Meghana Atluri

I started my career in equity research. Fundamental analysis, investment advisory, building views from incomplete data. It had nothing to do with what I do now. Or so I thought. The move away from finance wasn't planned. It happened in stages. A startup. A commodities exchange. A master's in Madrid at IE Business School that pulled me toward international business and away from spreadsheets entirely. Then a role that put me at the intersection of commercial strategy and new market expansion, and something clicked. The finance training hadn't disappeared. It had just changed shape. Stress-testing assumptions before committing. Asking what the downside looks like before getting excited about the upside. Building a view from incomplete information and being honest about the gaps. Those instincts don't leave you. They just look different when you're trying to close a deal than when you're writing a research note. The thing I didn't expect was how much that background would matter in early-stage commercial work. Not because of the technical knowledge. Because of the habit of thinking before moving. Non-linear paths get treated like something to explain away. Most of the time they just mean someone had to figure things out without a script. That's not a weakness. It's just a different kind of training. What's the most unexpected thing an early role taught you that still shapes how you work?

The first hire in a new market or a business is one of the strangest decisions you can make. You're hiring for a role that doesn't fully exist yet, in a context you're still figuring out, with requirements that will change the moment the first real customer conversation happens. Most job descriptions for these roles are written for a different job entirely. They describe the person you'll need six months in, not the person you need on day one. The person you need on day one is comfortable not knowing. Comfortable building before there's a playbook. Comfortable being wrong quickly and adjusting without needing a process to tell them how. That's a completely different person from someone who's great at executing a motion that already exists. Mixing those two up is an easy mistake. It's also an expensive one. And I've made it. I've hired for the wrong phase. Brought someone in who was genuinely excellent at running an established motion and then put them in a situation where the motion didn't exist yet. It wasn't fair to them, and it slowed everything down. What I look for now is simpler than any scorecard. I want to know how someone talks about a time they had to figure something out with almost no guidance. Not what they did. How they talk about it. Whether the ambiguity bothered them or interested them. That usually tells me more than anything else in the conversation. I look for it partly because I've been that person. The early hire walking into a role that didn't fully exist yet, more times than I can count. What's the most useful signal you've found when hiring for an early-stage or undefined role?

We were three months into a deal that should have closed in six weeks. The conversations were productive. Stakeholders were engaged. Follow-ups were getting answered. Nothing looked wrong. But nothing was moving. At that point, I stopped trying to push the process forward and started trying to understand the organisation better. In a conversation with one of the stakeholders, a name came up for the first time. They weren't part of the buying committee. They weren't in any of the meetings. They weren't involved in procurement. But internally, people listened to them. And they had reservations about what we were proposing. Not because they disliked the solution. They simply hadn't been part of the conversation, so they were evaluating it through second-hand information. We asked for an introduction. No deck. No demo. No sales pitch. Just a conversation about how they viewed the problem, what concerns they had, and what success would look like from their perspective. That discussion changed the trajectory of the deal. It closed two weeks later. That deal reinforced something I've seen repeatedly: formal authority and actual influence are rarely the same thing. The org chart tells you who can approve. It doesn't tell you who people trust. It doesn't tell you whose opinion carries weight when nobody senior is in the room. And it definitely doesn't tell you who can quietly slow momentum without ever formally saying no. Some of the biggest deal risks aren't objections. They're stakeholders you haven't identified yet. What's your tell that a key stakeholder is missing from the conversation?

Most outbound advice focuses on what to say. Very little attention goes to whether you're talking to the right person at the right moment. That's why most teams end up sending hundreds of messages to book a handful of meetings. The bottleneck often isn't copy. It's timing. I was recently exploring GojiberryAI and ended up reading their High Intent Outreach framework. One thing that stood out: The premise isn't that AI writes better outreach. It's that AI helps identify people who are already showing signs they're in-market before you ever send a message. Things like: • Engaging with competitor content • Recently changing roles • Companies announcing funding rounds • Other buying-intent signals across LinkedIn The framework included a case study where they booked 12 demos in 5 days by focusing on intent signals rather than building traditional cold prospect lists. Whether that exact number is repeatable isn't really the point. The interesting part is the shift in thinking. Most teams start with a list and then try to create interest. Intent-based prospecting starts by finding existing demand rather than trying to create it. That's a very different approach to outbound. The framework is worth a read if pipeline generation is part of your role. If you'd like a copy, leave a comment and I'll send it over. I've also dropped a link to Gojiberry in the comments if you'd like to explore the product yourself👇

Every market entry I've been close to had a version of the same moment. Somewhere between the planning phase and first real traction, the original assumptions start breaking. Not dramatically. Quietly. Usually, mid-conversation with someone who's been in that market for years and is too polite to say, 'this won't work the way you think.' The teams that caught it early shared something in common. They went in expecting to be wrong about specific things. They built in time to find out what those things were before committing to scale. The ones that caught it late made the same mistake. They confused a positive early signal with validation. A few good meetings, a promising pilot, genuine interest from the right people. And then ran the full motion before they actually understood what was working and why. In my experience, that last part is the key piece of the whole puzzle. Knowing why something is working is completely different from knowing that it is. One tells you what to do next. The other just feels good. The best market entry I've seen didn't look impressive from the outside. Slow start, small first deal, deliberately narrow scope. But the team could explain exactly why each thing was happening. Which meant when they did move faster, they knew exactly how. What's the one thing that only became obvious once you were actually inside a new market?