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 doing the work

1. 1
   What GTM actually is

   The job behind the acronym: how a product finds, wins and keeps customers, and who does what.

   How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals?

   The gist 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, and whether that trigger is the same one. If the deals came from ten different accidents, from a friend, from a conference, from an inbound fluke, you have revenue without a motion. The honest early metrics are not ARR, they are: what share of closed deals came from one repeatable source, how long each took, and whether a second person other than the founder has closed one yet.

   📄 The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders It answers the four questions every early founder actually asks (what is my ICP, how do I run a sales call, which motion, how do I forecast) in one... 4 questions on what gtm actually is →
2. 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.

   I have been an SDR for about 18 months. How do I actually make the jump to AE?

   The gist 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 in on your AEs' calls, run discovery yourself where they will let you, and start tracking not just meetings booked but meetings that turned into pipeline and then into revenue. Learn one qualification framework properly so you can talk about economic buyer, decision process and pain like someone who has done it. Then ask your manager directly what the bar is and get it in writing, because the average SDR tenure before promotion is a bit over a year and vague timelines are how people lose two.

   📊 Sales Development (SDR) Metrics and Comp Report The longest-running benchmark on SDR quota, ramp, ratios, comp and time to promotion, drawn from hundreds of B2B companies. Treat the absolute numb... 4 questions on gtm roles and career paths →
3. 3
   Outbound that works

   Cold email, cold calls, LinkedIn, sequences and lists. How to start conversations with people who have never heard of you.

   My cold calls die in the first ten seconds. What do I actually say when they pick up?

   The gist 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 your odds badly. Open with a pattern interrupt and then a proactive reason for the call, something like "How have you been?" followed by a plain sentence about why you are calling them today. Your goal on a cold call is not discovery, it is selling the next fifteen minutes, so do not try to qualify the whole account in ninety seconds. Successful cold calls run roughly twice as long as failed ones, which means your job is to earn the next sentence, not to deliver a pitch.

   📄 Proven cold call opening lines that work Almost everything written about cold call openers is opinion. This is 90,380 recorded calls scored by whether a meeting got booked, including the f... 4 questions on outbound that works →
4. 4
   Running a sales process and closing

   Discovery, demos, qualification, champions, procurement and the last mile to a signature.

   How do I know if a deal is real or if I am being strung along?

   The gist Write down what you know against a qualification frame and the gaps become obvious. MEDDPICC is the common one: metrics they care about, the economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, the pain you are implicating, your champion and the competition. If you cannot name the economic buyer or describe the paper process, you do not have a deal, you have an interested person. The single best test of a champion is whether they will do something for you, like get you a meeting with their boss or send you the security questionnaire. Be willing to disqualify early and loudly, because a clean no in week two is worth more than a maybe that dies in your forecast in month four.

   📄 MEDDIC / MEDDPICC Sales Methodology and Process The reference explanation of all eight letters from the people who own the methodology, free to read. Use it as a deal checklist: the letters you c... 4 questions on running a sales process and closing →