Do you really need to hire GTM roles?

Go-to-market teams are booming.

According to Highspot’s 2025 State of Sales Enablement report, 57% of business executives expect their GTM teams to grow this year.

Is your company keeping pace? 🤔

More than creating a new business function, forming a GTM team is a mindset shift that shatters silos, combining product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams into one cohesive unit.

Even if your organization doesn’t have a dedicated GTM team today, chances are you already have several GTM roles on your org chart. That, or you were thinking about hiring them anyway before launching a new product or attempting to increase traction among existing ones.

In this piece, we break down what GTM teams are, the roles that power them, and the practical steps you can take to build a high-performing GTM motion of your own.

What is a go-to-market team?

A go-to-market (GTM) team combines members from marketing, sales, customer success, and product, who work together to build and execute a repeatable revenue strategy. Instead of passing work from one department to the next, GTM teams work together as a single organism.

GTM teams oversee the end-to-end customer journey together. Each function uses the same data sources, software, and customer data to stay aligned, with everyone making decisions from a single source of truth.

In today’s crowded market, a strong GTM team is increasingly important. Building a great product isn’t enough on its own anymore. You need a team that’s obsessed with understanding customers, testing new channels and ideas, and scaling strategies and tactics that work.

“Building great products is easier than ever and only getting easier. What you need to build a great business is a great GTM team — people who can actually build distribution for your product. People who excel at GTM inherently experiment and go deep on each experiment with bullheaded persistence. They are your prized possessions.” Anshul Gupta, partner at TrueAlpha, wrote on LinkedIn. 

GTM teams consists of these four core functions:

1. Product defines what’s being brought to market, building features and shaping messaging based on customer needs. They ensure products align with demand and are developed with customer feedback in mind.
   
   
2. Marketing generates product awareness and demand through messaging and creative that resonates with target accounts. Within GTM, marketing works closely with sales and customer success to generate demand and nurture leads.
   
   
3. Sales converts demand into revenue by engaging prospects, guiding them through the buying process, and then closing deals. They share buyer insights with teammates, using it to shape messaging and determine which product features to prioritize. 

4. Customer success teams engage customers post-sale to ensure that they’re unlocking the product’s full value and generating ROI. They’re also tasked with customer retention and expansion through upselling and cross-selling.

The main difference between GTM teams and their more traditional sales and revenue counterparts is adding product teams to sales efforts. Instead of being siloed within engineering, product teams also interact with customers and prospects, which helps them develop products using real-world feedback.

GTM teams are typically led by a GTM Manager or GTM Director — or maybe a title even higher than that. Whatever the title is, this person oversees the GTM function, ensuring that newly launched products or services are meeting customer expectations.

GTM manager/director role

A GTM manager owns the overall GTM motion. This person is the glue that holds the marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams together. They ensure everyone is aligned on audiences, messaging, data, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Laser-focused on results and efficiency, GTM managers identify the motions that work best and scale them across the function. 

Primary responsibilities:

• Defining the organization’s go-to-market strategy
• Aligning marketing, sales, customer success, and product around shared goals and processes
• Spearheading product launches and campaigns
• Analyzing GTM performance and focusing on continuous improvement

Required skills:

• Strong leadership and communication skills
• Deep understanding of marketing, sales, and customer lifecycle
• Data analytics skills; ability to translate insights into action
• Project management expertise

GTM KPIs:

• Pipeline generation
• Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
• Conversion rates across the funnel
• Revenue growth, retention, and expansion

GTM roles: Product

Depending on how large the company is, you might have one product manager or many of them, each responsible for different product lines. When it comes to GTM teams, the product teams play an important role — one that often isn’t part of traditional RevOps functions. 

Product manager GTM role

The product manager sits between the product and GTM teams, ensuring that products are ready to bring to market. Owning positioning and packaging, product managers translate customer feedback and market insights into features and other user-friendly product decisions. Ultimately, the product manager is responsible for making the product easy to sell and easy to adopt.

Primary responsibilities:

• Coordinating product launches across marketing, sales, and customer success
• Defining positioning, messaging, and packaging for new products and features
• Gathering customer and market insights to inform the product roadmap
• Creating assets for customer success and sales enablement

Required skills:

• Strong customer and market research capabilities
• Ability to communicate and collaborate with a cross-functional team
• Proven storytelling and messaging skills
• Product launch execution experience

GTM KPIs:

• Launch adoption (e.g., activations and new feature usage)
• Sales readiness via sales enablement collateral
• Post-launch win rate or conversion lift
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) on new products or features

GTM engineer role

A GTM engineer is the technical wizard within the GTM org tasked with connecting tools, data, and workflows. Zeroed in on operational efficiency, GTM engineers make sure all relevant tools — like CRMs, sales prospecting tools, and the rest of the sales tech stack — play nicely with each other. They also aim to automate as many repetitive workflows as they can, like lead scoring and lead routing.

Want to learn more about this relatively yet highly impactful new role? See our GTM engineering deep dive.

Primary responsibilities:

• Building and maintaining GTM systems (e.g., CRM and data enrichment)
• Automating workflows for lead scoring and routing
• Consolidating data to create a single source of truth
• Optimizing GTM tooling and processes 

Required skills:

• Sharp technical chops
• Systems thinking, with the ability to design scalable workflows
• Data modeling and analytics expertise
• Ability to translate GTM needs into technical solutions

GTM KPIs:

• Lead routing speed and accuracy
• Data quality (e.g., enrichment rates)
• Operational efficiency gains (e.g., reduced manual steps)
• Reporting reliability

GTM roles: Marketing

Traditional marketing teams operate in silos, focusing on top-of-funnel metrics, throwing leads over the wall, and hoping for the best. In a GTM model, marketing is part of a well-oiled revenue engine with shared goals and shared data. In addition to lead generation, they’re responsible for pipeline quality and revenue impact. Marketing also collaborates more closely with the product team, developing positioning and defining the ideal customer profile (ICP) together.

Product marketing GTM role

As part of GTM teams, product marketers bridge the gap between the product team and the market, owning positioning and ICP development. Tasked with turning product features into persuasive narratives, product marketers help sales and customer success teams sell more faster. 

Primary responsibilities:

• Developing positioning, messaging, and value propositions
• Defining customer personas and the ICP
• Leading product launches across sales, marketing, and customer success
• Creating sales enablement collateral (e.g., battlecards and decks)

Required skills:

• Conducting market research and gathering customer insights
• Storytelling and developing messaging and positioning
• Ensuring alignment with product, sales, and customer success teams
• Analyzing competitors and thinking strategically

GTM KPIs:

• Win rate improvement
• Launch performance and new feature adoption
• Sales enablement effectiveness
• Pipeline influenced

Marketing / ABM manager GTM role

With the context of GTM, marketing and account-based marketing (ABM) managers own demand generation and account-level engagement. Partnering with sales, these folks target priority accounts, using data and buying signals to inform personalized outreach. Marketing managers focus on the full funnel, from awareness to pipeline to expansion.

Primary responsibilities:

• Running ABM campaigns
• Building multi-channel demand programs for ICP segments
• Collaborating with sales on outreach sequences
• Tracking account engagement and intent and optimizing programs

Required skills:

• Understanding of ABM strategies and demand generation experience
• Audience segmentation and personalization skills (Pssst: Personalization is super easy using tools like LeadIQ Scribe)
• Technical and data analysis capabilities
• Ability to work with cross-functional teams

GTM KPIs:

• Pipeline created for target accounts
• Deal acceleration metrics (e.g., meeting conversions)
• ROI from ABM programs
• Account engagement improvements

GTM roles: Sales

Sales plays a central role in GTM efforts, particularly in B2B settings where deals are more complex, involving multiple stakeholders and longer deal cycles. Instead of just engaging marketing-generated leads, sales partners with the GTM team to drive revenue, using customer insights to improve messaging and level up sales strategies. Operating on the frontlines, sales is the human layer of the GTM engine, helping build trust and navigate internal politics within target accounts.

Sales manager GTM role

Sales managers oversee the sales team within GTM, ensuring reps closely collaborate with marketing, product, and customer success teams. They coach reps on messaging and deal strategy and are accountable for overall team performance, pipeline health, and forecast accuracy.

Primary responsibilities:

• Managing and coaching sales reps and account executives
• Ensuring the team hits quota and pipeline targets
• Collaborating with marketing, product, and customer success
• Using data-driven insights to coach reps

Required skills:

• Leadership and people management experience
• Knowledge of deal strategy and how to sell
• Ability to work with cross-functional teams
• Data-driven coaching and sales forecasting capabilities

GTM KPIs:

• Team’s quota attainment
• Pipeline quality
• Win rates and deal velocity
• Sales forecasting accuracy

Account executive GTM role

In a GTM context, account executives (AEs) are responsible for prospecting, giving product demos, and closing deals. They build strong customer relationships and are usually the main point of contact for prospects and clients. AEs also collect feedback and bring it back to the GTM team to refine messaging and improve strategy.

Primary responsibilities:

• Managing deals from opportunity to close
• Engaging with multiple stakeholders in target accounts
• Collaborating with sales development reps and marketing on deal strategy
• Sharing customer insights with the broader GTM team

Required skills:

• Collaborative selling and negotiation skills
• Ability to manage multiple stakeholders
• Pipeline management and CRM proficiency
• Knowledgeable about ICPs and buyer personas 

GTM KPIs:

• Quota attainment
• Average deal size, sales cycle length
• Win rate
• Total revenue booked

SDR/BDR GTM role

Within GTM, sales development reps (SDRs) and business development reps (BDRs) focus on lead generation, identifying and qualifying opportunities. These roles manage outbound prospecting, engaging leads and ultimately booking meetings. SDRs and BDRs work closely together with AEs, ensuring smooth handoffs at the right times. They also collect customer and prospect feedback, sharing it with the rest of the GTM team. 

Primary responsibilities:

• Prospecting and outbound outreach
• Qualifying inbound leads and routing them to AEs
• Maintaining CRM data quality and data hygiene
• Conducting account research (which is super easy with tools like LeadIQ! 😎)

Required skills:

• Strong communication skills, including being comfortable with cold outreach
• Experience with account research and prospecting
• CRM and sales prospecting tool proficiency
• Persistence (even when repeatedly ignored!)

GTM KPIs:

• Number of qualified opportunities and meetings booked
• Lead conversion rate per opportunity
• Activity metrics (e.g., calls and emails sent)
• Contribution to pipeline growth

GTM roles: Customer success

Inside GTM teams, customer success (CS) reflects the voice of the customer. By gathering feedback on pain points, product usage, and feature requests, CS identifies trends and figures out what improvements can have the biggest impact on product adoption and customer satisfaction. By staying in close contact with customers, CS helps GTM teams deliver proactive product updates and fixes before minor issues become big ones.

Customer success manager GTM role

Customer success managers (CSM) are the main point of contact for high-value customers post-sale. By maintaining close relationships with their accounts, CSMs increase adoption and retention, and increase the chances of expansion within accounts. Any feedback CSMs collect is shared with the rest of the GTM team, ensuring product updates align with customer feedback.

Primary responsibilities:

• Managing a portfolio of accounts; increasing retention and adoption across all of them
• Reflecting the voice of the customer internally to the broader GTM team
• Coordinating with sales, product, and marketing on account strategy
• Updating the team on the health of accounts at regular intervals (e.g., quarterly)

Required skills:

• Managing relationships and collaborating with clients
• Problem-solving and analytical skills to troubleshoot issues
• Exceptional communication skills
• Customer advocacy, with empathetic and strategic thinking

GTM KPIs:

• Customer retention rate
• Upselling and expansion revenue
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Product adoption metrics

Customer onboarding specialist GTM role

Customer onboarding specialists help new customers get up and running quickly by guiding them through configuration, training, and initial use cases. By working hand-in-hand with customers as they’re just starting out, onboarding specialists help accelerate customer ROI and prevent early churn.

Primary responsibilities:

• Running onboarding and product training sessions for new customers
• Documenting onboarding processes and best practices for customer success
• Monitoring early usage signals to detect potential churn risks
• Collaborating with CSMs and product teams to influence new features

Required skills:

• Technical skills and deep product knowledge
• Superior communication and training skills (training requires patience!)
• Exceptional attention to detail
• Customer empathy and proactive problem-solving

GTM KPIs:

• Time-to-value for new customers
• Onboarding completion rate
• Early product engagement metrics
• Customer churn within 90 days

Customer experience specialist GTM role

Customer experience (CX) specialists monitor the customer journey across touchpoints and figure out what to improve. They identify friction in GTM motions, collecting both qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers and bringing it back to the GTM team. Their work helps ensure the brand delivers on its promises and that customer expectations are met.

Primary responsibilities:

• Identifying customer pain points
• Designing CX improvement initiatives
• Collecting and analyzing feedback from surveys and calls
• Partnering with product, sales, and marketing to improve CX

Required skills:

• Ability to analyze data and customer feedback
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Empathy and customer advocacy
• Commitment to process improvement

GTM KPIs:

• CSAT and NPS scores
• Customer churn and retention 
• Product adoption and usage metrics
• Time-to-value

How to get started building a GTM team

Remember: Just because you might not have a dedicated GTM team right now doesn’t mean you have to expand headcount to put one together. Chances are you have at least several of these roles filled at your organization already, and perhaps all of them if you’re big enough. 

Before you post any job listings for your GTM team, look to see whether you need to hire anyone in the first place. You might be able to cobble a team together using existing resources. You’d just have to position them differently and make sure they talk to each other.

If you do end up having to add a bit of headcount, it’s tricky but doable.

“One critical step in scaling your startup is assembling a go-to-market team to drive growth and connect your innovation with the right customers,” Joseph Malanka, who owns a recruiting firm, wrote on LinkedIn. “But it’s not always straightforward. Building a GTM team is both an art and a science.”

We agree.

By following these three steps, you can build a GTM team that helps your organization sell more.

1. Assess your needs

Hopefully, you’ve already completed a go-to-market assessment, diving into the market, competitors, opportunities, and beyond. This is the first step in ensuring the folks you hire have a clear understanding of what you’re building, why, and how it’s different from what’s already out there.

This exercise will help you establish what type of sales and marketing approaches you should take, like prioritizing ABM strategies and using cold outreach. It also helps you determine your budgets and the scale of your efforts.

2. Hire GTM roles

If you determine you don’t have enough in-house talent to build a GTM team, start filling roles. During this process, keep in mind that hiring a GTM team is similar to hiring traditional sales, marketing, product, and CS roles — except that their duties and responsibilities may be a bit different because each team member needs to be far more connected than traditional functions.

Since GTM is a newer term, keep in mind that some super talented applicants might not have that exact phrase on their resumes. To avoid overlooking these gems, make sure your application screening tools aren’t only surfacing candidates who’ve written “go-to-market” or “GTM” somewhere on their resume.

Not sure what kind of person to hire?

“Begin with a few versatile, high-impact hires who can wear multiple hats. Once your processes mature, bring in specialists,” Malanka continued. “Look for individuals who are comfortable building from scratch and pivoting quickly.”

Pro tip: While you’ll likely end up posting your job listings on sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, and other top job boards, we highly recommend looking for GTM roles within communities like ExitFive and RevGenius. Check them out! 

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3. Onboard the GTM team

Every new hire will need individual onboarding. Beyond that, though, you’ll want to make sure that each team — sales, marketing, product, and CS — is talking to each other from the start and onboarded together if possible.

By having built-in inter-team meetings from the start, sharing KPIs, and creating shared resources that act as a single source of truth, you can increase the chances your newly formed GTM team starts crushing it right out of the gate.

Measuring GTM team success

Building a GTM team is a great first step in creating a repeatable revenue engine. But even if your team is full of rockstars, it won’t be an overnight success. 

Follow these tips to build a strong team that drives more and more sales over time.

Establish cross-team KPIs

GTM teams are at their best when every department is responsible for achieving the same outcomes. Creating shared KPIs and broadcasting them across the GTM team prevents different departments from siloing the team’s goals — like marketing optimizing for leads, sales chasing closed deals, and CS caring only about retention. It’s an easy way to ensure every GTM function is moving in the same direction and using the same metrics to measure their impact.

Here are some cross-team KPIs to consider tracking for your GTM team:

• Revenue growth, which measures how quickly your GTM team is increasing the total amount of revenue generated over a specific period of time (e.g., a quarter).
• Market share, which reflects the percentage of a market’s total sales that your company controls compared to the competition.
• CAC, which represents how much money your company spends to acquire a new customer across marketing, sales, and other GTM activities.
• CAC:LTV, which compares customer acquisition costs with the total amount of revenue the customer is expected to bring in over their lifetime.
• Customer retention and renewal rates, which describe how well a company keeps existing customers over time and how often they choose to renew their subscriptions. 

Implement continuous learning

Even if your GTM team knocks it out of the park during the first couple of months, you can always hit more home runs. 

By implementing a culture of continuous learning and committing to continuous improvement, you can consistently improve the results of your GTM efforts.

Here are some tips to keep in mind as you get started:

• Make sure you have proper reporting and tooling. With the right tools, you can rest comfortably knowing that everyone is working from the same data and can confidently identify what’s working and what isn’t.
• Schedule team-specific meetings along with GTM team check-ins. This ensures the broader GTM team stays aligned on goals. It also gives each independent function an opportunity to discuss and solve their unique challenges.
• Adjust your strategies as you continue learning. By iterating on a continuous basis, your GTM motion stays agile and responsive to customer feedback and market trends.
• Launch and learn quickly. GTM is all about experimentation. Don’t be afraid to fail, just be ready to double down on your wins. 
• Celebrate success to inspire your team. Recognizing wins boosts morale and keeps your GTM momentum chugging along. 

Do you need to hire a GTM team?

While “GTM” can feel like a buzzword these days, teams that connect the dots between product and customers find much more success than those that do not. They can iterate faster, target the right prospects, and work together toward shared goals.

But don’t think you can just hire someone with GTM in their job title and start crushing it. GTM success is all about how leadership sets their teams up to be aligned and highly communicative with each other.

So, does your company actually need a dedicated GTM team? 

Or can you get by with the status quo?

Let’s turn to Maja Vole, a GTM consultant for B2B companies, for an answer.

“Go-to-market motions are predictable and scalable ways to get customers into the product,” she writes. “They are playbooks that you use to grow your company so you no longer have to worry about where your next client is coming from, but you can rely on a steady and sufficient inflow of leads in your business.” 

If a steady inflow of leads sounds nice, building a GTM team is certainly worth exploring.

Without the right tools and data, however, even the most skilled GTM practitioners will struggle. 

In fact, according to the Highspot report referenced all the way back at the beginning of this piece, 55% of organizations are unable to effectively drive their GTM initiatives. 

Why? 

For starters, 29% of companies still rely on a disconnected GTM stack, making it impossible for cross-functional GTM teams to stay aligned.

Here are LeadIQ, we love empowering GTM teams to do their best work. 

With purpose-built prospecting tools that fully integrate with your tech stack, highly actionable contact data and buyer insights that are automatically synced to your CRM and automatically enriched, our platform gives GTM teams a single source of truth they can use to align their efforts and bring products to market with confidence.

But don’t just take our word for it.

Request a demo today to see the power of LeadIQ with your own eyes and learn how we power GTM teams around the world.

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