Built to Grow: A Handbook for High-Performance Sales Teams

"Anyone building a B2B business should read this book." —Aaron Levie, CEO at Box

Based on 20 years of sales experience, Built to Grow is the go-to-market field guide for startup founders.

Startup founders often wish for a playbook for building and scaling a sales function. All too often, it’s an experimental, improvisational process, in which any wrong move can lead to wasted time and capital. But in her 20 years building and scaling go-to-market teams, Stephanie Friedman has identified a set of steps that any B2B founder can take to build a successful sales organization. 

This book is that playbook—a structured and repeatable methodology for building a high-performing sales function from a company’s earliest days.

In Built to Grow, Friedman lays out a systematic framework for building and managing a sales organization, from defining the repeatable sales motion and creating a sales playbook to hiring the right salespeople and managing the revenue engine. The book is divided into three phases of startup growth—Experiment, Build, and Scale—and offers actionable insights and tactics drawn from Friedman’s two decades of experience working with successful startups, both as an operator and as a board director and adviser to founders and CEOs.

Built to Grow 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 0 to 100 salespeople. The principles put forward in Built to Grow allow startup founders and CEOs to implement a repeatable and predictable approach to selling their product and building a generational company from day one.

Stephanie Friedman is an angel investor, advisor, and startup executive with over 20 years of go-to-market operations experience, with a focus on enterprise software. Previously, she helped build three successful startups as an operator and revenue leader, and after one acquisition stayed on for two years to manage sales operations for a 380 million dollar 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 from 0 to almost 50 million dollars in run rate sales in less than four years. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. She has lived and worked in six countries, is fluent in five languages and holds a master’s degree in international business. She is also the founder of Love Dogs Rescue and Foundation and she lives in California with her husband, her two children and (currently) two rescue dogs.