Part of the Primis "Built for Scale" series.
Most companies get GTM hiring wrong not because they do not care about it, but because they move too fast. The pressure to hit revenue targets creates urgency, and urgency leads to hiring people before the conditions exist for them to succeed.
The GTM team that works at five million ARR looks nothing like the one that works at fifty million. Here is what we see from the hiring side, and where companies tend to come unstuck at each stage.
Under 50 people: founders close the deals
This is not the stage to build a GTM team. It is the stage to prove you have something worth selling.
The first real sign of a business starting to scale is when the founders genuinely cannot close all the deals themselves, not because they do not have time, but because demand has outgrown their capacity. That is the moment to make the first GTM hire, and the right hire is usually one strong Account Executive who can work with minimal hand-holding and help document what a repeatable sales motion actually looks like.
GTM team size should match your revenue stage, not your ambition. At pre-seed or seed stage, one to two GTM hires is the right number. Marketing at this stage is almost always founder-led. That is fine.
The thing to avoid: Hiring an SDR team before your AEs are consistently closing. SDRs without a proven sales motion to feed into are expensive noise. Get the closing right first, then build the top of funnel.
50 to 150 people: building the engine
This is where the GTM function takes shape and where most of the interesting hiring decisions happen.
You need a small team of AEs with clear ownership of pipeline, a couple of SDRs to start building outbound systematically, and a Customer Success Manager to make sure the customers you are winning actually stay. Churn at this stage is a commercial catastrophe that headcount cannot fix.
Marketing needs its first dedicated hire here too. Not a Head of Marketing yet, but someone who can own demand generation, content, and the basics of pipeline marketing. Trying to do this with founders or a freelancer works up to a point, and that point is usually somewhere around Series A.
This is the inflection point. Your sales team has grown beyond five to ten reps and spreadsheets are no longer reliable for forecasting. That is when Revenue Operations starts to make sense, initially as a part-time or fractional resource, but it needs to exist. Without it, pipeline data is unreliable, forecasting is guesswork, and handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success are messier than they need to be.
The thing to avoid: Hiring a VP of Sales too early. A VP of Sales is a multiplier, not a starting point. They need something to work with: a product that sells, a defined ICP, and at least some proof that the sales motion works. Hire them before that foundation exists and you will burn through a high salary without results.
Headcount: Three to six AEs, two SDRs, one to two CSMs, one marketing hire, and a fractional or part-time RevOps resource.
150 to 400 people: specialisation and the VP of Sales hire
By this point the GTM motion is proven and the challenge shifts from figuring out what works to scaling it reliably. That requires leadership, structure, and significantly more specialisation.
The VP of Sales hire happens here, and it is one of the most consequential decisions a scaling company makes. The biggest mistake founders make is hiring a Big Tech closer when they actually need a GTM architect. The right profile at this stage is someone who has built a sales function from scratch before, not someone who managed a fifty-person team at an established SaaS company. Those are very different skill sets and they rarely transfer cleanly. (Dataworks)
Incremental hiring in 2026 is concentrated in sales and post-sales, where teams are expected to grow roughly ten to twenty percent depending on company scale. Customer Success becomes a serious function at this stage rather than one or two people firefighting. Expansion revenue, renewals, and net revenue retention start to matter as much as new business, and the CS team structure needs to reflect that.( Iconiq)
RevOps moves from fractional to full-time. Teams operating in cross-functional pods, where SDR, AE, and CSM work together around specific segments, report significantly better GTM performance than those in traditional siloed structures.
The thing to avoid: Letting marketing remain under-resourced relative to sales. A common pattern is aggressive AE hiring alongside a tiny marketing function, which creates a pipeline dependency on outbound that becomes very expensive and fragile at scale.
Headcount: A VP of Sales, ten-plus AEs organised by segment or geography, an SDR team with dedicated management, a growing CS function, a Head of Marketing, and a full-time RevOps lead.
400 people and beyond: the revenue machine
At this scale the GTM organisation is large, complex, and needs genuine executive leadership across every function. A Chief Revenue Officer starts to make real sense here, bringing the whole commercial engine under unified ownership rather than managing marketing, sales, and CS as separate fiefdoms that occasionally align.
Marketing and RevOps teams are expanding more slowly in 2026, which is partly driven by higher AI adoption. In some cases they are even staying flat, a sign that leaders are betting on AI tooling, process, and agency support before headcount. That shift is real and worth taking seriously. The GTM teams seeing the best results at scale are not necessarily the biggest ones. They are the ones with the best systems, the cleanest data, and the sharpest ICP focus.(Iconiq)
Sales engineering and solutions consulting become important functions at this stage, particularly if you are selling into enterprise or technical buyers. And marketing splits into distinct specialisms: demand generation, product marketing, content, and field marketing each become their own lanes rather than one generalist's remit.
The thing to avoid: Assuming more headcount solves a GTM problem. At this scale the answer is almost always better systems, better data, and clearer segmentation before more people.
Headcount: A CRO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, VP of Customer Success, a RevOps function with real authority, sales engineering, and segment-specific AE teams.
A few things that hold true at every stage
Prove the motion before you scale it. Hiring five AEs into an unproven sales process does not validate the process faster. It just makes the failure more expensive.
Sequence the leadership hires deliberately. VP of Sales before you have a sales motion is the single most common and costly GTM mistake. Get the motion working first, then hire the person to scale it.
Do not neglect Customer Success. Every pound or dollar spent retaining and expanding an existing customer is worth more than the same spend acquiring a new one. The companies that treat CS as an afterthought pay for it in churn.
And take RevOps seriously earlier than feels necessary. Clean pipeline data and reliable forecasting are not admin functions. They are the foundation the whole GTM org runs on.
Thinking about your next GTM hire?
As a specialist recruitment agency we work with companies globally on GTM recruitment, from first AE hires through to VP of Sales, CRO, and full commercial team build-outs across the US, UK, and beyond.
If you want to talk through the right hire for where you are right now, we would love to help - reach out on Marketing@primis-talent.com and we'll be in touch!