Releasing the State of GTME Report, 2026

Why I wrote the report

Last week I dropped the first ever state of GTME report.

GTM Engineering is one of the fastest-growing roles in tech, yet almost no one understands how it should be structured, compensated, or evaluated.

After repeatedly negotiating compensation for myself and peers without reliable benchmarks, I realized the data simply did not exist.

So I said f*ck it, i’ll build the compensation benchmarking report myself.

If you havent seen it yet - go view it on the web at stateofgtme.com

I collected 225+ responses from GTMEs across startup stages from Seed to Public, spanning North America, Europe, and APAC. Data was anonymized and self-reported. No sponsor had any influence on survey questions or answers. :)

“GTMEs are going to make a bazillion dollars”

It’s very easy to virtue signal and say you’ll pay large sums of money to GTMEs but to actually do it is another thing...

Right now its the wild west for GTMEs. Some USA based GTMEs are making 65K all in; others are making north of 250K…. It’s fair to assume there are age, experience, and technical differences between these people, but those people may not know the other exists!

The same is true of agencies. Some agencies are charging $2,000/mo, while others are charing $33,000/mo or more (many high end agencies declined to provide compensation data…)

So I literally just went out and brute forced this thing, sent a bunch of emails, texts, posted on Linkedin, and partnered w reputable people like and Maja Vohje for distribution and more. Thank god I have friends because we were able to get 225+ responses :), many of whom I know and trust! This report is a testament to them just as much as it is to me - theres tons of anonymized, sensitive data about comp, trends, and more.

Generally speaking, if people generate results in the form of pipeline generated, time or efficiency created, or overall work satisfaction, I believe those people should be paid within certain market rate paybands. This report will hopefully help GTMEs everywhere advocate for themselves, teams learn what they should expect to pay in-house and agency GTMEs, and more. Time to put your money where your mouth is ;) - you know who you are.

Takeaways

There’s a dozen takeaways from this report I put together, i’m going to share a few of them below, many of which are concerning in my mind, so I’ll start with the positive:

The good

• These roles are in super high demand, we went from 63 job postings total in 2024 to 3.3K+ in 2025 (lol).

  

• GTM Engineering delivers measurable revenue impact - 72% of respondents report measurable revenue impact from their GTM Engineering work. That’s not a “maybe” function - nearly three-quarters can point to real numbers.

• I think this data will enable GTMEs to advocate for higher salaries and importantly, more equity / performance upside based on the interest paybands we see in the USA in particular.

  

• A young, energized talent pool is forming - 54% of practitioners are under 27. GTM Engineering is attracting early-career talent, which means the pipeline is deep and the community will compound.

The Bad (and interesting)

• 49% of GTMEs receive no bonus for their performance

  

• 67% of GTMEs receive less than 10 bps of equity

• AI CRMs despite being highly anticipated by VCs and touted by believers in these markets were only mentioned by 3.5% of GTMEs

  • The same trend goes for Unify (8.8% of respondents), likely because they have swung more to the BDR workflow.

• There are (unsurprisingly) 25+ tools in the Most Exciting New Tools section that I have never even heard of.

  • There will always be another GTM tool so long as the sky is blue

    

• Unify has 8.8% usage but the largest request for a tool is an “All In One Outbound Tool”….. funny - who is cooking this?

  

• “Better / More Data” is another top requested feature → I think this speaks to the democratization of existing data sources and compression of alpha to be generated. “Reporting” and “global revops” are also mentioned → pointing me to an idea i’ve always had on creating a visibility platform centered on giving folks visibility across all their tools

GTME is a mispriced asset that I think will reach some equilibrium state over the next few years :)

An interesting theme - loneliness

Something i’ve been particularly surprised by in my 2ish years of doing this now is how lonely I can sometimes feel as a GTME.

The data shows nearly 55% of GTMEs say that their teams do not know what they actually do.

This is really sad → we have not yet articulated as a field the value we bring, how we do it, and why it matters.

It’ve always felt that doing GTME work has in a way, felt fairly alienating, and due to the cross functionality of the role - leads to GTMEs being responsible for a lot, reporting to everyone, and not being recognized for anything.

“If things work, no one notices. If they break, everyone blames you.”

- 2 GTMEs I caught up with over the last few weeks

It’s a tough role to take on, and i’ve seen many others feel the same pain.

I had a call last week with an early stage GTME friend who is juggling the requests of their boss (CEO), and that of their sales team (AEs / BDRs) while also trying to hit their own goals.

This rings true when you look at Top Bottlenecks - the top bottleneck is Bandwidth / Capacity. Folks are struggling to find the time of day to be cross functional with all they have on their plates.

Additionally, “Growth” teams tend to be smaller group of highly functional and high agency folks. I certainly felt this at Unify, it was a team of 2 of us for the majority of the time I was there, holding up the weight of the world…..

Questions for next time

There’s a bunch of things I want to query next time via this survey -

• What types of jobs are folks coming from?

• Deeper detail on tools folks use

• Exploration of non-outbound focused work (inbound, SEO/AEO, UGC / content)

• Discussion of internal built tooling versus bought SaaS

• % of workflows run with zero human touch versus some

Closing Remarks

In closing, I had a lot of fun putting this together. GTME as an asset is clearly mispriced and there’s a lot of noise about what a GTME is. But I think the role will begin to standardize, and we’ll see clearer comp bands, better equity packages and more for the folks that support revenue orgs behind the scenes.

If you’re lucky enough to have one, thank your GTME (and revops) folks today

Garrett

PS. If you’re in the market for a new job and youre a GTME - hit my dms, have a ton of good folks looking to hire!