"GTM Engineer": Revolutionary Superhero or Self-Serving Marketing?

Last week, Varun Anand, Co-Founder @ Clay posted the article “Why we built the first GTM engineering team - and believe it’s the future of sales.” In some ways, I freaking loved this post because it aligns directly to GTMBA’s PoV that the future of sales requires more cerebral sellers who are scrappy and create leverage in their process through AI. However, Clay’s article was self-serving and omitted some critical considerations.

TLDR: Clay argues that AE, SDR, SE roles will merge into one function.

 Source: Clay

What they got right: The traditional SDR-to-AE assembly line is dying. As GTMBA highlighted 2 weeks ago, companies like Weaviate are optimizing GTM hiring to emphasize advanced tools like Clay and CommonRoom rather than the Sales tools of 2010s to create massive leverage in GTM orgs. This is happening and those who don’t do this will be left behind.

However, Clay's “super-seller” ideal (SDR, AE, Sales Engineer in one person) oversimplifies on two key dimensions:

1. Market Presence: Clay's model works extremely well because they've built a marketing engine deserving 3-Michelin Stars. Their “Claygency” network effectively functions as an outsourced SDR, AE, and Implementation team, creating warm leads and market presence. Am I impressed with what Clay has done? Hell yes! But, most companies never break out like with viral word-of-mouth. It’s much easier to collapse all the roles into one “GTM Engineer” when all you need to do is send a message and prospects want to talk to you and are predisposed to your product :)

2. ICP & Target Buyer: Clay's approach works really well for start-ups selling easy to implement products, into a very wide TAM, into GTM leaders at AI/Digital Natives. This buyer is forward thinking and the implementation risks are low. However, consider selling an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure to Engineers that requires customization and 6-12 implementation periods. This is a completely different ball game and requires a very different GTM model consisting of deployment experts, solutions architects, and account executives (you might get away with collapsing SDRs into AE roles).

So what’s our prediction? We are definitely aligned with the general idea behind a “GTM Engineer” - a superstar who can master AI-powered tools to create leverage in GTM and create $100M+ ARR companies with lean teams.

But buyer beware of the hype, you can’t just copy Clay’s “GTM Engineer” playbook. You need to understand how Clay’s PoV matches to your company’s circumstances - target buyer, marketing presence, and type of deployment.

Share your thoughts below.

Bisous,

Julian