Article · long read

The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders

First Round Review with Emery Rosansky · First Round Review Free Intermediate

Covers ICP definition, the PBC structure for running a sales call, pilot design and weekly forecasting in one place, with templates for the call scorecard and the forecast model. The most useful single page for a founder building their first process.

  • Define ICP by operational signals, not size: for an onboarding tool, companies with 20+ open remote roles on LinkedIn.
  • Keep pilots under 90 days; if value takes six months to show, only run it as a paid pilot.
  • At ACVs of 10K dollars or less, margins look far healthier on a self-serve motion.
  • Run a monthly 90 minute forecast review plus 30 minutes a week on opportunity hygiene and close dates.

It answers 5 questions

  1. What does 'go to market' actually mean? People say GTM constantly and I still cannot define it.
  2. I have a call booked with a real prospect tomorrow. What do I do on it?
  3. How do I tell whether our GTM is genuinely working or we just got lucky with a few deals?
  4. My demos go well and then the deal stalls. How do I stop that?
  5. How do I turn random wins into a sales process someone else can run?

Read with it

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  4. A structured curriculum for engineers who have never thought about sales, covering channels, segmentation, quota, comp and... Andreessen Horowitz Video · 16 short videos All Things Sales! 16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders Peter Levine
  5. The SuperOps founder frames GTM around one question, is your category established or new, which is exactly the fork in the road... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min SaaS Deep Dives: PMF, GTM and Maverick Marketing with Arvind Parthiban Arvind Parthiban
  6. Kirani has backed Freshworks, Chargebee and BrowserStack, and his rule that the product stays horizontal while the GTM goes... SeedToScale (Accel India) Article · ~15 min read How to Build a Clear and Actionable GTM Strategy Shekhar Kirani
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