How to Hire a GTM Engineer Without Getting Burned

One RevOps lead we spoke to had been turned down by five agencies in a row.

She had budget. She had a mandate from her board. She still could not buy the thing she needed.

That is a strange way for a market to fail. Usually the buyer cannot pay. Here the buyer could pay and nobody would take the work in a shape that helped.

The simple idea

"GTM engineer" is one job title covering about four different jobs.

Some of those people think. Some build. A few do both. The word does not tell you which one is on the call.

So you have to find out yourself, before you sign.

The five ways it goes wrong

All five are real. All are anonymised.

1. The order taker. Says some version of just tell me what you want to build. Then builds exactly that. No opinion, no pushback, no strategy. You get what you asked for, which is only useful if you already knew the right answer.

2. The strategist. Sells you a deck. The thinking is genuinely good. Nothing gets built. On Monday you are back at your desk with a slide and no system.

3. The one whose floor is above your ceiling. Twenty five thousand dollars a month, minimum, no smaller version available. Not a scam. Just not for you, and you find out forty minutes in.

4. The volume model. Their playbook needs a huge list to work. One team hired an agency like this. It emailed 100,000 names, booked about 50 meetings, and roughly 5 of those were real buyers. Several people showed up to the call asking where their gift card was. If your market is 4,000 companies, this model has nothing to run on.

5. The one who needs you to already have a person. Tells you that you still need a body in the room to make the calls. That is true. It is also why you called them.

The warning she now carries

This is the line she repeats into every first call, and I think it is the best filter in the whole list.

Be careful with anyone who says they will just do what you want to do. They are not there to give you real guidance and get you to the result you want. They are there to take an order and build the thing you described, whether or not it is the right thing.

An order taker is not lazy. An order taker is safe. Building what you asked for is the only way to be sure the client cannot say the plan was wrong.

You are paying for judgment. Judgment means someone tells you no.

On the first call, describe your plan and ask them what is wrong with it. A person with an opinion will have one within thirty seconds. If they say it sounds great, you have found an order taker, and you found them for free.

What we found

The other half of the problem shows up six months later.

One company we met had 50 workbooks, one for each state, built by a consultant who then left. Any change means opening all 50 by hand and editing them city by city.

Another had a full stack of connected tools built by one person. He went on leave. His teammate could see that the data had stopped flowing, but had no way to find out why.

The build was fine in both cases. The handover never happened. A system only one person understands is a system you are renting, whatever the invoice says.

How to run the call

Five questions. They take ten minutes and they sort the field.

1. Here is my plan. What is wrong with it?
2. Who on my team owns this in six months, and what do they need to know?
3. Show me the smallest thing you have built, not the biggest.
4. What do you refuse to do?
5. If you disappear, what breaks?

Question five is the one people fumble. Anyone who has actually handed a system over has an answer ready, because they have watched it go badly at least once.

The right partner should be easy to fire and hard to need. If that sounds like the wrong pitch, it is because most of the market is selling the opposite.