The 5 Jobs of Founding GTM Hires

One thing people don't realize when they join an early-stage startup as a founding GTM team member is that their job is going to be much broader than just closing deals. It'll depend on your product offering, ICP, and industry, but we'd say there are about five different 'hats' you'll have to wear.

1. Customer researcher
2. Product strategist
3. Marketer
4. Account executive
5. Founder Thought Partner

These five roles are not all evenly distributed for each type of business, and sometimes one of the hats needs to be hung up for a few months to make sure you can figure out how to wear another one for a while. Let's talk about each of them.

A typical sales org may just consider this 'prospecting' for new potential buyers, but at an early-stage company defining its buyer persona, you'll need to go much deeper than building lead lists.

Whether you have multiple stakeholders or a single champion in your sales processes, understanding how businesses look at your product from their perspective will be extremely important for how you help your founders position your product in the market.

You want to become the person (or a team of 2-3 people) who understands the buyer persona better than anyone else in the company. Given the sheer volume of customer conversations and correspondence you have, you should be able to find insights your founders may not have seen yet if you're wearing this hat the right way.

Constant feedback is key. Every conversation should answer questions like:

Who actually experiences this problem?
How urgent is this, and can I create urgency?
How do companies solve it today?
Who signs the contract?
What language do buyers naturally use to describe the problem?

This ties directly into how you make your role as the Customer Researcher impactful.

The product and founding team are going to be relying on you to explain exactly what product features are either winning deals for you or losing them. You should have a key role in helping determine what the company should be thinking about building next.

This isn’t about becoming an expert product manager but more about having the courage and transparency to say what you truly think based on your customer conversations.

Getting product feedback is also not going to be black and white. Customers aren’t going to say out loud, “That doesn’t make sense” or “We need this right now.”

You’re most likely going to find the wedges between the questions that they ask, the parts of the demo that seemed most interesting to them, and often what materials they ask you to follow up with. These are key data points to think about when letting your internal team know what to build next, what to avoid focusing on, and what product wedges are winning deals today that need to be prioritized.

For those of you reading this who are fortunate enough to have a VP of Marketing, this isn’t for you.

For those who don’t - congrats, time to be a fractional CMO.

Since 90% of people reading this are probably B2B, marketing to businesses is always challenging and hard to determine what KPIs matter and which don’t.

As a Founding GTM rep, your job isn’t going to be investing in huge marketing budgets for huge events and ad deals - but rather focusing on how the company’s image is correlated to your sales messaging.

For example, fine-tuning things like

These small actions here and there compound into turning you into a sales rep who is constantly thinking about how your company’s brand is viewed in the market today, vs. relying on a huge marketing budget to do it for you.

In the early days, some small plays can pay huge dividends in the long run.

Ah, yes, the job you thought you were hired to do.

I think the biggest struggle you will have as a small startup sales rep (and one of the reasons we want to build this newsletter) is that you have to define your own sales process.

Founder-led sales and true GTM rep sales are very different. Founders are able to bring a dynamic to the room that you can’t because of their vision, ownership, and flexibility. As the first or second Account Executive of the business - your goal is to make the sale. Not sell a vision.

Yes - it’s great to have a founder’s mindset on calls, but in order to start closing real contracts and have businesses evaluate your product, it’s important to add structure to teach businesses how to buy from you.

This won’t come day one, and there are dozens of future newsletter editions we can write on this topic alone, but the biggest takeaway here is that at some point you need to be a true salesperson with the goal of closing deals, end-to-end.

The last hat you’ll wear that is really woven into every other role we talked about today is being a thought partner for founders.

I admire and truly respect every entrepreneur out there. So much is happening in the fast-paced, tech-infused world we live in today. Tough decisions have to be made, pivots need to be thought through, and finding PMF may sometimes feel like a never-ending hamster wheel.

It’s incredibly important as a Founding GTM leader to recognize this, and be there for the founding team to support their goals in any way: bouncing ideas off each other, testing new sales methods, killing product features.

It’s all a part of the journey from 0-1, and working with founders every day is one of the coolest parts of being a Founding GTM operator.

Founding GTM isn't about wearing one hat well all the time.

It's about knowing which hat the company needs you to wear this quarter, even if you need to stretch it a bit to fit.

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