91 people
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Teaches outbound prospecting built on curiosity and disqualification rather than persuasion
He rewrites actual cold emails and cold call openers line by line, in public, so you can see exactly why a message reads as spam and what the non pushy version sounds like. If you or your SDRs are sending outbound that gets ignored, this is the most immediately applicable material on the list.
Co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, built from a Chennai apartment into global subscription billing infrastructure
Because he sells pricing and monetisation software, he thinks out loud about the part of GTM most founders under-engineer: how a pricing model shapes the sales motion, expansion revenue and who you can afford to sell to. He is also candid about selling from India into Western markets from day one.
SaaS marketing operator turned founder who co-hosts a podcast on marketing Indian SaaS to the world
He has run marketing inside Zoho and Freshworks and now sells into a narrow, opinionated category, and the Marketing Nation episodes he hosts pull that same specificity out of other Indian SaaS marketers on channels, ABM and demand generation.
Co-founder of 30 Minutes to President's Club and co-author of Cold Calling Sucks (And That's Why It Works)
He is the clearest teacher of the phone call itself: the opener, the pattern interrupt, the pause, and the exact words to use when a prospect says they are not interested. Watch how he refuses to let a guest leave an answer at the level of advice, which is a good habit to copy when you are learning from anyone.
Co-founder of 30 Minutes to President's Club, previously VP of Sales at Pave
He is good on the jump from carrying a bag to running a team, and unusually blunt about what a manager should actually inspect in a deal review. His teardowns of real cold calls and email sequences show the edit, not just the finished script.
Built Gong's sales content engine on call data, now teaches enterprise sales craft full time
His material is grounded in what call recordings actually showed at Gong: talk ratios, question counts, when pricing comes up in a winning call. That makes his advice testable rather than folkloric, and his discovery frameworks are some of the most copied in B2B sales.
Former Chief Evangelist at Challenger, now teaches teams how to sell against buyer inertia
She reframes the real competitor as the buyer doing nothing, and gives concrete language for surfacing the cost of the status quo instead of pitching harder. Her cold outreach and discovery examples are written out in full on LinkedIn, so you can see the exact wording rather than the theory.
Founding CRO at HubSpot who wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula, now investing and teaching at Harvard Business School
He gives you the numbers behind sales scaling: the hiring scorecard, the ramp curve, the leading indicators that predict a quarter before the quarter closes. His later work on product market fit signals and the sequence of stages a company must clear before adding reps is the corrective for founders who hire salespeople too early.
Founder of Winning by Design and the author of the Bowtie model, SPICED, and Revenue Architecture
He is the person to read when your problem is the shape of the whole revenue machine rather than a single call: how stages are defined, where conversion actually leaks, and why a renewal is a design outcome and not a customer success afterthought. SPICED is a more usable discovery framework than most because each letter maps to a question you can ask out loud.
Sales leadership coach known for the systems side of managing reps, from one on ones to enablement
Most sales content teaches the rep. He teaches the manager: how to run a one on one that changes behaviour, how to build a playbook people actually open, and how to diagnose whether a miss is a skill problem, a process problem, or a pipeline problem. His frameworks are unusually specific about what a leader inspects each week.
Author of Selling With, on winning the internal buying conversations that happen when the rep is not in the room
He is the clearest writer on the document your champion forwards: how to draft a business case in the buyer's own language, what an executive summary must contain, and how to test whether a champion is real. If your deals die at the internal approval step rather than in the demo, this is the material that names why.
Five time public company CRO, author of The Qualified Sales Leader, and one of the people behind MEDDIC
This is the source material for how enterprise deals get qualified and inspected: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, pain, champion. The podcast is the best available long form record of how experienced CROs think about forecast calls, deal reviews, and the moment a quarter is already lost.
Founder of Pavilion, the peer community where most GTM executives compare notes, and co-host of Topline
Topline is the closest thing to overhearing how CROs and CEOs are actually reading the market: which multiples are holding, what is happening to sales headcount, how compensation plans are shifting. He is also candid about the operator career itself, including getting fired, negotiating equity, and what a revenue leadership job really demands.
Outbound coach whose podcast and training break cold calling and cold email down into repeatable steps
His skills episodes are the practical way in for someone learning outbound from zero: the opener, the reason for the call, the permission based objection handle, and how to write a cold email that earns a reply. He also teaches the research step properly, so the personalisation is about the account's actual problem rather than the prospect's holiday photos.
Product led growth operator who writes the playbooks behind self serve and hybrid SaaS monetization
She breaks growth into loops, models and org structures rather than tactics, so you can see where self serve stops working and sales assist has to start. Her writing on hybrid PLG plus sales motions and on when to introduce paywalls is unusually concrete about the tradeoffs.
Pricing and monetization partner who argues you should design the product around the price
He teaches the discipline of running willingness to pay conversations before you build, which is the single habit most early teams skip. His breakdown of the four ways new products fail on monetization (feature shock, minivation, hidden gem, undead) gives you a vocabulary for diagnosing your own launch.
B2B positioning consultant who rewrites startup homepages in public
He shows the work: real homepages, before and after, with the reasoning for every headline change spelled out. If you cannot explain who your product is for and what it replaces, his teardowns are the fastest way to find the hole.
Author of Product-Led Growth and founder of the ProductLed training practice
He is the most systematic voice on the mechanics of free: free trial versus freemium, what the model does to your unit economics, and how to build an onboarding path that actually converts. Useful when you are deciding whether a self serve motion fits your product at all.
Messaging specialist who teaches B2B tech companies to write like humans instead of like vendors
She is the antidote to feature list copy: her frameworks force you to name the buyer's problem in plain words before you name your product. Useful when your positioning is right but every sentence on the site still reads like a spec sheet.
Wrote the modern definition of the product marketing function and its four fundamentals
LOVED gives you a defensible answer to what product marketing is actually accountable for (ambassador, strategist, storyteller, evangelist) instead of it being the team that makes slides. Read her when you are hiring your first PMM and cannot write the job description.
Category design godfather: co-author of Play Bigger and host of Lochhead on Marketing
He makes the case that the biggest GTM lever is not out-competing rivals in a known category but defining a new one and teaching the market its language. His frame it, name it, claim it sequence is the practical version of that, and he is blunt about when a company has no business attempting it.
Product led growth and product led sales operator who publishes ProducTea
Her core argument is that PLG and sales are not opposing camps, and her product led sales material is the clearest published account of how a self serve funnel hands qualified accounts to reps. She is also willing to say out loud when a company should not do PLG at all.
The Product-Led Geek: PLG and product led sales for companies selling to developers
Developer tools break most generic PLG advice, and he is the person who works through what changes: how a free tier maps to a security or infrastructure buyer, and when a bottom up signal is worth a sales conversation. His writing is unusually operational, closer to a checklist than a think piece.
B2B SaaS pricing consultant who wrote The Pricing Roadmap
He is the rare pricing voice who explains value metrics and packaging architecture rather than just telling you to raise prices: how to pick the unit you charge on, how tiers should ladder, and where a model quietly caps expansion revenue. Read him when your pricing page is fighting your product roadmap.
Coaches founding and solo product marketers on how to build the PMM function from scratch
He answers the question most early stage teams get wrong: what the first product marketer should actually do in the first ninety days, and what to refuse. His teardowns of real launches and positioning docs show the artefacts, not just the theory.
Built Exit Five into one of the largest paid communities for B2B marketers
He is the clearest working example of building a company on an audience rather than a paid funnel, and he narrates the mechanics openly. Useful if you want to see how B2B brand, founder-led content and community actually convert.
Wrote the book on ecosystem-led growth and runs the partner data network behind it
He turns partnerships from a relationship story into a data one: which accounts your partners already touch, and how that changes your outbound list and your win rates. Read him if partnerships in your company are still treated as a side function.
Content distribution over content production: create once, distribute forever
He is specific about what to do after you publish: repurposing frameworks, channel-by-channel distribution, and how SEO and social compound together. Good antidote if your content plan is a publishing calendar and nothing else.
Ran the SEO and content engine that made Ahrefs a category default
He documents a rare thing: a software company that grew mostly on search and education rather than paid acquisition or a sales team, and he shows the numbers behind it. Useful on keyword strategy, content that maps to product, and why most SEO advice does not survive contact with data.
Built Gong's brand and the revenue intelligence category around it
He explains, with the receipts from one company, how a distinctive brand voice and a named category do work that performance marketing cannot. Read him for the argument that memorable beats measurable in B2B, and for how to sell that internally.
Wrote the manual for running a revenue operations org
He is the most systematic public source on what RevOps actually does day to day: territory and comp design, forecasting hygiene, tooling debt, and how the function should be structured and staffed as a company scales. Start here if RevOps in your company is a job title with no defined scope.
Audience research over funnel metrics: where your buyers actually pay attention
He is unusually willing to publish numbers that undercut the standard playbook, including his own company's. Read him for how to find where a specific audience already spends attention, and for a sober view of what attribution can and cannot tell you.
Tests B2B messaging on real buyers instead of arguing about it internally
He supplies the missing evidence layer under positioning work: what your target buyer actually takes away from your copy, gathered from people in the role rather than from a workshop. His podcast teardowns are a compact study of differentiation in saturated markets.
Built the professional association for partnership and ecosystem leaders
He is the clearest public voice on partnerships as a career and an org design question: what a partner team is measured on, when a company should hire its first one, and what a chief partner officer role actually contains. Useful if you are trying to fund a partnerships function rather than run one experiment.
The people who actually do this
GTM leaders and practitioners worth learning from, with what each one is known for and where they publish. Some of them have spoken at eChai events, so you can meet them in person rather than only read them.
Showing 39 of 91. Clear filters
April Dunford
Pete Kazanjy
Jason Lemkin
Kyle Poyar
Emily Kramer
Josh Braun
Krish Subramanian
Arvind Parthiban
Nick Cegelski
Armand Farrokh
Chris Orlob
Jen Allen-Knuth
Mark Roberge
Jacco van der Kooij
Kevin Dorsey
Nate Nasralla
John McMahon
Sam Jacobs
Jason Bay
Elena Verna
Madhavan Ramanujam
Anthony Pierri
Wes Bush
Emma Stratton
Martina Lauchengco
Christopher Lochhead
Leah Tharin
Ben Williams
Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt
Jason Oakley
Dave Gerhardt
Bob Moore
Ross Simmonds
Tim Soulo
Udi Ledergor
Sean Lane
Rand Fishkin
Peep Laja
Asher Mathew
How this list works
Everyone here has a public body of work on go-to-market: talks, posts, podcasts, newsletters, books. We link to those public profiles, and we say what you'd learn from each person. That's the whole list.
We don't publish anyone's email or phone number, and being listed here doesn't mean someone has offered to answer messages. Read their work first. If you do write to someone, their public profiles are the place.
Listed here and would rather not be, or something is wrong? Email [email protected] and we'll fix or remove it.
eChai Partner Brands
The partnership →
