← chenzoo

A Savage GTM Field Manual · Restricted Distribution

Fear & Loathing
in B2B SaaS

A genuinely usable manual for building, staffing, and forecasting a go-to-market machine — hiring, culture, methodology, the tech stack, comp, pipeline, forecasting, the works — disguised as the deranged 4 a.m. dictation of an operator who has survived a dozen revenue death marches. Read it. Run your org from it. Try not to end up in it.

Begin at Module 1 →

The Modules

Sequenced to build the machine from nothing

  1. 01Orientation: What GTM/RevOps Actually Is
  2. 02Building the Team: Who to Hire and When
  3. 03Culture: Building a Sales Floor That Doesn't CurdleCulture isn't the poster in the break room. Culture is what your top rep gets away with on a Thursday." — overheard from an anonymous operator, three drinks in, correct, and now unavailable for comment.
  4. 04Methodology: Picking a Religion and Enforcing ItA methodology is just a checklist a guru sold you for $40,000. The checklist still works. That's the part that should scare you." — my attorney, reviewing an invoice he did not approve, correctly.
  5. 05The Stack: Assembling Your Frankenstack Without Dying
  6. 06Knowing Who to Hunt: ICP, Segmentation & Territory
  7. 07The Number: Quota & Capacity Planning
  8. 08Blood Money: Designing the Comp Plan
  9. 09Making Pipeline: Outbound, Inbound & the AI SDR SwarmPipeline is the only prayer the board respects. Everything else is interpretive dance performed by idiots in front of a slide deck."* — overheard from a CRO at 11 p.m., third whiskey, eyes like two cigarettes someone forgot to extinguish
  10. 10Speed Kills: Lead Management, Routing & SLAsA lead is a perishable good with a half-life measured in goddamn minutes. You either move or you're scraping spoiled meat off the funnel floor and explaining it to the board."* — Dr. Tanya Vex, *The Velocity Doctrine* (self-published, 280 pages, every single one of them this sentence at different font sizes)
  11. 11The Pipeline Is a Crime Scene: Hygiene & Inspecting RealityA pipeline is not a list of deals you want. It is a list of deals that actually fucking exist. You'd be amazed how many operators can't tell the goddamn difference — and how many of them own a Patek Nautilus they haven't paid off yet."* — my attorney, reviewing a Q3 board deck at 2 a.m., visibly disgusted
  12. 12Down the Funnel: Conversion MathEverybody worships the top of the funnel because it's the only number that goes up when you spend money without actually having to do anything hard. The bottom is where the truth lives, and the truth has a conversion rate that will make you want to crawl under your standing desk and stay there."* — Dr. Tanya Vex, *The Revenue Calculus* (self-published, $1,499, available on her website between meditation retreats and LinkedIn carousels about abundance mindset)
  13. 13Reading the Entrails: Forecasting
  14. 14Deal Desk After Dark: CPQ, Discounting & Quote-to-Cash
  15. 15Inspection: QBRs, Pipeline Reviews & 1:1sYou don't get what you expect. You get what you inspect. Everything else is a slide with a green arrow on it and a cropped axis and the faint, unmistakable smell of someone who has confused performing confidence for doing the work." — overheard from a VP of Sales three weeks before the board fired him, while he was still polishing slide forty-one
  16. 16The Sacred Numbers: Metrics That Run (and Ruin) the CompanyThere are maybe nine numbers that decide whether your company lives or dies screaming in a down round. Everyone in the building obsesses over the other four hundred, most of which they invented themselves." — my attorney, who bills by the metric and has never once seen a Rule of 40 score that wasn't adjusted into compliance by someone with a very creative relationship to the word 'margin'
  17. 17The Credit Wars: Attribution
  18. 18The Back Half: Retention, Churn & Expansion
  19. 19The Tarpit: Your Data Layer & the Single-Source-of-Truth Myth
  20. 20Running the Machine With Robots: The AI-First Revenue Org

A work of satire that happens to be correct. Every guru quoted herein is fictional; the frameworks, formulas, and failure modes are not. Contains extensive profanity, strong opinions, and a healthy fear of the board.