Break into a GTM career
Work out which seat you want, then get good enough at the craft to be hired into it.
4 steps, 16 questions underneath, read for leading a gtm team
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1
What GTM actually is
The job behind the acronym: how a product finds, wins and keeps customers, and who does what.
When do I stop selling myself and hire the first person, and what kind of person should that be?The gist 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 of your week on sales you no longer learn anything from. Do not hire a VP first. Hire a scrappy individual contributor who will happily do the unglamorous work and who you would personally buy from. The most common failure is treating the first hire as your exit from sales: the founder who checks out at this moment usually loses both the hire and a year.
Dear SaaStr: How Do I Make Sure My First 1-2 Sales Reps Are Strong? A concrete checklist for the first closer hire: close 10 to 20 yourself first, hire scrappy over pedigreed, and expect a deal within one sales cycl... 4 questions on what gtm actually is → -
2
GTM roles and career paths
SDR, AE, AM, growth, product marketing, RevOps, sales leadership: what each one really does and how people move between them.
How do I decide which GTM roles to hire, and in what order?The gist 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; if your closers are idle, hire pipeline generation instead. If the closers are winning but the numbers are a mess and forecasting is guesswork, that is your first ops person, usually part-time before full-time. Product marketing earns its seat when the same objection keeps costing you deals and nobody owns the answer. Two reps before a manager, and never hire a leader to figure out a motion you have not yet found yourself.
Building a world-class sales org Lemkin gives actual numbers for the decisions leaders agonise over: when to hire, how to set quota, how many reps per manager. Opinionated in a way... 4 questions on gtm roles and career paths → -
3
Outbound that works
Cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn, sequences and lists. How to start conversations with people who have never heard of you.
When do I hire SDRs, and how many AEs can one SDR feed?The gist 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 cold outreach, an SDR will not fix it, they will just fail more expensively. When you do hire, hire two rather than one so you can tell a person problem from a process problem. Ratios depend on deal size and cycle length, but the useful discipline is Aaron Ross's original point: separate the person who opens from the person who closes, and measure the SDR on qualified opportunities created, not on activity. Give them a written playbook, a defined list, and at least a quarter before you judge them.
15-minute summary of Predictable Revenue The origin of the SDR role and of role specialisation in modern SaaS sales, condensed by the author himself so you do not have to buy the book to g... 4 questions on outbound that works → -
4
Running a sales process and closing
Discovery, demos, qualification, champions, procurement and the last mile to a signature.
How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run?The gist 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 qualification checklist, a discovery guide, a demo structure, a pricing sheet with approved discount bands, and a definition of what a stage change requires. Add a weekly pipeline review with the same questions every time, and run loss reviews on every deal you drop so the playbook keeps improving. Do not set quotas until the process is proven repeatable, because a quota on an unproven motion just teaches you that the rep failed. The test is simple: could a competent new hire close a deal using only what you have written?
SaaS Playbook: Sales India Built from a masterclass with Mohit Garg, former CRO at MindTickle, and written for cross-border companies selling from India, including how to str... 4 questions on running a sales process and closing →
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