What is GTM recruiting, and how is it different from sales recruiting?

By Kim Talarczyk, founder of Demand Recruiting

GTM recruiting is recruiting for the go-to-market team, the sales, marketing, RevOps and customer success people who bring in and grow revenue, and the leaders over them. Sales recruiting fills sales seats. In GTM recruiting I look at how a hire fits the whole revenue motion, because at a small B2B SaaS company your first seller, first marketer and first RevOps hire depend on each other more than their titles suggest.

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What GTM recruiting covers

For me GTM covers sales, marketing, RevOps, customer success and the leaders over them. On the sales side that's AEs and founding AEs, SDRs and BDRs, sales engineers, partnerships roles, and sales managers and VPs of Sales. On the marketing side it's demand gen, growth, product marketing and content, and marketing leadership. RevOps and GTM engineers keep the systems and data under all of it working, and customer success keeps and grows the revenue the rest of the team brings in. You can see how I approach each search on my services page.

How GTM recruiting is different from sales recruiting

Hiring for sales means finding someone who can carry a number in your sales motion. Hiring for GTM means looking at how that person fits with everyone else who touches revenue, because at a small company your first seller, first marketer and RevOps person lean on each other every day.

Scope is the obvious difference, but the handoffs are the one that matters most. I want to know how a marketer thinks about the meetings sales will take, and how a seller works with the pipeline marketing builds. A good sales recruiter will ask about your motion too. What changes in a GTM search is that I'm also asking how this seat will work with the ones next to it.

That's why I start by defining the gap you need to fill, not just the job title. "We need a marketer" can mean someone to build pipeline from zero, someone to tell the product story, or someone to take over the channels the founder already started.

What I look at in a GTM search

I look past the title to what someone owned, real revenue or just activity like calls and MQLs. I ask how they approach their work, then pick one example and keep going deeper. That shows me how they think, and with marketers it shows whether they think in programs or only in channels.

When a candidate has been in a role that works closely with sales or marketing, I ask how they handled the handoffs with that team. I also check that they've done the work in a motion and stage like yours, PLG or sales-led, SMB or enterprise. I walk through the rest of my process in my hiring framework.

When you need a GTM recruiter, and when you don't

If your network keeps producing people who fit, start there. A GTM recruiter helps most with a first hire in a function, a leadership seat, or a role you've tried to fill and couldn't, because those are the searches where defining the seat matters as much as finding people. If you're comparing options, I go through how I'd choose a recruiter for a GTM hire in my guide to SaaS recruiting agencies.

How I work

At Demand Recruiting I recruit for sales, marketing, RevOps and other key revenue roles at B2B SaaS companies, working with founders and GTM leaders. You work with me, Kim Talarczyk, on every search. There's no hand-off to a junior recruiter or an account team.

If you're trying to work out which GTM seat comes next, I'd love to hear what you're building.

Let's talk about your next hire