Doing the work · GTM

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 5 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 → How is GTM different before product market fit versus after? Before PMF, GTM is a learning function and after PMF it is a manufacturing function, and confusing the two burns most of the money startups lose. B... Doing the work 3 resources → How do I judge a startup's GTM before I join it, so I am not walking into an unhittable number? Interview them harder than they interview you, and ask for numbers rather than stories. The four that matter most: what percentage of the team hit ... Doing the work 3 resources → We sell to developers. Why does the normal B2B playbook keep failing on them? Because the normal B2B playbook is built to reach a buyer, and with developers the person who decides is usually not the person with the credit car... Doing the work 3 resources → What does a GTM career actually pay in India over ten years? Ignore the broad job title averages you will find online, because they mix B2B software sellers with FMCG and ad agency account executives and come... 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 5 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 → My list of target accounts is enormous and mostly cold. How do I find the ones that are ready to buy right now? Fit tells you who could buy. Timing tells you who will. The bridge between them is a trigger, some event that just made your problem urgent inside ... Doing the work 4 resources → Everyone we sell to already uses the big incumbent. How do I position against them without trashing them? Never attack the vendor, attack a specific frustration their own customers already voice, in their words, lifted from review sites and your win and... Doing the work 5 resources → Our CRM says we lose on price. I do not believe it. How do I find the real reason, and what does it say about who we should be selling to? Price is what a buyer says when they do not want to explain the real reason, and reps write it down because it is not their fault. The fix is ungla... Doing the work 3 resources → Everyone has an opinion on our new messaging and nobody can settle the argument. How do I test it instead? Stop reviewing messaging internally, because the most senior opinion wins and none of you are the buyer. Put the actual page or email in front of t... 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 4 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 4 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 4 resources → One email is not a sequence. How many follow-ups, how far apart, and what should go in each one? Four to seven touches over two to three weeks is the honest range: fewer and you quit before they noticed you, more and you are just annoying peopl... Doing the work 3 resources → We are burning money on Google and LinkedIn ads and cannot tell if it works. How should an early B2B team do paid? Ads amplify product-market fit, they do not create it, so if the organic version of your motion is not working, paid will just make the failure fas... Doing the work 3 resources → My champion went quiet and the deal stalled. How do I multithread an account without going over their head? A deal riding on one person is not a deal, it is a favour. Gong's data is blunt about this: winning deals average around eight contacts on email ve... Doing the work 4 resources → Do webinars and events actually create pipeline, or are they just expensive hospitality? They create pipeline when you pick the format against the stage of the deal, and they burn money when you do not. A conference fills an awareness g... Doing the work 4 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 4 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 4 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 5 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 4 resources → They want a pilot before they commit. How do I run one that ends in a contract instead of a shrug? Most pilots fail because nobody wrote down what winning looks like, so at the end everyone says nice things and nothing happens. Fix that at the st... Doing the work 4 resources → How does usage-based pricing actually work in practice, and should I move to it? Almost nobody runs pure pay as you go, and you probably should not either. What actually works is hybrid: a platform fee that gives you predictable... Doing the work 4 resources → Procurement has entered the conversation and wants thirty percent off. How do I negotiate without gutting the deal? Understand what is happening: procurement is usually measured on the savings they extract, so they are going to ask for something no matter how fai... Doing the work 4 resources → I want to raise prices. What happens to the customers who are already paying me, and should I grandfather them? Start with new customers only. It costs you nothing, it tests the new price in the market for a quarter or two, and it means your first price rise ... Doing the work 5 resources →

Let the product sell

Our self-serve funnel converts at about 2 percent from signup to paid. Where do I even start looking? Do not touch the pricing page yet. Split the funnel into visit to signup, signup to activated, activated to paid, and look at which of the three is... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases? Do not force one event. Model activation in three stages instead, setup, aha and habit, and let the aha event differ by use case while setup and ha... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I decide what goes in the free tier and what sits behind the paywall? Free should contain everything a single person needs to succeed alone, and paid should start exactly where the value stops being personal and start... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I cut time to value when the product genuinely needs setup work before it does anything useful? Invert the order. Instead of configure everything then use the product, give people a working demo environment with realistic sample data so they s... Doing the work 5 resources → Sales wants to call every signup. How do I decide which ones deserve a human? Score on three things and only three: does the account look like someone who buys from us, have they done the thing inside the product that predict... Doing the work 6 resources → I have a backlog of 30 activation ideas and no way to rank them. How do I decide what to build? Rank by where the drop-off is largest, not by how clever the idea is. Break the path from signup to activation into every discrete step, count how ... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I run a pricing or packaging experiment on a live self-serve funnel without blowing up revenue? Change one variable, apply it only to new signups, and grandfather everyone already paying. Existing customers seeing a price change is a support c... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I convert more trials without turning the product into a nagging upgrade prompt? Tie every prompt to something the user just did. A message that appears because someone hit a limit, finished a project, or invited a third colleag... Doing the work 5 resources →

Sell through other people

How do I get a partner's reps to actually mention us in their deals? Partner reps do what pays them and what is easy, in that order. Make the ask absurdly small: one sentence they can say, one slide, one person on yo... Doing the work 4 resources → How do we actually list on AWS Marketplace, and what changes in our sales process? The listing itself is a few weeks of work: register as a seller, choose a delivery method (SaaS is usually contract or metering based), write the l... Doing the work 5 resources → What should a tech integration partnership include beyond a logo swap? An integration only becomes a partnership when three things exist: a working connection your support team can debug, a joint customer story with a ... Doing the work 4 resources → A reseller has signed. How do I make them actually productive? Assume two months of your time before they sell anything, and plan for it from the day the contract is signed. They need exactly what your own reps... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I run account mapping with a partner without giving away our pipeline? Account mapping is just comparing customer and prospect lists to find overlap, and tooling exists precisely so neither side has to email a spreadsh... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I work with a system integrator without losing the customer relationship? Write it down before the first deal: who holds the software contract, who does implementation, who the customer calls when something breaks, and wh... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I tell whether a partnership is actually working, and when do I kill it? Split the number into partner sourced (they brought the deal) and partner influenced (they were present in a deal you would probably have had anywa... Doing the work 5 resources → Should we list on more than one cloud marketplace, or is AWS enough? Follow your customers, but the data leans toward breadth. Tackle's survey work found companies transacting on all three clouds report around 29% of... Doing the work 5 resources →

Keep and grow the customers you win

How do I build a customer health score that actually predicts churn? Start with four to six inputs, not twenty. The ones that earn their place are depth of product usage (not logins), breadth across the account, supp... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I spot which accounts are actually ready to expand? Look for accounts that are pressing against a limit and accounts that are spreading sideways. Hitting a usage ceiling, adding users faster than the... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I run a QBR that the customer does not find a waste of time? Stop opening with your usage dashboard. Open with the outcome they told you they were buying, and show progress against it in their numbers, not yo... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I run an upsell conversation without sounding like I am shaking them down? Earn it first. If you cannot show the customer a result they got in the last quarter, you have not bought the right to ask for more money, and they... Doing the work 5 resources → My champion at a big account just left. What do I do? Move within 48 hours, before someone else defines your product for the new person. Send a short personal note to the incoming contact congratulatin... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I work out why customers are actually churning instead of guessing? Three passes. First, cohort the churn: group customers by when they signed up and by what they did, then see whether people leave at month three or... Doing the work 5 resources → A big account has gone quiet and I think they are going to churn. What do I actually do? Get the honest conversation on the calendar rather than sending another check-in email. Ask directly whether they are still getting what they bough... Doing the work 5 resources → We are losing customers to failed payments. How do I fix involuntary churn? This is the cheapest retention win available and almost nobody owns it. Involuntary churn is typically 20 to 40 percent of total churn and it is a ... Doing the work 5 resources →

Build the team

What should a new rep's first 90 days actually look like? The first 30 days are absorption: product, market, recorded calls, and shadowing you on live deals until they can pitch it back without notes. Days... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I set quotas that most of the team can actually hit? Set them top down and bottom up, and treat the gap between the two as information rather than a negotiation. Top down is the revenue target divided... Doing the work 5 resources → I am the first AE and my founder still runs half the deals. How do we split it? Split by stage, not by account, at least at first. The founder stays on the parts only they can do, the vision framing, the pricing exception, the ... Doing the work 3 resources → How should SDR, AE and customer success comp actually differ, and why? Pay variable in proportion to how much of the outcome the person controls. An AE controls the close, so around 50:50 with a real accelerator. An SD... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I know whether a new rep is going to work out before six months have gone by? Watch leading indicators, not bookings, because bookings arrive too late to act on. By week six they should be able to run the demo without you and... Doing the work 4 resources → Do SPIFFs work, or do they just teach the team to wait for the next one? Both, depending on how often you run them. A SPIFF is a tactical lever for a specific short window: a product launch, a stalled segment, a quarter ... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I hire SDRs in India and keep them past four months? The India SDR pool is deep and trained on US outbound tooling, and it costs roughly a fifth to an eighth of a US hire, but attrition is the tax you... Doing the work 5 resources → How do I split territories and segments without starting a civil war? The test of a good split is not that it is equal, it is that every rep has an equal shot at quota. Balance on potential and workload, so a patch of... Doing the work 5 resources →

Run it on real numbers

Reps will not update the CRM. How do I get clean data without becoming the data police? Chasing reps for updates never scales, and it makes you the person everyone avoids. Three things work better. First, cut the required fields down u... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I calculate conversion rates by stage, and what do I actually do once I have them? Calculate them on a cohort, not on a snapshot. Take every opportunity created in a month, follow that same set forward, and measure what share reac... Doing the work 4 resources → How should inbound leads get routed, and how fast does it actually need to happen? Fast enough that speed stops being your problem. The classic Harvard Business Review study of 2.24 million leads found that firms contacting a pros... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I forecast my own quarter as an AE so my manager stops overriding my number? Forecast the evidence, not the vibe. A deal belongs in commit only if you can name the economic buyer, point at a written next step with a date, an... Doing the work 4 resources → Our numbers live in five different tools and none of them agree. How do I build one source of truth? Pick which system owns which object and write it down: the CRM owns accounts, opportunities and revenue, the billing system owns what was actually ... Doing the work 5 resources → Our win rate dropped this quarter. How do I work out why rather than just guessing? Cut it four ways before you form a theory: by lead source, by segment or deal size, by rep, and by competitor present or not. One of those cuts alm... Doing the work 4 resources → Marketing says they sourced the pipeline, sales says they did. How do I settle attribution without starting a war? Stop trying to find the one true owner of a deal, because in B2B there is not one. Run two views side by side and be explicit about what each is fo... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I tell whether my pipeline is real or just hopeful? Age it and test it. Pull every open opportunity, sort by days since the last customer initiated action, and treat anything past two normal sales cy... Doing the work 4 resources →

Own the story

How do I test whether a category name lands before we commit the whole website to it? Put the words in front of real buyers before you put them in a headline. Run the line past twenty people who match your ICP and ask them what they ... Doing the work 4 resources → We named the problem instead of the product. Is that a positioning mistake? It is usually the right instinct, badly executed. Naming the problem is what makes a category feel inevitable, because the buyer recognises the pai... Doing the work 4 resources → Our competitor's category is bigger and better funded. How do I carve out a segment we can actually win? Find the buyer who feels one specific pain more sharply than anyone else and build the whole story around them, even if that shrinks your addressab... Doing the work 5 resources → What do I actually change when we reposition? Website, deck, pricing, all of it? Positioning is not a headline swap, it is a decision that touches everything downstream of the comparison you chose. Change the homepage and the sa... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I turn a point of view into content that actually helps sales close deals? Write for the moment in the deal where a rep gets stuck, not for the top of the funnel in general. Ask your AEs which three objections kill deals, ... Doing the work 4 resources → Our content gets likes but no pipeline. What do I change? Usually you are reaching the right volume of the wrong people, or the right people with content that never mentions a buying situation. Check who i... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I keep the founder's voice in content once I am the one writing it? Stop writing drafts for them to approve and start transcribing them instead. Book a recurring thirty minute call, ask three sharp questions, record... Doing the work 4 resources → US buyers hesitate when they learn we are an India based team. How do I handle that in our messaging? Answer the real worry, which is almost never about India and almost always about support coverage, security posture, data residency and whether you... Doing the work 4 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 18 months with none? Chargebee was founded in 2011 in Chennai by four friends, two of them from Zoho, and spent about 18 months building before a single customer paid. ... Doing the work 5 resources → How did Whatfix manufacture its first ten customers with cold email, then find out it was underpricing by twelve times? Whatfix did not wait for inbound. Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar Namburu sent 500 personalised cold emails to SaaS product managers from Bengaluru, an... Doing the work 4 resources → Why does Elena Verna say a growth model needs replacing roughly every 18 months? Elena Verna, who has run growth at Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey, thinks in loops rather than funnels: a funnel is linear and spends it... Doing the work 4 resources → How did Rocketlane build a community nine months before it had a product to sell? Srikrishnan Ganesan ran roughly 120 cold outreach conversations and engaged 70 to 80 companies before Rocketlane was commercially available, and in... Doing the work 4 resources → Why does Krish Subramanian call your price the strongest lead filter you have? Krish Subramanian built Chargebee out of Chennai and is unusually candid that they got pricing wrong four times before it worked. A freemium tier o... Doing the work 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

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