GrowthStack Advisory / Resources
Hands-on experience with pipeline that works
Practical guides and tool breakdowns drawn from live engagements and from running sales development functions at Locus, GoComet, and Landmark Group. No recycled internet advice.
Several of these guides carry a free interactive tool: an outbound readiness scorecard, an outbound model fit scorecard, a sales tool stack picker an MQL to SQL calculator and a TAM, SAM and SOM calculator. The two standalone calculators, for pipeline capacity and cold email A/B test sizing, live in free tools.
E-commerce and D2C GTM
Selling software to brands whose revenue is attributed daily and whose calendar freezes for a quarter. Drawn from the ConvertCart and WorkStore engagements.
Selling to e-commerce and D2C brands: who decides
The agency gatekeeps without signing, and engineering time stalls more deals than budget.
Selling e-commerce software around peak season
The retail freeze removes a quarter from the deployable year. Sell through it, do not deploy in it.
Why booked meetings do not happen
No-shows are a process fault. What took one team from 44% to 15%.
Founder-led sales
For founders still carrying revenue personally. What breaks before the first hire, how to decide the hire is due, and how to hand the selling over without losing the deals already in play.
Five founder-led sales mistakes that kill pipeline
All five are invisible while the founder is selling, and they compound in a fixed order.
When to make your first sales hire, and who
Repeatable, not busy. And why a full calendar and an empty one point at different roles.
Handing sales from founder to rep
The stage transfers, the context does not. A four week sequence that keeps deals intact.
Pipeline diagnostics
What to do when the pipeline looks healthy and the revenue does not follow. Four guides: the three activities that produce pipeline, locating the leak, measuring the right thing, and telling a rep problem from a system problem.
Pipeline comes from three activities working together
Targeting, outreach and qualification, the tools behind each, and how to tell which one to fix first.
How to audit a sales pipeline in 72 hours
Six diagnostic questions, the four places pipeline leaks, and why stage inflation hides for so long.
Sales metrics that predict revenue
If a number can improve without anyone outside the company acting, it is activity, not a prediction.
When an SDR is not performing: five levers
Check the list before the calls. Three of the five levers are not the rep.
Logistics and supply chain GTM
Four logistics organisations, three of them from the inside. Selling software into freight, last mile, 3PL and shipping works differently, and these are the differences.
Why the logistics software sales cycle runs long
Pilots run on real freight, rollout is the actual deal, and peak season is a predictable freeze.
Selling to shippers, carriers and 3PLs
Three buyers treated as one market. Only one of them resells you.
ICP for logistics software: volume is the qualifying number
Throughput, not headcount, predicts value. How to find your volume floor from closed-won.
The logistics buying committee: who actually decides
Operations has the pain, finance has the signature, IT can veto and procurement can delay.
Opening South East Asia for a logistics platform
Singapore holds the decisions, Indonesia holds the volume. Target the operation, not the address.
Inbound lead conversion
Half the named client work on this site is inbound rather than outbound. These four things decide whether an enquiry becomes pipeline.
Lead scoring that predicts revenue
Most models rank engagement because engagement is what the platform can see.
Speed to lead: how fast must you answer an inbound lead?
One business hour, in the buyer’s time zone. Why ownership rather than capacity is what breaks response time.
Inbound lead routing: who gets the lead, and why
Segmentation and assignment are two decisions. Why round robin optimises for the wrong thing.
Coaching an inbound sales team: what is different
Order taking is the habit inbound volume creates, and why outbound coaching advice does not transfer.
Sales qualification frameworks compared
Why BANT and MEDDIC fail, and how to write criteria two reps grade identically.
Sales tooling & tech stack
Which tools to buy, when, and who each one is actually right for. Built from setting up these stacks in live teams.
The SDR playbook
A complete ten-section template: ICP, messaging, sequence, qualification, metrics and coaching.
Claude for sales teams
The HubSpot, Apollo and Outreach connectors, Anthropic’s Sales plugin, and what to set up first.
Apollo’s AI agents
Lead Discovery, Sequence Creation and Sequence Optimization, and the ICP they depend on.
HubSpot Prospecting Agent
What HubSpot’s AI prospecting agent does, what $1 per recommended lead adds up to, and how to run the trial.
Salesforce in Claude
Anthropic’s CRM plugin, its 37 prebuilt sales skills, and what it inherits from your stage definitions.
AI in outbound: the 2026 benchmarks
Adoption, headcount, touches per contact and deliverability benchmarks from two 2026 studies. Free deck.
AI is a layer, not another tool
Where AI actually improves an SDR's existing work, and why a standalone tool changes nothing.
Best AI BDR software in 2026
What AI BDR tools actually automate, what they cannot, and when buying one is worth it. From someone who has run eleven of these tools live.
The B2B sales tool stack, by team size
Every core tool by category, who it is right and wrong for, and a picker that builds a stack for your stage.
Best sales tools for startups
The lean stack by job, and the enterprise tools worth skipping until you are bigger.
HubSpot vs Salesforce
Which CRM your team will actually use. The deciding factor is adoption, not features.
Apollo vs ZoomInfo
Startup speed against enterprise data depth, and which one your stage actually needs.
Outreach vs Salesloft
Both are for mature SDR orgs. The real question is whether you should buy either one yet.
Outbound, SDR & hiring
Standing up outbound, and building the team that runs it.
Cold email infrastructure setup: domains, mailboxes and build order
How many sending domains and mailboxes you need, why they sit away from your main domain, and the order it has to be built in.
The first 90 days of outbound
A week-by-week build plan: what to do in weeks 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 and 9-12, and the order that matters.
How to structure a B2B outbound sequence
Seven touches is a starting shape, not a rule. What each touch is for, and why email, LinkedIn and phone should be one motion rather than three.
Cold email deliverability checklist
Why good messaging still lands in spam, and the domain, warmup and volume setup that fixes it.
Instantly vs Lemlist
Cold email at volume vs email and LinkedIn in one sequence, and the mistake both invite.
Scaling an SDR team from 10 to 23
Hiring, onboarding, management layers, and the cadence that holds it together.
How to hire your first SDR
When to hire, what to test for, week-by-week onboarding, and what to pay.
ICP, qualification & conversion
Getting the target and the qualification right before you scale the sending.
TAM, SAM and SOM: sizing a market in three steps
SOM is an output of capacity and win rate, not a market share you pick. With a calculator.
How to build a B2B ICP sales will use
Disqualifiers, tiering, and the named account list it should produce.
Sales qualification frameworks compared
Why BANT and MEDDIC fail, and how to write criteria two reps grade identically.
Improving MQL to SQL conversion
The qualification and follow-up changes that moved conversion from 10% to 25%.
Written by Shobhit Gupta from live engagements and 10+ years running sales development functions. New notes are added as patterns repeat across client work. LinkedIn.
Related reading
Questions
Tell us where the funnel leaks
We will tell you whether it is a targeting, execution, or qualification problem, and what it would take to fix.
Book a CallWritten with AI assistance from Shobhit Gupta’s notes and client work, then reviewed and edited by Shobhit Gupta on .