What do I do? First separate the three things that look identical on a dashboard: demand fell, demand moved somewhere you cannot see, or your one channel changed... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We are going from two reps to ten. How do I scale outbound without it turning into spam? What worked at two reps was judgement, and judgement does not copy. Before you hire, write down the target account definition, the three triggers t... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → Marketing says it sourced the pipeline, sales says it did not. How do I do attribution without fooling myself? Accept that software attribution measures what is clickable, not what is persuasive, and the gap is enormous. Refine Labs tracked 620 declared-inte... Leading a GTM team 3 resources →

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 ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 4 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 → 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... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Security reviews keep stalling my deals. What do I actually need, and when should I get it? Start before a prospect asks, because the timeline is the problem, not the cost. A SOC 2 Type 1 is a point in time snapshot you can get in weeks to... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → A reseller wants to carry us. How do I build a price book for partners without my own sales team undercutting them? Write two things down before you sign anyone. First, the rules of engagement: which accounts, segments and geographies belong to the channel and wh... Leading a GTM team 6 resources → How do I put a deal desk and discount approvals in place without slowing everything down? A deal desk is a written process long before it is a person. Start by auditing your last fifty deals and drawing the line between standard (list pr... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → Should I sign multi-year deals, and what payment terms should I be pushing for? A multi-year deal is worth real money to you (locked revenue, no renewal risk, lower churn) so charge for it properly rather than giving it away. T... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

Let the product sell

We are sales-led today and I want to add a self-serve motion. What order do I build it in? Backwards from where you already have proof. You already know which customers succeed and what they did in week one, so start by instrumenting that... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Activation has been flat for three quarters despite a lot of experiments. How do I diagnose that as a leader? Flat activation with busy teams almost always means you are optimising the wrong half of the funnel, and the usual cause is upstream: the people ar... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Who do I hire first for PLG, and what should the team look like once it is ten people? Do not hire a Head of Growth first. Your first hire should be a builder who can ship an experiment end to end, because the initial growth model has... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Who should own activation: product, growth, or customer success? One team owns the number and everyone else owns an input. In practice the growth team should own activation because they can ship changes to the si... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I stop sales and the self-serve funnel from fighting over the same accounts? Write the rules of engagement down before the first conflict, and make them about the account rather than about the person. Pick a clear line, usua... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I set an activation target the whole company will actually rally behind? Pick a target you can defend from data rather than one that sounds ambitious. Start from your current rate and the benchmark spread, which puts goo... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → What should I actually report to the board for a PLG business, given pipeline coverage means nothing here? Five numbers, every month, on the same slide. New signups, activation rate, free to paid conversion, net revenue retention, and blended CAC payback... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I build the data plumbing so activation signals reach sales while they still matter? The chain is product events into a warehouse, a scoring definition on top, and a sync back into the CRM where reps already live. If a rep has to op... Leading a GTM team 5 resources →

Sell through other people

When should we hire our first full time partnerships person, and what do we pay them? The trigger is workload and money, not a funding round. When partner conversations stop fitting into a founder's evenings, roughly 15 to 25 active ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I choose between a distributor, a VAR and going direct in a new country? Go direct when the market is big enough to justify a local hire and your buyer expects to talk to you. Use VARs when the sale needs local language,... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I stop my AEs from treating partner deals as a threat to their number? Pay them the same or more on a partner deal. Every clever half credit scheme ends the same way, with reps quietly routing around the channel until ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → What margin should we give partners, and how do we stop channel conflict? Publish one margin table and one deal registration policy, then hold the line. Sensible bands are 10 to 15% for referral, 20 to 30% for partners ca... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I design a partner program from scratch: tiers, margins and enablement? Keep version one embarrassingly simple: two tiers, one margin band, one certification. Typical software economics run 5 to 15% for referral, 20 to ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → What operations do I need behind channel: deal registration, PRM, attribution? Start with a shared sheet and a defined lifecycle, and buy software only when the sheet visibly breaks. Three things must exist from day one: deal ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I get real attention from AWS or Microsoft instead of just another badge? Assume the partner development manager owes you nothing and is measured on their own number. Nearly everyone finds this hard, so the differentiator... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Marketplace revenue is growing but finance hates the platform fee. How do I make the case? Do not argue about the fee, argue about the alternative. Compare the fully loaded cost of deals won through the marketplace with your normal CAC, t... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

Keep and grow the customers you win

How do I structure a customer success team once one person is not enough? Pick your organising axis on purpose. By segment (enterprise, mid market, SMB) is the default and works when your customers differ mostly in size. ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I move net revenue retention from around 100 percent to 120 percent? Do it in the right order. First stop the leak, because expansion built on a leaky base is exhausting: fix involuntary churn, then find the segment ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Should my CSMs carry a quota? Eventually yes, but not before your product renews reliably on its own merits. Paying a CSM on expansion when the product is still churning turns t... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Who should own expansion: sales, customer success, or a dedicated team? Split it by how hard the sale is. Simple expansions that follow naturally from usage (more seats, the next tier) should sit with CS, because they a... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I stop the sales to customer success handoff from breaking every time? Two fixes do most of the work. First, bring CS into the deal before the contract is signed, not after, so the customer meets the person who will ru... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I build a renewal and expansion process that runs without me in every deal? Treat renewal as a pipeline, not a date. Every renewal gets a stage, an owner and a forecast category, opened at least a quarter out for anything m... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I forecast renewals so the number is actually believable? Stop forecasting from CSM sentiment. Build it from a small set of predictive inputs (usage trend, executive engagement, support pattern, open escal... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → Our churn got noticeably worse this year. How do I run the fix as a leader? Make it one of the company's top three goals and put one named person on it, which sounds too simple and works almost every time. Then segment befo... Leading a GTM team 5 resources →

Build the team

How many reps should I hire next quarter, and in what order? Do the arithmetic backwards from the number. Take next year's new ARR target, divide by realistic per rep yield, then divide again by the attainmen... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I build a comp plan that pays for the strategy we actually have this year? Write the strategy in one sentence first, then make the plan pay for that sentence and nothing else. If this is a new logo year, pay heavily on new... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → When do I hire a VP of Sales, and what happens if I get it wrong? Roughly 70 percent of first VP of Sales hires do not make it, and a bad one costs you about a year, so the timing rule matters: hire when you have ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → What does sales comp look like for an India based team selling into the US? The salary is Indian, the quota is not. A rep in Bengaluru selling US ACV costs a fraction of a US hire but is working against US deal sizes, so th... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → One of my reps is at 40 percent of quota. How do I move fast without wrecking the rest of the team? First establish whether it is the rep or the territory, because firing someone who was handed a dead patch teaches the team that the number is rigg... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → My comp plan is being gamed. How do I find it and fix it mid-year? Gaming is a design bug, not a character flaw, so go looking for it in the data before you go looking for it in people. Sort deals by discount, by c... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I actually get out of founder-led sales instead of just talking about it? You get out by writing things down, not by hiring harder. Build a sales operating model on paper: leads, conversion rate by stage, deal size, win r... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How much should the whole GTM org cost, and how do I know when we are overspending? Stop looking at headcount and look at the magic number: net new ARR in a quarter divided by the fully loaded sales and marketing spend of the quart... Leading a GTM team 5 resources →

Run it on real numbers

When should we hire our first RevOps person, and what should they actually own? The trigger is not a revenue number, it is where the pain is landing. If your sales leader is spending most of a day a week in spreadsheets and CRM... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I call a quarterly number I can actually defend to my CEO and my board? Build it three ways and show the range, not a single figure: bottom up from deal level commits with entry criteria applied strictly, top down from ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We are paying for twenty plus GTM tools and I cannot justify half of them. How do I cut the stack? Run a real audit before renewal season, not during it. For each tool write down four things: licence cost, actual weekly active users, which integr... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → What should I actually put in front of the board every quarter, and in what shape? Same package, same order, every single quarter, in a trailing nine quarter format so trends and seasonality are visible without anyone doing mental... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Where does AI genuinely help in our GTM stack today, and where is it still theatre? It helps most where the task is high volume, low judgment, and already has a clear right answer: transcribing and summarising calls, drafting first... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → We miss the forecast almost every quarter. How do I actually fix accuracy? Start by measuring it properly, because most teams grade themselves against a forecast they revised in week eleven. Forrester's definition is the h... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I set territories and quotas that the team does not immediately game? Build the number bottom up first, then reconcile it against the top down target, and show the team both. Bottom up means rep capacity times realist... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How do I use CAC payback and magic number to decide whether to hire more reps? Treat them as a gate, not a target. If your magic number is comfortably above one and CAC payback is under twelve months, the machine is returning ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources →

Own the story

When is category creation the right call for us, and when is it just an excuse? It is right when your buyer feels a real pain that no existing category addresses, and when the existing frame is actively making senior people ign... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I fund and staff a category play without starving pipeline? Run it as a slice of marketing, not as a replacement for demand generation, because a category with no revenue behind it is a very expensive opinio... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → When should we start talking to Gartner and Forrester, and what do we actually say? Start earlier than you think, but start for the intelligence rather than for the quadrant. In the first stage you simply answer inbound analyst inq... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → How do I tell if the category is working, or if we are just talking to ourselves? The signal is other people using your words when you are not in the room. Watch for prospects opening calls with your category term, analysts and c... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How much of my budget should go to brand versus demand? Anchor on the total first: median B2B SaaS marketing spend runs around 8 percent of ARR, with venture funded companies spending roughly double what... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I measure brand when it does not show up in the attribution report? Accept that last touch attribution will always credit the search ad and never the reason someone searched, and then measure the leading indicators ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How do I build a narrative the whole company tells the same way? Write one narrative, not a messaging document, and make the sales deck the artifact that carries it, because long messaging docs get filed and neve... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Our founder is the brand. How do I make the brand bigger than one person? Move from a person to a point of view that other people can carry. Name the belief the founder keeps articulating, then give it a home that is not ... Leading a GTM team 5 resources →

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... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → 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... Leading a GTM team 5 resources → How did Exotel move from selling to small businesses to selling to enterprises, and why did it take four years? Exotel started where most Indian SaaS starts: 350 SMB customers acquired through inbound at 10 to 15 conversions a month, on accounts worth 500 to ... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → How does Mark Roberge turn sales hiring into a data problem instead of a gut call? Mark Roberge was an MIT engineer who became HubSpot's CRO, and he treats hiring as the one input that determines everything downstream. His screen ... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → How did Atlassian reach 100 million dollars in revenue with no salespeople, and where did that model stop working? In January 2012 Atlassian's CEO Scott Farquhar said it plainly: 2011 revenue was 102 million dollars, up 35 percent, profitable, 450 employees, and... Leading a GTM team 3 resources → Why does Manav Garg say an India based company should be more profitable than a US one? Manav Garg built Eka Software selling commodity trading software to global enterprises, then co-founded SaaSBoomi and Together Fund, and he refuses... Leading a GTM team 3 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
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
Kyle Poyar Growth Unhinged · Boston
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. PLGPricingInbound & contentRetention & expansion
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
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
See everyone →

The other levels

Breaking into GTM Doing the work How the best do it
eChai Partner Brands