The GTM Engineer Could Give Your Salespeople an Unfair Advantage

The Go-To-Market Engineer (GTME) is emerging as a new role in revenue organizations, combining AI, data, automation, process and human thinking to help sales teams perform at a higher level.

I have been thinking a lot about the term ‘Go-To-Market Engineer (GTME).’ I learned that Clay coined the term in 2023 to describe people who build revenue systems using AI, data and automation. Since then, the role has started appearing across a growing number of revenue organizations.

My interest in AI has never been about using it simply because we can. I keep coming back to a more practical question: which emerging technologies can give our revenue generators superpowers and an unfair advantage ?

So I started digging.

What I found was interesting, not because every company suddenly needs someone with GTME on their business card, but because the function represents something revenue leaders need to pay attention to.

At its best, GTM Engineering brings together three things that have too often lived separately inside revenue organizations: emerging technology, process, and human thinking.

Get that combination right, and I believe we can give professional salespeople something they have always wanted: an unfair advantage .

However, get it wrong, and we risk doing what we have done many times before: adding another tool, another process, another function, and wondering why revenue has not become any more predictable.

The function is not actually new.

The more I looked at GTME, the less convinced I became that the underlying function is new. Sales operators have been doing versions of this forever.

We have looked for better ways to identify prospects. We have tried to understand which signals indicate an opportunity. We have improved processes, introduced new technologies, given salespeople better information, and removed work that slowed them down. In the “old days,” many of us simply did this ourselves.

What has changed is the technology available to us.

A GTME can now build systems that identify companies matching an ICP, detect meaningful signals, find the right executives, enrich the data, research what is happening inside the business, and prepare the information a salesperson needs to engage. That can remove an enormous amount of manual work. However:

Moreover, to understand what helps us win, we first need to understand why our customers buy from us in the first place.

We have spent too long confusing activity with progress

For years, sales productivity has largely been about volume. More calls. More emails. More touches. More leads. More activity. We have built processes, KPIs, and technology around that thinking.

However, selling is not just an activity game. Selling is also an intent game.

If I am carrying a number, my question should not be: What task am I supposed to complete today? What I should consider is:

Those are very different questions.

I can complete the next task my CRM gives me and move an opportunity from one stage to another. However, did the customer move? Did I learn something? Did I change their thinking? Did we get closer to a decision?

That distinction matters because our internal sales process often is not the customer’s buying journey. One records what we want to happen. The other tells us what actually needs to happen for the prospect to buy.

That is where I believe GTM Engineering gets really interesting.

Give salespeople more time to think.

Imagine technology continuously identifying customers who are most likely to need what you sell and recognizing signals that suggest the timing may be right. It identifies the right people, brings together relevant information about the customer and their situation, and gives the salesperson what they need to decide how best to engage.

Now the salesperson can do what professional salespeople do: think, then act.

Why am I reaching out? Why should this person care? Why am I different from everybody else trying to get their attention? What should I say or do that demonstrates I understand their situation? What should be automated, and what absolutely should not be?

I strongly believe the human needs to remain in that loop or, perhaps more accurately, on top of it.

Classically trained salespeople understand nuance. They understand relationships. They know how to read situations and how to make something personal rather than merely personalized.

The opportunity with AI is not to eliminate that. It is to give them more capacity to do it.

Start with the customer, not the technology

If I were designing a revenue organization today, I would not begin with AI. I would not begin with GTM Engineering. I also would not start by drawing boxes for Marketing, SDRs, Sales, RevOps, and Customer Success.

I would start with two questions: Why does our customer buy from us? Moreover: Why would they buy from us again? From there, map the buyer journey.

Understand what customers are trying to accomplish, what information they need, where they hesitate, who becomes involved, what creates confidence, and what ultimately moves them toward a decision.

Then look at your own selling process.

What needs to happen? How long does it take? Where do deals get stuck? Where does human judgment create value? What information does the salesperson need? What needs to happen after the first purchase to create another?

Only once we understand that should we decide who, or what, should do the work.

Not the other way around.

Do not let the tools design your sales organization

We have learned this lesson before. You only have to look at poorly implemented CRM environments and salespeople complaining bitterly that they have too many tools to navigate. Gartner found that 70% of B2B sellers feel overwhelmed by the number of technologies required to do their jobs (Gartner, 2024)

Giving people more technology does not automatically make them better.

Sometimes we implement the technology and gradually redesign our processes around how the tool works. Eventually, the salesperson works for the system rather than the system working for the salesperson. We cannot afford to repeat that mistake with AI.

My starting assumption would actually be that humans do everything.

First understand what needs to happen and why. Then ask where technology can help.

Maybe it is about saving time. Maybe it’s about helping someone think. It may be about improving information quality. It may be about increasing appropriate volume. Maybe it’s about consistency. But there needs to be a reason.

Don’t turn GTM Engineering into another silo

This is probably my biggest concern with GTME. I can easily imagine a company hiring a talented GTME who starts building. A workflow here. An automation there. Another tool. Another process. Another integration. Before long, you’ve created Frankenstein.

Worse, the GTME has their own objectives and measures of success: 20 workflows built. 10 processes automated. 500 accounts enriched.

That’s impact. The salesperson and GTME need to hunt in a pack.

Their objectives ultimately need to come from the same place: the company’s revenue objectives. The GTME should bring ideas and challenge how things are done. That’s part of their value. However, they also need to understand the customer and think like a salesperson.

Why are we doing this? How does it help the salesperson? How does it help the customer? Does it help us move an opportunity? Could we do it differently?

Otherwise, GTM Engineering simply becomes another silo inside a revenue organization already plagued by silos.

Revenue is an ecosystem

GTM Engineering points toward something bigger.

Revenue generation is becoming too complex for CEOs and CROs to keep diagnosing problems with statements like: “We need more leads. We need more calls. Our salespeople are not talking to enough prospects. We need more salespeople.”

Those may be symptoms. They are not necessarily diagnoses. Revenue is an interconnected ecosystem.

Marketing, SDRs, salespeople, GTM Engineering, RevOps, Account Management, Customer Success, and Support all influence whether a customer buys, and whether they buy again.

So instead of asking, “How many salespeople do I need to hit next year’s number?” Ask:

That answer will be different for every company. Moreover, it should come from understanding the customer, not from replicating an organizational chart we have used for the last twenty years.

This is ultimately about Revenue Confidence.

Revenue Confidence is not about believing harder that the number will happen. It is knowing enough about your revenue system to understand why it should happen, what could prevent it, and what you can do about it.

Why customers buy. Why they buy again. Where opportunities are getting stuck. Where capacity is constrained. Where assumptions are being made without evidence. Where people add value. Where technology can create leverage. Moreover, what needs to change when the system is not producing the outcome you expected.

That is why GTM Engineering interests me, not because it is another new sales title, but because, done properly, it can become an important and potentially game-changing part of a revenue system.

Give your people superpowers.

A company needs a clearly understood revenue strategy.

Then every person in the revenue ecosystem needs to understand what their role means in that context. What are they accountable for? How does their work contribute to the revenue objective? How does that connect with what they themselves want to achieve?

When you align those things, technology becomes incredibly powerful.

Now we are not simply giving people more tools. We are giving them superpowers.

We can remove work they do not need to do. Give them better information. Help them think. Give them more time with customers. Help them identify opportunities they might otherwise miss. Also, let professional salespeople spend more of their day doing the work that actually requires a professional salesperson.

That is why I am paying attention to GTM Engineering.

Not every company will eventually have someone called a GTM Engineer. I am not sure that matters.

The function matters. The engineering mindset matters. Moreover, the opportunity to combine human judgment, customer understanding, process, and emerging technology matters enormously.

If we execute GTM Engineering well, we can put classically trained salespeople on a completely different level.

We can combine their experience, judgment, and ability to understand customers with technology that gives them information, capacity and capabilities they simply didn’t have before.

AND ultimately give them what every salesperson needs when they walk into the market each morning:

References:

Clay (2026) ‘GTM Engineering: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Hire’, The GTM with Clay Blog. Available at: https://www.clay.com/blog/gtm-engineering

Gartner (2024) ‘Gartner Survey Reveals Only 11% of Sales Organizations Can Drive Commercial Success While Executing a Transformation’. 18 December. Available at: Gartner research.

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