Zero to One Hundred

Zero to One Hundred is the go-to-market field guide for technical startup founders.

Stephanie Friedman has helped dozens of technology startups grow their sales functions, both as an operator and as a board director and adviser to founders and CEOs. Along the way, she's seen the same sorts of problems crop up: a chaotic, improvisational sales process; salespeople not getting up to speed quickly enough; new hires not working out. It's possible to push through the chaos, especially when the product has strong product-market fit. But ensuring a company's sales function scales fluidly--without all the wasted time and capital spent fine-tuning systems and processes--is critical to a startup's long-term success.

In Zero to One Hundred, Friedman demystifies the process of building a high-performing sales function, using a methodology honed over 20 years of sales and go-to-market experience. She lays out a systematic and disciplined framework for building and managing a high-performing sales and customer success team--from defining a repeatable sales motion and creating a formal sales playbook to hiring the right profile of salespeople, managing revenue, building out customer success, and creating the right sales culture. The book is divided into three phases of startup growth and offers actionable insights gleaned from the author's own experiences advising successful startups of all shapes and sizes.

Even if your company is tiny, you need to be preparing for a time when it won't be. Zero to One Hundred is the go-to-market field guide for founders looking to scale from $0 to $100 million in annual sales, which often coincides with building the sales team from zero to 100 salespeople. The principles put forward in Zero to One Hundred allow startup founders and CEOs to implement a repeatable and predictable approach to selling their product--and, ultimately, building a generational company--right from day one.
About the Author: Stephanie Friedman is an investor, advisor, and startup executive with 20 years of go-to-market operations experience, with a focus on enterprise software. Previously, Friedman helped build three successful startups as an operator and revenue leader, and after one acquisition stayed on for two years to manage operations for a $380 million business as part of a public company. She joined her last startup, Xamarin, in 2012 as their first non-engineering hire and built the customer-facing organization from zero to 100 sales and customer success people and $0 to almost $50 million in run rate sales in less than four years. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Friedman has lived and worked in six countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Paraguay, and the US), is fluent in five languages, and has an MBA in international business. She lives in San Francisco.