The Go-to-Market Hiring Playbook for B2B Startups

Go-to-market hiring is where many startups stumble the hardest. You can have the best product in the world, but if your GTM team cannot find, engage, and close customers, it does not matter. And GTM hiring has unique challenges that are fundamentally different from engineering or product hiring.

The stakes are high. Your GTM team directly determines your revenue trajectory, and your revenue trajectory determines whether you can raise your next round. Get GTM hiring wrong, and you are burning cash without building the revenue engine your investors expect.

The GTM Hiring Sequence

Order matters enormously in GTM hiring. Here is the sequence that works for most B2B startups.

Phase 1: Founder-Led Sales (Pre-Hire)

Before hiring anyone, founders should close the first 10-20 customers personally. This is non-negotiable. You need to understand your buyer, your sales cycle, your objections, and your value proposition before you can teach someone else to sell for you.

Founders who skip this step and hire salespeople first almost always fail. They cannot train the rep because they do not understand the process themselves. They cannot evaluate performance because they do not know what good looks like. And they cannot provide the product feedback loop that comes from direct customer conversations.

Phase 2: First Sales Hire

Your first sales hire should be someone with 2-5 years of experience who has sold similar deal sizes to similar buyers. Do not hire a VP of Sales as your first hire. You need someone who can do the work, not someone who manages people doing the work.

Look for someone who has succeeded at an early-stage company before. The skills that make someone successful at Salesforce, where they have brand recognition, inbound leads, and sales engineers, do not transfer to a startup where they need to build their own pipeline from scratch.

Phase 3: Sales Development (SDR/BDR)

Once your first sales rep is generating consistent pipeline and closing deals, hire SDRs to fuel the top of the funnel. One to two SDRs per Account Executive is a typical ratio. SDRs should be hungry, coachable, and resilient. They do not need industry experience, they need work ethic and a willingness to make 80 calls a day.

Phase 4: Customer Success

As your customer base grows, hire for customer success before churn becomes a problem. A strong CSM at a startup should be part account manager, part product specialist, and part renewal closer. They own net revenue retention, which is arguably the most important metric for a B2B SaaS company.

Phase 5: Sales Leadership

Hire a VP of Sales or CRO when you have 3-5 reps and a repeatable sales process. This person should be able to formalize the playbook, build a training program, and scale the team from 5 to 20 reps. Hiring a sales leader too early, before you have a repeatable process, is one of the most expensive mistakes in startup history.

Key Roles Explained

Account Executive

Owns the full sales cycle from discovery to close. At startups, they often do their own prospecting as well. The best startup AEs are consultative sellers who genuinely understand the buyer's problems and can articulate how your product solves them.

Sales Development Representative

Owns outbound prospecting and inbound qualification. Their job is to generate qualified meetings for Account Executives. SDRs are typically early-career professionals who are building toward an AE role.

Solutions Engineer

Provides technical expertise during the sales process. They run demos, answer technical questions, and help design custom implementations. Hire this role when your product is technically complex and buyers need proof that it will work in their environment.

Revenue Operations

Manages the systems, data, and processes that keep the GTM machine running. CRM administration, pipeline reporting, territory management, and compensation plan design all fall under RevOps. This is often overlooked but becomes critical once you have more than five sellers.

Compensation Structures

B2B sales compensation should be structured to incentivize the behavior you want. For most startups, a 50/50 or 60/40 base-to-variable split works well for Account Executives. SDRs should be 70/30 or 80/20 since they control the activity but not the close.

Set realistic quotas based on actual data, not aspirations. A new rep's first-quarter quota should be 50-75% of a tenured rep's quota to account for ramp time. Unrealistic quotas demoralize your team and increase turnover.

The Bottom Line

Build your GTM team in sequence, not all at once. Start with founder-led sales, add individual contributors, then layer in management. Hire for your current stage, not the stage you hope to reach. And remember that the best salespeople are drawn to companies with a great product and a clear market opportunity, so invest in product-market fit first.