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GTM hiring
Founding sellers, growth, marketing, and customer-facing roles.
Customer marketing or demand generation: define the audience
Choose customer marketing or demand generation by defining the audience, lifecycle problem, and collaboration needed.
Customer success or account growth: clarify the hire's main job
Separate adoption and service ownership from commercial expansion when designing a startup customer success or account management role.
How to define the mandate for your first marketing hire
Choose the customer problem, channel responsibility, and evidence of progress before hiring a startup's first marketer.
More in gtm hiring
23 guidesScoping developer community work separately from sales
Scope developer community work with clear participation, moderation, support, feedback, and commercial boundaries.
Defining a first developer relations hire
Define a first developer relations role around developer education, technical credibility, feedback, and useful participation.
A 30-day learning plan for your first GTM hire
Turn a first GTM hire's opening month into a practical sequence of product learning, buyer conversations, experiments, and decisions.
Defining a first pre-sales leadership role
Define a first presales leader's scope across technical discovery, demonstrations, evaluations, team development, and delivery handoffs.
How to scope a first product marketing hire
Scope a first product marketing role around buyer understanding, positioning, evidence, and useful commercial materials.
Scoping a first US sales hire
Define a first US sales hire around the target buyer, market-learning task, founder support, and commercial authority.
Forward-deployed engineer or solutions engineer: define the customer work
Separate pre-sales technical work from customer deployment ownership before hiring a forward-deployed or solutions engineer.
Forward-deployed strategist or engineer: define the customer outcome
Separate customer workflow discovery and deployment strategy from hands-on implementation in forward-deployed roles.
Founding account executive or GTM engineer: which should you hire?
Separate customer-facing sales ownership from systems, data, and automation work when designing a startup's first GTM hire.
Defining a founding seller's possible transition to leadership
Discuss a founding seller's possible leadership path through future responsibilities and demonstrated capability rather than an automatic title promise.
Writing a brief for a fractional growth engagement
Define a fractional growth engagement with a focused hypothesis, hands-on scope, access boundaries, review criteria, and a useful handoff.
Growth engineer or growth marketer: define the constraint
Choose a growth hire by identifying whether the bottleneck is market experimentation, product implementation, or measurement.
GTM strategy or revenue operations: where does the work belong?
Distinguish commercial choices about markets and motions from ownership of the processes and systems that execute them.
How to hand off founder-led sales to your first sales hire
Prepare customer context, deal evidence, decision rights, and a learning plan before transferring sales ownership from a founder.
Should you hire a customer-domain operator into sales?
Evaluate whether a domain operator can turn customer knowledge into discovery, commercial ownership, and repeatable selling.
When sales learning needs an enablement owner
Decide when sales enablement needs dedicated ownership and distinguish learning systems from frontline sales management.
A product marketing interview exercise based on buyer evidence
Use a fictional buyer-evidence packet to assess product marketing synthesis, positioning, claim discipline, and testing judgment.
Scoping a technical customer onboarding hire
Define technical customer onboarding across setup, integration, validation, adoption, and support handoff.
Technical support engineer or product engineer?
Choose technical support or product engineering by distinguishing customer investigation, recurring fixes, and product ownership.
When should a startup hire its first revenue operations person?
Evaluate recurring commercial process problems, ownership, and maintenance needs before opening a revenue operations role.