GTM engineering is mostly rebranded sales and marketing dressed up as technical work. The role emerged from Clay, pulls from marketing, sales, and revenue ops backgrounds, and relies on tools like Python and Claude for cold outreach and data integration. Only 30% of job listings actually mention coding.
Chapters
Give me a hot take. GTM title and the whole area around it is a made-up scam that only repackages sales and marketing into different category to sell better. Let's dive into that. So GTM engineering is a hot new topic. There are more GTM engineers than astronauts in the whole world, and it was just popping up in 2024, maybe even 2025. It kicked off. There's a company that has spawned the whole GTM or go-to-market movement, and it's none other than Clay. Clay was the first one to really come up with this job title, GTM engineering. And in my opinion, as somebody that's sitting in the GTM adjacent industry and coming from the revenue operations background, I want to dive into exactly how that works and why it's happening. In go-to-market engineering, there is no progression path and there was no path to becoming a GTM engineer beforehand. And unfortunately on LinkedIn, there's a lot of AI slop that's falling around and filling all of the cracks. So what can you actually believe? As somebody that's sitting in the space, I would very clearly tell you that a GTM engineer is one of 3 things. You are coming from the marketing strategy background. You are coming from the sales or sales operations background, or you are coming from a systematic or technical background, whether or not that's going to be in the engineering space or that's going to be in the technical space or even in the revenue operations space, these are where all of the GTMEs that I coach and I mentor are usually coming from. I would say a good 85% of them are from these 3 backgrounds. So that kind of begs the question, what is GTM engineering today? GTM engineering is becoming more of a split role. As you start to go through the jobs and everybody on the market hiring for this elusive position, you'll start to see Keywords like Python or Claude Code or Clay, or even tools like Apollo. These are all B2B different tools that you can go ahead and use their data to go and activate your network or even activate the market. But what does activating your market actually even mean for you? It means going out, maybe purchasing data, purchasing a list of data, putting ads on top of them, contacting them with cold email, and then orchestrating the results so that they go into your CRM. But realistically, is that all that GTM engineering really is? I wouldn't actually even say so. The problem with go-to-market engineering right now is that it's so undefined, and a lot of people that I know are not able to actually say what they do very clearly. A lot of the agencies in the space, or as we like to call them, claygencies, because they are productizing go-to-market engineering, what they are doing is they are packaging one of these 3 or one of these 4 different items. They are talking about cold email, maybe cold calling, advertising, and revenue operations. If you want to throw in there maybe sales operations, you can do this as well. This is my professional opinion though. You are going to be figuring yourself out in a technical role where you are combining your technical straps with demand generation abilities or channels, whether or not your channel or your activation channels are going to be centered around cold email, cold calling, ads, retargeting, nurture campaigns, or even CRM integration and implementation plans like the ones that I take care of, these are inherently going to become less and less commoditized, and you are going to see a lot more professionals push towards the technical roles in interconnected systems. As we probably have figured out by now, and you've probably figured out by now, data is becoming more and more commoditized. The bigger the wallet you have, the better and more data that you can get. Unfortunately, that's the way it is right now and the way it will continue to be. But with go-to-market engineering, it's about knowing how to connect the systems. It's about understanding the architecture between system 1, system 2, system 3, system 4, and understanding the most efficient path to be able to write scripts that are either going to transform the data with formulas or actually organize and figure out the edge cases between job title 1, job title 2, and job title 3. This is a really big thing in our industry right now where a lot of people use LinkedIn data to be able to do their job sourcing, their job targeting, and their ICP or ideal customer profile lists. Really, at the end of the day, people are in business to be able to serve other businesses. Businesses make money one of 3 ways. They either pour money down the top, they spend less money, or they systemize the in-between. The go-to-market engineer is responsible for all 3 of those functions and all 3 of those activation channels all at the same time. Unfortunately, the technical straps of the position are not sexy to sell. So you're seeing a lot of demand generation focused businesses, even somewhat so like my consultancy, focusing on both sides of that funnel. Winning by Design is, in my opinion, the gold class standard in revenue activation, where we have the bowtie method, where you have activating through marketing, sales, conversion optimization, and even, you know, promotion of existing customers. But the problem is, is that with go-to-market engineers is because they're only coming from the first 3 segments of that bowtie funnel. You have people that know how to write a cold email. You have people that know how to maybe put together a pitch or a problem statement. And an offer, make a web page look amazing, or even do cold calling. And then you have people that know how to organize the CRM. But that doesn't take into account an enterprise-level sales motion. That doesn't take into account a partnership motion. And we are forced to figure out what the existing problems are and how we can solve it with technology rather than our heads. So this is realistically the issue and the hot take in our industry is what is go-to-market engineering and why are a lot of sales professionals on LinkedIn changing their title from sales or BDR Do GTM. This is something that I leave you with, and this is my opinion on industry, is that a lot of buyers and a lot of sellers have no one concrete definition of what is actually going on right now. They only see roles and responsibilities. They only see outcomes. But at the end of the day, the title doesn't reflect the work that's being done. I believe that only 30% of the job titles actually listed include Python, which is a technical coding program that language that you can be able to actually write code and figure it out. The people that I look up to most in the industry are not technical people, but they have out-technified themselves and they've outsourced all of their strategic minds into a second brain, either in Claude, in a GitHub account, through context engineering. And they're letting not only the system build it for them in less amount of time, but they are becoming the human in the loop for context engineering. They are becoming the human in the loop for sales processing and sales enablement. And this is the pattern that I'm seeing more and more over time, is that we are becoming as humans less dependent on the ability to actually build things as much as more of our judgment and our taste as somebody in our industry puts it together than letting AI just kind of go wild. So in go-to-market engineering, it is AI on top of marketing, sales, and revenue activation. But at the end of the day, Where are we actually needed? Is it being the human in the loop? Is it our intuition and our judgment? Or are we processing all of that online without actually understanding the fundamental systems on why people want to work with other people? Businesses work with businesses, but people work with people.
