2 to 5 years in

Doing the work

You run the motion day to day. The questions here are about making it repeatable instead of lucky.

Understand the job

How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals? Luck looks like revenue. Working looks like repeatability. Ask whether you can name the trigger that made each of the last ten buyers start looking... Doing the work 4 resources → I have been an SDR for about 18 months. How do I actually make the jump to AE? The promotion is not a reward for hitting meeting targets, it is a bet that you can close. So show closing behaviour before you have the title: sit... Doing the work 4 resources → What is the real difference between product-led, sales-led and everything in between, and which one are we? The question is not which model you prefer, it is who signs and how much they are risking. If one person can start using the product on a card with... Doing the work 4 resources → I am the first GTM hire at a startup. What is my job really, and how do I not get fired in 12 months? Your job is not to relieve the founder of selling, it is to prove the founder's selling can be done by someone else. So spend the first month ridin... Doing the work 4 resources →

Who you sell to, and why they care

How do I qualify a deal properly instead of just hoping the enthusiastic person can buy? Enthusiasm is not authority. Before you invest another hour, you want four things: a named pain the buyer can quantify, the person who controls the... Doing the work 4 resources → Our positioning reads fine on the website but every rep says something different on calls. How do I fix that? That gap is almost always a sign the positioning was written for the website and never translated into a conversation. Fix it by building the pitch... Doing the work 4 resources → Half my pipeline is outside our ICP because those are the leads that came in. Do I chase them? Chase them to learn, close them only if they close fast. Off-ICP deals are seductive because they are there and someone said yes to a meeting, and ... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I build a sales deck that is not just a tour of our features? Open with a change in the buyer's world, not with your company. Name the shift, show that it creates winners and losers, describe the better state ... Doing the work 4 resources →

Build pipeline

My cold calls die in the first ten seconds. What do I actually say when they pick up? Stop asking whether you caught them at a bad time, because it hands them an exit and Gong's data across hundreds of millions of calls shows it cuts... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? Sort every topic idea by how close it sits to a purchase. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, integration pages and "how do I do X with Y" pages ... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I build a target list that is worth working instead of scraping ten thousand random companies? A list is a hypothesis about who has your problem badly enough to pay, so write the hypothesis down before you open any tool. Start from the accoun... Doing the work 4 resources → Our product is self-serve. How do we get users without a sales team? Product-led companies get most of their new users from two places: organic search (about forty percent) and product virality (about sixteen percent... Doing the work 3 resources →

Close deals and price right

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 design tiers so buyers pick the right plan and grow into the next one? Good, better, best works for about two thirds of SaaS companies because it makes the choice easy, so start there unless you have a strong reason no... 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 find out what customers will actually pay without just asking them? Asking "what would you pay" gets you a polite fiction, so use structured methods instead. Van Westendorp gives you a sensible range, Gabor-Granger ... Doing the work 3 resources →

How the best do it

What does Gong's call data actually say top sellers do differently in discovery? Gong analysed over 519,000 B2B sales calls and found that success peaks when a rep asks roughly 11 to 14 targeted questions on a discovery call, an... Doing the work 3 resources → How did Chargebee get its first paying customers after 14 months with none? Chargebee was founded in 2011 in Chennai by four friends, two of them from Zoho, and spent over 14 months building before a single customer paid. T... Doing the work 2 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
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
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The other levels

Breaking into GTM Leading a GTM team How the best do it
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