Alper Yurder 🤝

Co-founder & CRO of Flowla, interactive deal rooms your buyers LOVE 👉 Follow our podcast #salestherapy by Flowla 🎙️ on spotify

I’m a former B2B SaaS founder with 10+ years of experience in sales, marketing, and go-to-market strategy.

I’ve built and scaled startups through the seed-to-Series A journey raising VC funding, leading sales teams, and turning unknown products into trusted brands.

Today, I work as a fractional CRO & CMO, helping B2B founders design and execute their go-to-market systems from message-market fit to scalable revenue.

I act as the founder’s right hand to:

- Build GTM strategy, positioning, and demand generation
- Turn your brand from unknown to known through founder-led content and sales
- Install repeatable sales and marketing systems that actually drive revenue

Alongside my client work, I advise and mentor founders at accelerators and VC programs across Europe, and lecture on founder-led growth and GTM strategy.

If you’ve built a great product but the market doesn’t quite see it yet or if you feel your growth stalled and can use some support, I help make it seen, understood, and bought.

👉 Feel free to DM me if you’d like to chat about your GTM or sales strategy.

Co-Founder

Hey there, I'm an ex-sales leader turned co-founder, and I spend all day sharing ideas, solving problems and having #salestherapy with sales professionals from every sector and level. If you're after sales and G2M advice, you've come to the right place! And believe me, I've been through it all - from building SDR teams to closing multi-million dollar deals and everything in between. So, let's have some fun and chat sales!

🙌 I'm a big fan of Gamma (AI presentation builder that hit $50M ARR in 2 years), so when HubSpot For Startups invited me to hear founder Grant speak, I cleared my calendar. One of the best events I've been lately. Key GTM insights below 👇

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👉 **The state of B2B SaaS investing**

AI funding VC Panel with Sitar Teli (Connect), Luke Smith (Molten), Will Wells:

Sitar: "We look for 70-80% margins in B2B SaaS. But with founders building on existing platforms, we're seeing 10-20% instead."

The democratization of building has a trade-off - easier to ship, but unit economics under pressure.

Luke: "At Series A, we need at least one founder who deeply understands the customer. That's where defensibility lives."

Will's focus on European deeptech: neo computing, AI inference challenging Nvidia, foundational businesses in defense and space.

Europe's deeptech moment feels real.

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👉 **What's changing for technical founders**

The commercial co-founder requirement is softening.

VCs increasingly back product founders who partner with experienced operators early, then build commercial teams later.

The bar: Deep product understanding + customer empathy.

GTM can be layered on. Product vision can't be outsourced.

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👉 **AI agents are here**

HubSpot's new Breeze AI agents: prospecting, content generation, customer service.

What stood out: truly contextual outreach beyond templates.

We're past "AI tools." We're entering "AI agents that execute workflows."

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👉 **Building AI unicorns** (Husayn Kassai, Onfido)

His framework: 6-12-18 max team for speed.

Culture: "How are decisions made when you're not in the room?"

Product-led growth as foundation.

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👉 **Product always wins** (Grant Lee, Gamma)

"If people aren't talking about your product organically... you're in trouble."

This resonated deeply from our Flowla journey.

When product hits home, you scale to $50M ARR in 2 years like Gamma did.

I've seen founders try to scale without organic pull. It never works.

Marketing amplifies what exists. It can't create something from nothing.

When PMF is real, GTM pours fuel on fire.

When it's not, GTM is expensive noise.

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Two days of high-signal conversations with investors, founders, and operators.

Grateful to be part of these discussions.

Many thanks to Anna Gordon and HubSpot For Startups for curating such a strong lineup and for the invitation. Great inspiration for my upcoming workshops and speaking events! And why looking so serious in the pic Richard Lee 😉

Alper Yurder

Founder at Forte | We build scalable GTM systems for B2B startups with founder brand, AI-led inbound-outbound and scalable sales process | Exited B2B SaaS Founder | Angel Investor | Fractional GTM leader to +20 startups

🙂 Great pleasure being with the founders of Tenitys latest cohort last week for the series of Sales Masterclasses. We workshopped on founder brand, how to grow on LinkedIn, finding scalable growth loops, and building trust with early customers to get to your first 100.

these are late-seed and pre-Series A founders - making the move from £500K or £1M ARR to what's beyond, and figuring a scalable growth loop! love it!

And honestly? The challenges are similar to what I see in general:

"How do I make this repeatable?"
"How do I build trust with new clients fast?"
"How do I get more visibility without spending millions?

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We went through real examples from founders in the room and I gave examples from recent work on building trust, expanding beyond first network and trying different gtm motions such as:

-> building trust for a fintech app through private dinners with CFOs, one is a happy customer, let them evangelize you in a private setting,

-> Another is an edtech - now truly beyond founder-led sales so doing paid search, retargeting, and cold calls all at once in a sequence that makes sense.

Each founder's business is unique.

But there's still a playbook 👇

Finding and recording signs of:
→ Faster sales cycles (who closes in 2 weeks vs 2 months?)
→ Good ICP fit (who converts easily vs who ghosts you?)
→ The one scalable motion that's unique to YOUR business

Then doubling down on what works for you.

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Always a pleasure working with founders who are in the thick of it, building real businesses.

Thanks for having me Tenity 🙌 

And special thanks to Eda Taskin, Wiktoria (Victoria) Przybylska, and the team for organizing. And great pleasure to meet Mehnaaz Maleta who're doing wonderful work helping create the new Nordic unicorns! Looking forward to collabing more on that too...

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👉 If you're a founder cracking these things right now (£500K-£2M ARR, trying to make founder-led sales repeatable) - DM me, happy to share my playbooks and presentations from these events

👉 If you're a VC or accelerator looking for someone who's actually built this to share real practical tips with your portfolio - hit me up too.

✈️ Many are heading to Slush and wanted to drop my real-talk GTM stack before wheels up for you to up your GTM game on the go.

These aren't bookmarks I never opened. These are resources that actually built my knowledge on sales, AI workflows, and founder-led growth.

Playbooks & Books That Moved the Needle:
- SaaStock sessions with Adam Robinson, zero fluff, all systems
- Balderton's B2B Sales Guide, best advice for technical founders
- Predictable Revenue, still the outbound essentials
- The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, hire sales or close deals better
- Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt, your personal brand IS your GTM 
- Series A Benchmarking Report, know your numbers before you raise

Podcasts Worth the Flight:
- 20VC, Harry Stebbings bringing founder + investor truth weekly
- Lenny's Podcast: product, growth, GTM from operators who've done it
- Balderton Podcast: European founder focus
- Startup Sales: Adam Springer's early-stage B2B playbook
- How I Built This: for when you need founder energy
- My own "Sales Therapy": shameless plug but listeners say it helps

GTM + AI Stack I'm Using Now:
-Brian Balfour's essays, growth loops + systems thinking
-Holloway's GTM Playbook, comprehensive, not surface-level
-My AI workflow: Fathom → Claude → 10 LinkedIn posts per sales call (will share the prompts soon)

Tools I actually use: Clay, Gamma, Napkin, Replit, Claude (enterprise version is fire!) Relevance.ai tests, Empler.ai, Ujji.ai

Founders/Operators I Follow:
davegerhardt - founder brand + content harrystebbings — founder + VC mindset 
pierreherubel - B2B positioning frameworks
justinkan - raw founder perspective 
lennysan - product-led growth 
alexgarcia - distribution tactics
and me (obviously) - sharing how I help founders build systems starting with their own founder brand -> trust building -> linkedin -> outbound -> sales process -> inbound engine -> scale creator marketing and referrals

Drop a 🔥 if you find this useful!

💪 I'm always in awe of technical founders who hit £1-2M ARR with almost no marketing. Just pure product. Deep expertise. Word of mouth. Which honestly is gold. But not enough 👇

Yesterday I spoke with a founder who:
- Built IoT security for 20M devices
- Grew to £1M+ ARR in 14 months  
- Has only ONE salesperson
- Posts on LinkedIn "only when there's really valuable content"

Here's what always happens at this stage

👉 The Pattern:

→ Revenue plateaus around £1.5M
→ Sales is 100% founder-led (doesn't scale)  
→ Pipeline is unpredictable
→ Competitors with worse products but better marketing start winning

👉 The breakthrough isn't working harder

It's adding structure to what already works

If you're at £1-2M ARR with minimal GTM, here's what to fix:

1️⃣ Document your customer language

Interview 5 customers: "How did you describe us internally?"

That's your messaging. Not your features.

2️⃣ Make the founder visible

You close deals in the room. Get in more rooms.

LinkedIn: 2 posts/week sharing what you see in the market + 1 for credibility and social proof

3️⃣ Create repeatable outbound

You've proven the product works. Now prove you can find customers systematically.

Target → Message → Test → Scale 

Record tests somewhere, review every month to hit message-market fit

4️⃣ Build forecastable pipeline

Stop hoping referrals arrive. Build a system that generates 20 qualified conversations/month. Either an inbound engine with a content hire,

AIO, founder brand

or trust building activities like webinars and private dinners

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👉 The founders who scale past £2M don't have better products

✅ They have better distribution

You've done the hard part (building something people need)

Now do the uncomfortable part (telling people it exists)

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DM me "GTM" if you're at this stage and would like a chat - I'll send you the full diagnostic I use with founders.

Partner UP

Partner UP empowers startups to build and scale effective sales teams with the right strategies, tools, and expertise.

Specialized in four primary services (Strategy, Growth, Process, Team) for two segments of startups:

1. Early-Stage Startups: We build and launch your sales foundation—from team structure and sales pitch to first hires, comp plans, cold outreach, and tech stack.
2. Growth-Stage Startups: We optimize and scale your sales—refining operations, account planning, team performance, hiring, coaching, and process improvements.

Founder

Evercopy

- Advise the executive team on GTM strategy for this multi-channel advertising platform.
- Guide scaling operations and revenue model development for global brand acquisition.

Board of Advisors

Ludopsy

-Provide strategic direction on monetization and market positioning for the AI-powered game analytics platform.
-Counsel leadership team on enterprise sales approach and product-market fit refinement. 
Learn More: https://docsend.com/v/v9bvw/ludopsy

Exceptionly

-Co-founded global software talent platform, architecting end-to-end sales operations from scratch.
-Built a complete B2B sales funnel including outbound strategy, CRM implementation, and scalable workflows.
-Led a globally distributed team while defining company vision, culture, and strategic roadmap.

Chief Revenue Officer

Spotify

- Transferred to the Spotify US team to create a sustainable deal structure.
- Created a sustainable deal structure implementing a strategic trading framework across multiple business segments. 
- Developed cross-functional Salesforce approval process with DocuSign integration, establishing scalable deal desk structure. 
- Partnered with vertical leads to unlock dormant advertiser spending and grow wallet share globally and across the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia.

Sales Strategy & Partnerships Director, Americas

- Launched sales, sales operations and strategy, marketing, editorial, and licensing operations.
- Oversaw Spotify Turkey's advertising sales operations. 
- Recruited, mentored, and directed a high-performing sales team covering 15 media agencies and top 100 advertisers in the country. 
- Negotiated 20+ annual deals with the leading media agencies to increase revenue in the region. 
- Helped Turkish brands leverage music to engage with their audiences.
- Oversaw the dotted line, managed sales-related functions such as B2B Marketing, Business PR, Strategy, and Planning, and worked closely with finance functions.
- Became local point of contact on behalf of Licensing, Label Relations, Business Management, Business Development, PR, Social Media, Editorial and Localisation functions to grow business in all aspects. 
- Initiated and executed Business Development projects with top-level business partners to reach more users. 
- Acted as a public speaker to create awareness and to grow Spotify’s market share in Turkey – over 30 TV/Newspaper interviews, university events, conferences.

Country Director, Turkey 

Microsoft

- Managed 50+ key accounts
- Oversaw creative digital agencies in order to create and offer customized projects, and leading the process of going online.  
- Built and developed MSN, Skype and Windows Live Platforms position in digital marketing and display advertising space and responsible to increase the overall market share of Microsoft Advertising.
- Established and drove effective account plans to manage the business.
- Created and presented high impact proposals, reports and communication to the partners. 
- Maintained mind shift to advertisers from various segments and worked closely with advertisers, media buying agencies and creative agencies in order to take part in their media plan as the number one online advertising platform.
- Planned and executed both short and long term goals of advertisers online marketing strategy.
- Attained and exceeded the overall revenue target on an annual basis. 
- Built strong commercial and personal relationships and increased the overall annual budget of advertisers on the MSA network.

Senior Account Executive

Linkz

- Oversaw the advertiser and publisher solution sales and operations team of 5 people that overachieve all sales targets with more than %160 YoY attainment rate
- Reported directly to Deputy General Manager
- Developed new ad formats with the creative and technical teams in order to widen the scope of the product
- Worked in close cooperation with a broad network of business partners, top advertisers, top media and creative agencies in order to build and grow revenue and market share within performance ad network, and tool businesses within Turkey Online ad market
- Managed all key accounts 
- Executed yield and price management in order to provide analytical information to enhance business decision-making and to drive the profitability of the overall inventory
- Partnered up with the executive production team.

Sales and Operations Manager

MTV UK, Northern & Eastern Europe

Sales Executive

I transform early-stage startups into revenue machines by building scalable sales foundations from the ground up. After 20+ years leading sales strategy at Microsoft and Spotify, I now deploy this expertise as a Fractional CRO to help seed and Series A founders achieve rapid, sustainable growth.
Connect: calendly.com/eleilademir

Learn More: https://docsend.com/v/v9bvw/partnerup

Core Expertise: GTM, outbound, Account management, sales strategy, pipeline management, forecasting, project management, business development, sales team mentorship, coaching, fostering collaboration and innovation.

Leila Ergul Demir

I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Solution Provider and Startup Partner at HubSpot!

Clay certified GTM Leader | Scaling Revenue for Seed & Series A Startups

Multichannel isn’t new. But this update finally makes it work the way it should.

Two of my favorite tools, HeyReach.io and Instantly.ai, now integrate, so you can support your LinkedIn campaigns with email (or the other way around) without duct-taping tools together.

LinkedIn → no reply → Instantly picks it up.
Email campaign → warmed lead → LinkedIn touch.
All synced, clean, and on-brand.

This is what lean GTM engineering looks like. 

Partner UP is an official partner of both of these fantastic tools. 
Get your HeyReach account here: https://lnkd.in/g3U7CU99 
Or 
Get your Instantly account here: https://lnkd.in/gnrCCt_A 

Thank me later!
Cheers!

Just became a HeyReach.io expert.

I handpick every tool because they deliver, especially when my clients rely on real results.

HeyReach has quickly become one of my go-to outbound tools.
It’s fast, safe, and intuitive. The guardrails are smart, the UI is clean, and setup is simple. No stress on your domain, no unnecessary complexity.

Clear targeting, human messaging, and multi-touch flows that feel thoughtful, not automated. It allows me to build outbound systems that actually convert.

If you’re working on signal-based outbound or want to test smarter sequences, I’d be happy to share what’s working.
Here is your link to try HeyReach: heyreach.io/?via=leila

Open article: HeyReach | LinkedIn Automation Tool For Agencies, Sales & Growth teams by heyreach.io

HeyReach | LinkedIn Automation Tool For Agencies, Sales & Growth teams

Clay Club Seattle is happening, and I’m co-hosting it.

On December 16, we’re taking over Edge Delta’s HQ at Columbia Tower for an evening of live demos, smart workflows, and real talk on how teams are scaling with Clay.

We’ll learn from:
🧠 Sarah Xu – a core member of Clay’s legendary Teaching Team and the architect behind their certifications. She’s helped hundreds of users level up their workflows, and we’re lucky to have her in Seattle for a live session.
💡 Bethany Stachenfeld – CEO of Sendspark and a power user building big ideas on top of Clay. She leads one of Clay’s integration partners and brings the energy and the tactics.
🧩 And I’ll share what Clay is and isn’t, what it can actually do, and how it fits into the bigger picture of GTM engineering, the kind of work we do at Partner UP to help startups build systems that actually scale.

Expect pizza, drinks, demos, and actual humans building cool stuff, not just another AI sales event.

📍 Columbia Tower, 41st floor
🎟️ Free to attend – RSVP here: https://luma.com/l5mltsy7

If you’re in Seattle and Clay-curious, come nerd out with us.

Bana en çok sorulan sorulardan biri “İlk satışımı nasıl yaparım?”(İkincisi de “Amerika’ya nasıl satış yaparım?”)

AI artık hayatımızın tam içinde. Peki GTM ve Operasyon tarafında gerçekten nasıl işimize yarıyor? Biz hangi araçları nasıl kullanıyoruz? Erken aşama ya da büyüme aşamasındaki ekipler için hangi adımları öneriyoruz?

Bu webinarda, sevgili Burak Aksar, PhD ile tam olarak bunları konuşacağız. İlgilenen herkesi bekliyoruz. 
https://lnkd.in/gRPdZD3E

I’ve been testing HubSpot’s built-in data enrichment across Partner UP and client accounts. Once your contacts or companies are in, HubSpot can automatically fill in and update key details like:

• Industry
• Employee count
• Location (split into city, state, country)
• LinkedIn profiles
• Company domain
• And more

It saves hours you’d otherwise spend cleaning spreadsheets or manually updating records. You end up with a more accurate CRM, stronger segmentation, and better reporting without needing another tool.

It aligns perfectly with how we build lean, scalable GTM engines with less cleanup and more clarity.

Also worth noting is that Partner UP is now both a HubSpot For Startups Partner and an official Solutions Provider. That means that we offer:

• Up to 90% off HubSpot Pro+ for eligible startups
• Starter plan at $9/month
• Free access to HubSpot Academy + exclusive partner perks
• Handholding 🤝 if you’re building your CRM from scratch or looking to clean up what you’ve got.

Happy to help you get access and set it up the right way.

taplio

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Leila Ergul Demir

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taplio

The Battle

Alper Yurder 🤝

Leila Ergul Demir

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Alper Yurder 🤝's LinkedIn Performance

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