Hey y'all -
Welcome to my newsletter.
This is is for founders and sales leaders who want to scale their revenue teams.
Each week I share an essay and a few interesting links from the weekend.
In this weeks issue:
- 44 Lessons I learned from scaling sales teams over the last 13 years.
Now onto this week's game plan:
The last time I emailed this group was in October 2024.
That's too long of a break.
For those of you who follow me on LinkedIn or X, you have seen me consistently putting out lessons learned.
I've even had a few posts go viral on social in the past few weeks (!):
This entire newsletter and my website started as a way for me to download and share what I've learn in a career as a founder and revenue leader.
In the last year or so, I’ve written over 74,000 words on my website and who knows how many words on social.
If you are new to this newsletter, I did you a favor and summarized all 44 essays from martinroth.com.
Here’s my best advice for building a high-performing sales culture:
1. Underperformance is a signal. Fix the issue fast or make a change. Avoid slow, painful exits.
2. What might seem like “micromanagement” is just management. It’s how you scale quality. Zoom in, set standards, then zoom out.
3. Sales careers compound. Play long-term games with long-term people. Get a mentor early.
4. Big deals have four stakeholders: user, buyer, exec, blocker. Map them or lose the deal.
5. Coaching is your culture. Reps don’t improve from ride-alongs, they grow from feedback loops.
6. Your first 10 reps make or break your culture. Don’t just hire “experienced” ones. Hire coachable, gritty ones.
7. When you scale, complexity hides in headcount. Simplify roles. Narrow the scope. Clarity wins.
8. Don’t run outbound like a volume game. Treat it like product marketing. Message-to-market match matters.
9. Every hiring mistake is a systems mistake. Fix the interview process, not just the rep.
10. Sales enablement is not just onboarding. It’s continuous skill development, not just a training doc.
11. The best salespeople are hungry, curious, and coachable. Experience is secondary.
12. Quit confusing activity with progress. Measure outcomes, not just inputs.
13. Avoid bloated comp plans. Simple, fair, aligned to what actually matters.
14. Run QBRs that expose gaps and friction. Not vanity metrics. Make them uncomfortable.
15. If no one owns something, it won’t get done. Assign owners. Drive accountability.
16. Revenue follows clarity. Write a one-pager for every role and outcome you expect.
17. Don’t hide behind “relationship-building. ” Sell value. Solve problems.
18. Scale process, not just hustle. Hustle doesn’t scale past 5 reps.
19. Move fast, but don’t rush hiring. A bad sales hire sets you back 6 months.
20. Sales managers should carry a bag, for a little while at least. If you can’t close, you can’t coach.
21. Your pipeline is your strategy, in spreadsheet form. Clean it up weekly.
22. CRM hygiene isn’t optional, it’s your forecasting system. Garbage in, garbage out.
23. Customer success is not a quota-carrying role. Let them focus on value delivery.
24. Pipe generation is a team sport. Don’t make outbound one person’s job.
25. Good comp plans reward behavior you want repeated. Make that behavior obvious.
26. Don’t overpay average reps. Compensation should drive performance, not comfort.
27. Forecasting starts with rep judgment. Coach their assumptions.
28. You don’t need a perfect dashboard, just one you’ll actually use.
29. Most deals die from neglect, not competition. Follow-up is your edge.
30. Revenue solves many problems, but not all. Fix the root, not just the symptoms.
31. Don’t tolerate ambiguity. Define what “good” looks like in every process.
32. Front-load your hiring process. Let the interview be the hardest part of the job.
33. Sales isn’t about persuasion, it’s about clarity. Make the customer feel understood.
34. A strong VP of Sales builds systems, not just motivation.
35. Document what works. Don’t rely on tribal knowledge.
36. Scale back to fundamentals when things stall. Activity. Messaging. Follow-up.
37. Process beats personality. Charisma can’t fix a broken motion.
38. Teach reps to run the sales process, not just react to the buyer’s.
39. Selling is about tension. No pain, no urgency, no deal.
40. Start every call with the problem. Then show how you solve it.
41. Demos aren’t product tours. They’re tailored proofs of value.
42. Stop “checking in. ” Send a reason to re-engage. Add value every touch.
43. Align marketing to sales with shared goals. Not just MQLs, pipeline.
44. Build your sales team like a sports team. Roles. Practice. Accountability. Culture.
What's got my attention right now:
- This post from Ryan Law, who runs content at Ahrefs.
The landscape of content marketing is changing rapidly and its hard to tell what that means for companies who have built their distribution on educational content.
I like this line from Ryan: "whatever the future of content marketing is, it does NOT look like corporate wikipedias covering every "how-to" and "what is" topic under the sun"
This is particularly interesting to me because we built Levelset's distribution on the back of content marketing. It's a space I understand deeply.
But like every other GTM tactic, things change as technology evolves. And we must all change with it.
- The guys at TBPN are absolutely blowing up and it looks like they are having a ton of fun.
It's like ESPN for tech bros.
The whole show blurs the line between parody and real news/insights.
It's like they beat everyone to the punch line and they have grabbed the entire tech world's attention in the process.
I think it works because they are reporting from inside the industry rather than reporting "on" the industry like most other publications.
It will be interesting to see how they evolve the content as their following gets bigger and bigger.
That's it for this week. One more ask before you go: Can you please forward this email to one person that might find it useful?
Have a great week!
Martin
Have a question? Hit reply and send it over, I reply to each one of your emails.