GTM engineers can help you launch experiments regarding a new onboarding flow, pricing test, or lead generation tool in just a few hours. They know how to help you skip long development cycles and handoffs between teams. If you have an early-stage SaaS startup, keep reading to understand how an ideal GTM engineer can help you gain quick momentum before scaling up.
Role of a GTM Engineer in Your Growth Development
It’s a special role that emerges from the intersection of three departments–operations, growth, and sales. So, a GTM engineer is an experimental layer on your growth team. They build new systems and experiment to grow revenue through automation and new technologies.
Ideal GTM engineers help you grow revenue without increasing headcount by:
Removing bottlenecks in experimentation
Rapid testing and iterations are very important to create a winning SaaS product. However, if it gets delayed, you are missing opportunities to optimize the user experAccording to a McKinsey report, SaaS companies spend more than 50% of their revenue on marketing and sales. For startups, that’s a big number to reach, convince, and convert customers. That said, in the early days of a SaaS startup, every campaign and every decision must push growth in the right direction. This is whereience. That will eventually translate to higher customer acquisition costs and lower lifetime value. A GTM engineer has all the technical skills to run these experiments without overburdening the core development team. As they increase the frequency of testing cycles, your SaaS products achieve significant improvements in metrics and directly benefit your bottom line.
Unlocking non-obvious growth channels
One of the best ways to cut over-reliance on saturated markets is to look out for alternative growth channels for your SaaS product. Hubspot’s integration with Zapier to acquire users using tools not natively supported by the platform can be a perfect example. Unfortunately, most companies miss out on such opportunities because their core engineering team is not free for such experiments. A GTM engineer can quickly prototype and implement integrations to experiment such potential growth channels for your SaaS product without diverting the core engineering resources.
Enabling faster customer feedback loops
Nearly 71% of millennials believe a quick-responding service team significantly influences their customer experience. If your development team is too occupied with mundane tasks to analyze and fix product complaints, customer churn rates will go high exponentially. Even a monthly churn rate of 10% means that the annual churn rate is closer to 72%! An experienced GTM engineer knows how to build light dashboards, hook up analytics, or ship a quick fix based on recurring feedback. They can do all of these without a full sprint. That means faster response, happy customers, and less churn.
Making data accessible across teams
Let’s say your sales team wants to target users who signed up but never activated. It will require a synchronized effort between the marketing team and the product operations department. Even as per a Gartner study, 82% of organizations struggle to achieve such a 360-degree view of customers to make such actions. As a result, they invest in the wrong tools. GTM engineers are trained and have the experience to build internal tools to unify data streams across teams. They enable teams to act on key customer insights at the right time so that your revenue never slips through the cracks on missed opportunities.
How to Identify a Result-Driven GTM Engineer?
Pick any serious GTM engineer, they are a rare blend of technical chops, business instinct and customer obsession. Put them in a messy startup environment, they don’t wait around for ideal opportunities six months from now to show your results, they deeply care about what moves the needle today.
At Rocket Talent, we have many years of experience in separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to growth-savvy GTM engineers. In our experience, these are some typical characteristics of an ideal GTM engineer:
They think in experiments, not features
Top go-to-market engineers are known for driving meaningful product experiments to help you grow faster. Let’s say you want to test if a free trial converts better than a freemium model. In general, your engineers might take weeks to build full flows for both. But, a GTM engineer can spin up a quick landing page A/B test to gather early data within a day.
They are close to customers
GTM engineers are your technical close allies to customers. They join customer calls, read support tickets, and live in tools like Hotjar and FullStory. If users are leaving the signup process halfway, they can spot and fix the issue in hours, not weeks.
They know when to duct-tape, when to scale
In the SaaS industry, sometimes, you need to run dozens of quick-growth experiments with proven hacks before investing in polished versions. GTM engineers can do that to validate ideas fast for you. They are not afraid to take some calculated risks as long as they get feedback.
They are proactive problem solvers
Revenue-oriented go-to-market engineers proactively fix problems before anyone flags them so that performance metrics do not suffer. For instance, if they see your leads are not booking demos due to broken timezone settings on mobile, they will patch it in an hour.
Mistakes to Avoid While Recruiting GTM Engineers
The annual salary of GTM engineers varies between $92K to $159K in the United States. So, you have to be super careful when recruiting candidates for such a high-salary role. However, most SaaS companies miss the mark by making these common mistakes:
Treating GTM engineers as regular developers
Most companies assume that any full-stack developer can double up as a GTM engineer. They hire purely based on technical skills. When they see that their GTM engineer lacks skills for business acumen and curiosity around growth levers, they regret their decision.
Focusing on brand names instead of startup fit
Just because an applicant worked at a popular startup doesn’t mean they are built for your early-stage startup hustle. If you’re recruiting based on pedigree alone, you’re making a big mistake. Instead, look beyond resumes to find GTM engineers who thrive in chaos, not just structure. The best candidates shine when asked about their work culture with imperfect inputs, like building lead generation tools from scratch.
Not having a clear success plan post-recruitment
The initial one to two months are important for a new GTM engineer in your startup. Most startups don’t have a clear onboarding strategy. Without clear goals, even the best GTM engineer can feel lost. It is important to give them early wins to own and make them a part of your growth team from day one.
Ready to Recruit the Best GTM Engineer? Let Rocket Talent Help You
Gain access to our pre-vetted, exclusive network of top 2% GTM engineers with proven track records to thrive in new SaaS startups. We also offer a free replacement service up to 24 months and complementary HR advisory services for a hassle-free onboarding of your new candidate.
