What is a GTM Engineer?
Find out what GTM engineers do and how they help your business
The old way of scaling scales – hiring more reps + high-volume mass outreach – no longer works.
That’s because today’s sales landscape is more complex with new tools, artificial intelligence, and automation changing how businesses operate.
To solve this challenge, meet the Go-to-Market Engineer.
They have the technical skill to use new tech, and the business savvy to get results.
What is a Go-to-Market Engineer?
Go-to-Market (GTM) engineers are specialists who bridge the gap between technical expertise and business strategy. They have the technical chops to set up and manage sales tools, and the business acumen to leverage technology and generate measurable sales results.
This places them at the crossroads of revenue operations, sales, and growth. And in modern businesses, GTM engineers play a critical role in optimizing and scaling a company’s GTM strategy.
Downfall of the old way to scale sales
A decade ago, when companies found their product-market fit and made the decision to scale, they simply needed to hire more sales reps. Companies believed that more reps meant more leads, more opportunities, and – ultimately – more revenue.
This play worked when high-volume cold emails regularly generated results.
But this play isn’t as effective as it used to be. Between email service providers making traditional cold outreach increasingly difficult and sales tools becoming more sophisticated, sales teams are forced to succeed in a dramatically different sales landscape.
Why GTM engineers are emerging
But if you’re looking for the real reason why GTM engineers have become a necessity, then look no further than the rapid evolution of technology like:
- Large language models that transform the speed and way we communicate with prospects
- Automation that accelerates work velocity and eliminates manual, repetitive tasks
- AI-powered sales tools that enable deeper and more thorough work
The growing complexity and integrations of sales tools demand individuals with a specific skill set that helps them navigate and adapt new tech.
And instead of the old outbound playbook, companies have been forced to rethink their entire go-to-market strategy and create a new GTM playbook that emphasizes:
- Quality over quantity in prospects
- Data-driven decision-making and processes
- AI-powered micro-campaigns
- AI-powered signal-based selling that targets prospects at the right moment
This is where GTM engineers become critical to success. When GTM engineering is executed well, companies can quickly multiply their pipeline and reduce their dependency on headcount to scale sales.
Each new tool or automation a GTM engineer implements helps chip away at manual work, creating a more efficient and scalable sales operation.
What does a GTM engineer do?
Thanks to their technical savviness and sales acumen, GTM engineers are tasked with setting up tools that help companies overcome sales challenges.
Current sales challenges
Compared to the sales landscape of just a few years ago, companies now have to deal with these challenges:
- Buyer cycles are more complex
- Teams are leaner
- Automation is expected
- Surge in powerful yet complex sales tools
- Emerging AI capabilities that require expertise to leverage effectively
GTM engineer responsibilities
Many GTM engineers are assigned these responsibilities:
- Pipeline generation
- Deal closure
- Technical training
- Tool integration and management
This looks like a lot, but a smart GTM engineer uses their sales toolkit to automate the majority of the workload.
GTM engineer sales toolkit
Here are some of the sales tools that GTM engineers use on a daily basis:
- Generative AI for creating content and sales collateral to make GTM motions more dynamic and responsive.
- AI-powered personalization for collecting and using lead data to create highly relevant messages that are tailored to individual preferences and needs.
- Sales automation tools for automating low-value, high-volume tasks so they have more time for situations that need a human
- Data analytics tools for monitoring outreach results, tracking engagement, and ensuring email infrastructure is in good health
- Lead scoring, qualification, & prioritization for targeting high-value prospects and avoiding wasting resources on unlikely customers.
Examples of GTM engineering tasks
Using their toolkit, here are some concrete example tasks that a GTM engineer might do:
- Conduct detailed account research and qualify leads at scale
- Drill down into current email, phone, and LinkedIn rules and look for automation opportunities where possible
- Scrape niche industry websites to find new prospects
- Support SDRs by providing key data that can push deals forward
- Use sales triggers like recent job changes to run better-timed outreach and generate better conversion
- Help Marketing automate lead qualification for inbound prospects
Notice how some of the tasks involve helping SDRs and Marketing?
GTM engineers are like a Swiss army knife that can do almost everything. But that doesn’t mean you need to ditch talented and highly qualified specialists.
GTM engineers vs sales teams
Because of what GTM engineering does, many argue that a GTM engineer is just a rebrand of an existing role, such as RevOps or sales development.
They’re not wrong, but they’re not entirely right. If anything, “GTM engineer” is a strategic consolidation of multiple roles rather than just a simple rebrand.
5 distinct roles. 5 distinct functions.
Just like AiSDR consolidates many different sales tools into one platform, a GTM engineer consolidates several different roles into 1 position.
By combining these traditionally separate roles, GTM engineers can:
- Reduce handoffs between teams
- Speed up sales cycles
- Provide more consistent customer experiences
- Scale operations quicker and more efficiently
- Drive better results with fewer resources
What are the benefits of a GTM engineer?
As you can imagine, combining multiple roles into one position offers several key advantages that can transform a company’s sales and growth efforts.
Tighter feedback loops
In a traditional sales model, SDRs and BDRs find leads and pass them to AEs. AEs often rely on sales engineers for technical help before handing customers off to customer success teams after closing deals. This handoff process runs the risk of creating delays and inefficiencies.
With GTM engineers, everything is handled by one person. They manage the entire process from start to finish: finding leads, handling technical questions, and supporting customers post-sale.
This eliminates unnecessary steps, shortens the sales cycle, and gets prospects to demos faster.
Greater product knowledge
Sales reps and AEs typically possess enough surface-level product knowledge to sell the product. If they have a technical question, they need to reach out to the product team.
GTM engineers, on the other hand, are power users. They’re capable of demonstrating advanced features, solve technical issues, and run specific GTM plays.
From the first interaction, prospects and customers receive expert consultations instead of standard sales pitches. This leads to a smoother, faster customer experience and builds trust from day one.
Better product feedback
GTM engineers use your product daily, which gives them unique insights into its functionality and opportunities for improvement. They often spot issues or features that sales teams might overlook.
This creates a flywheel effect where:
- A GTM engineer closes a lead
- While working with the lead, the GTM engineer sees a chance for a product fix or idea
- The product team implements the fix or idea
- The product gets better
- The GTM engineer closes new leads more easily
- Your company grows its revenue
Over time, the cycle repeats, improving the product, boosting sales efficiency, and driving revenue growth.
