GTM Team

Your GTM team is the engine that drives customer acquisition and retention. The right team structure at each stage accelerates growth. The wrong structure creates bottlenecks, duplicate effort, and wasted budget. Understanding what roles you need, when to hire them, and how to organize them is critical to GTM success.

The GTM team encompasses all roles responsible for customer acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. This includes marketing, sales, product, customer success, operations, and analytics. GTM is not just the sales team. It is the integrated system that moves customers from awareness to advocacy.

Team composition by stage

Seed stage: 3-5 person GTM team

At seed, GTM is the founder and 1-2 generalists. Roles include the founder or head of GTM, who sets strategy, handles investor relations, owns key customer relationships, and conducts sales calls. Marketing generalist handles content, social, ads, events, and customer research, often with 1 person handling it all. A sales or customer success generalist handles sales calls, contract negotiation, onboarding, and support, often the same person.

Series A: 8-15 person GTM team

Series A allows specialized roles. Team composition includes a VP or head of marketing who owns the marketing strategy, brand, content, and campaigns. Marketing managers with 2-3 managers handling content, paid ads, events, and community. VP or head of sales who owns sales strategy, hiring, and pipeline. Sales development rep (SDR) or account executive with 2-4 SDRs generating and qualifying leads and 1-2 AEs closing deals. Customer success manager handling onboarding, retention, and expansion revenue. Product manager bridges product and GTM, owns feature roadmap based on customer feedback.

Series B plus: 20-50 plus-person GTM team

Series B enables departmentalization and specialization. The chief revenue officer (CRO) oversees all revenue-generating activities, including sales, customer success, and revenue ops. VP or head of marketing owns demand generation, brand, and product marketing. Marketing team with 8-12 people, including a paid acquisition manager, content manager, events manager, analyst, and ops. VP or head of sales owns the sales team, strategy, hiring, and quota. The sales team with 10-15 people includes a sales manager, 4-6 AEs, 4-6 SDRs, and a sales engineer. VP or head of customer success owns retention and expansion, team is 4-8 CSMs plus customer ops. VP or head of product bridges customer needs with product roadmap. Revenue operations or analytics owns CRM, sales data, analytics, and forecasting.

Key GTM roles and responsibilities

Head of marketing

Owns awareness, consideration, and demand generation. Sets marketing strategy, owns budget, and manages team. Responsible for CAC by channel, cost per lead, and conversion rate from lead to SQL.

Product marketing manager

Bridges the product and market. Owns positioning, messaging, competitive intelligence, and customer research. Works with sales and product to ensure messaging aligns with product capabilities.

Account executive (AE)

Owns relationships and closes deals. Manages pipeline, qualifies leads, negotiates contracts, and closes sales. For SLG motions, AEs are the primary growth lever.

Sales development rep (SDR)

Generates and qualifies leads for AEs. Owns outbound prospecting, qualifying inbound leads, and scheduling demos. SDRs’ own conversion rates from leads to scheduled meetings.

Customer success manager (CSM)

Owns customer retention, activation, and expansion. Manages onboarding, training, adoption, renewal, and upsell. For SaaS, the CSM retention rate determines LTV.

Head of sales

Owns sales strategy, hiring, coaching, pipeline, and revenue. Sets quota, builds sales playbook, manages AEs and SDRs. Responsible for CAC and sales cycle length.

Team structure by GTM motion

Product-led growth (PLG) team structure

PLG prioritizes product experience and self-serve conversion over direct sales. Team structure emphasizes the product as the largest team that owns free user experience, onboarding, conversion, and retention. Content or marketing owns SEO, blog, community, and developer relations, driving organic acquisition. Customer success is smaller than SLG, focuses on retention and expansion for paying customers. Sales is a minimal team that handles only enterprise deals that require custom pricing or features.

Sales-led growth (SLG) team structure

SLG prioritizes direct sales and customer relationships over self-serve. Team structure emphasizes sales as largest team where AEs and SDRs are the primary growth engine, focus on CAC and sales velocity. Customer success is large team, manages relationships and expansion, handoff from sales and retention focus. Marketing supports sales with lead generation and account-based marketing, owns content for different personas. Product builds based on customer feedback from sales team, less emphasis on self-serve experience.

Hybrid (PLG plus SLG) team structure

Hybrid uses both self-serve and sales-assisted paths. Team structure includes product as medium-large team who owns free product and self-serve conversion. Sales as medium team handles SMB and mid-market deals that convert through self-serve but need sales help for expansion. Customer success as medium team manages both self-serve and sales-assisted customers. Marketing as medium team owns content for self-serve but also supports sales team with ABM and lead generation.

Hiring sequence

First hire at 3-5 months in is sales-focused person to validate product-market fit and gather customer feedback. This person should do sales calls and close deals.

Second hire at 6-9 months in is marketing-focused person to build content, brand, and demand generation. This person amplifies what the first hire is doing.

Third hire at 12-18 months in is customer success or operations person to manage the growing customer base and operations.

Manager hires at 24 plus months in hire heads of teams like VP Sales or VP Marketing to manage and grow teams. Bring on experienced leaders who have scaled before.

When to hire vs outsource

Hire in-house for sales team, customer success, product, and brand or positioning. These are core to your competitive advantage and require deep product knowledge.

Outsource or hire contractors for design, legal, HR, accounting, paid ads management in initial phase, and event logistics. These are not core and can be managed by external partners.

Hybrid approach for content with mix of in-house writers and freelance, marketing ops with contractor initially then hire, and analytics with contractor initially then hire as data complexity grows.

Common GTM team-building mistakes

Hiring too many salespeople before validating sales motion. If you hire 5 AEs before your sales process is repeatable, you waste money and burn team morale. Build the sales playbook with 1-2 AEs first, then scale.

Hiring generalists when specialists are needed. At Series B, you need specialists, not generalists. A marketing person cannot own content, ads, events, and data simultaneously at scale.

Siloing teams between marketing versus sales versus product. If teams do not collaborate, you will have messaging conflicts, misaligned customer handoffs, and wasted budget. Ensure weekly GTM meetings where teams align.

Hiring sales managers before sales reps are productive. A sales manager overhead without productive reps kills margins. Hire reps first, then managers to scale them.

Not documenting processes before scaling team. Without documentation, new hires cannot ramp efficiently. Document your sales playbook, marketing process, onboarding, and customer success playbook before hiring specialists.

Team metrics

Track team health through revenue per headcount, time to productivity for new hires with 3-6 months typical, retention rate of top performers with aim for 90% plus annual retention, quota attainment as percentage of team hitting quota, and customer satisfaction by team showing NPS from customers of each CSM and close rate by AE.

About upGrowth

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