If you’ve ever tried to scale a revenue team without a roadmap, Michelle Pietsch knows exactly how that feels—because she’s helped build the blueprint. From growing Datadog’s sales team from 3 to over 100, to leading go-to-market teams at Drift and Dooly, Michelle’s superpower is turning early-stage chaos into repeatable revenue.
Now, as co-founder of Beacons GTM, she partners with founders and sales leaders to fill the operational gaps most teams don’t even realize they have until growth stalls.
In this episode of Go-To-Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Michelle discusses the gritty reality of scaling sales in high-growth startups. From goal-setting gone wild (“We want to go from $500K to $4M this year!”) to the painful misalignment between investor expectations and actual execution, Michelle brings clarity, candor, and a whole lot of real-world wisdom.
Whether you’re leading RevOps, sales, or GTM strategy, her insights on data-driven planning, realistic revenue targets, and building accountability across teams are a must-hear. If you’re navigating early-stage growth, grappling with unachievable targets, or just tired of hearing “triple, double, double” without a real plan—Michelle’s here to give it to you straight.
Here are some interview highlights:
Amy: How do you know what your goals should be when you’re building out your sales team?
Michelle: Great question. We just wrapped up annual planning with many clients, and this comes up a lot. For first-time founders or even first-time sales and marketing leaders, setting goals can be challenging. Typically, they reach $500,000 in revenue and assume it’ll be easy to scale to $3–4 million the following year—without a clear plan.
You’ve got a small team, maybe just a marketer and a head of revenue, and then this big number is dropped on the table. But how did you reach that first $500,000? Where did the leads come from? What were the conversion rates? Who sold the deals? Was it founder-led or your first AE?
Read more: Cooking Up Better RevOps: Empathy and Expertise
Often, the data isn’t there, so the “why” and “how” behind the goals are missing. You need to place some bets—maybe on outbound motion, SDR teams, paid ads—but those bets need to be backed by reality and made repeatable. Without that foundation, it’s tough to scale smartly.
Amy: When you’re trying to back into metrics, what guidelines do you give early-stage teams?
Michelle: The key is to break large company goals into smaller, actionable objectives for each department and even individuals. That helps each team member see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
Take pipeline, for example. You need to understand how much pipeline you need to generate based on your conversion rates, and then calculate how many leads that entails. From there, you assign ownership: marketing owns X, sales owns Y.
Read more: From Four Unicorns To The Future of RevOps
It becomes a collaborative effort, not just “sales must close everything.” Everyone—from SDRs to AEs—should know their part in that equation. And if leads aren’t converting, then it’s time to place bets on outbound and assign owners for those plays.
Amy: Based on the data I’ve reviewed, a healthy split of pipeline sourcing is approximately 25–30% from marketing, 40% from SDRs, and 30% from AEs. Does that align with what you’re seeing?
Michelle: That sounds about right, but it really depends on stage. Early on, a company may not have a marketing team. Most of the effort is outbound, handled by AEs or SDRs.
Once you hire a head of marketing or growth, you can layer on inbound. But in the early stages, outbound is usually the backbone. If you nail that and then build out marketing, you’ll be in a great position. But yes, ownership early on tends to lean more toward the sales org.
Amy: What are some red flags you’ve seen that indicate a company’s growth goals might be unrealistic?
Michelle: The biggest one: no one can answer how the team is supposed to get there. . .
