The GTM Strategist Unicorn: Why You Can't Seem to Find The One (And What Smart Companies Do Instead)
Every GTM leader knows the person they desperately need: someone who understands why your conversion rates suck, can map the entire customer journey in their sleep, and gets genuinely excited about building Zapier workflows that turn prospects into revenue. Someone who thinks like a strategist but builds like an engineer. Here's what nobody wants to admit: this person doesn't exist in your talent pool. Not because they don't exist, but because you have no career path to attract them, no way to retain them, and no idea how to interview them. The companies winning at GTM stopped trying to hire unicorns. They found a better way.
The Perfect Storm: Why GTM Talent Has Vanished
The modern GTM landscape demands a skillset that shouldn't exist in one person, yet somehow must. Your ideal candidate needs deep business strategy chops to understand market positioning and competitive dynamics. They need sales acumen to grasp pipeline velocity and deal progression. They need marketing depth to optimize funnels and nurture sequences. And increasingly, they need technical fluency with automation tools, CRM systems, and data flows.
This isn't about finding someone who "knows a little of everything." The bar has risen dramatically. Today's GTM strategist must understand customer journey orchestration AND know how to build it in HubSpot. They need to design lead scoring models AND implement them in Salesforce. They must map attribution flows AND automate them with Make or Zapier.
But here's the kicker: these professionals need genuine passion for systems optimization. They get excited about reducing friction in handoffs between marketing and sales. They obsess over conversion micro-metrics. They see customer behavior patterns others miss. This isn't just competence. It's a mindset.
The statistical reality is brutal. Take a marketing professional with serious chops, add meaningful sales experience, layer in business strategy thinking, then require automation fluency and systems passion. Each requirement cuts the talent pool by 80%. You're not looking for one person in a hundred. You're looking for one in ten thousand.
The Career Path Black Hole
Here's the structural problem nobody talks about: there's no career ladder for these professionals. Contrast this with established disciplines. A brilliant software engineer has a clear path:
Senior Engineer → Staff Engineer → Principal Engineer → Architect.
A product manager progresses from Associate PM → PM → Senior PM → Director of Product.
But where does a GTM strategist advance? To VP of Marketing? That role often goes to brand-focused leaders. To VP of Sales? Usually filled by quota-carrying veterans. To VP of Revenue Operations? Often too execution-focused, lacking strategic depth.
This creates a vicious cycle. Top talent avoids roles with unclear progression. Companies struggle to fill GTM positions. They promote from within, often elevating specialists who lack the hybrid skillset. The quality gap widens.
Would a brilliant software engineer join a company with no engineering job ladder? Of course not. Yet we expect GTM unicorns to flock to "GTM Manager" roles with zero advancement clarity.
The best GTM strategists either become consultants, start their own companies, or hide inside organizations that truly value them and create bespoke roles. They're not scrolling LinkedIn for your job posting.
Why Traditional Hiring Fails Spectacularly
Even when companies recognize they need this hybrid role, the hiring process is fundamentally broken. Job descriptions read like wish lists written by committee.
"Must have 5+ years marketing experience, 3+ years sales experience, deep technical skills, and strategic thinking ability."
The requirements are accurate but the pool is empty.
The interview process compounds the problem. Your candidate might face a CMO focused on brand positioning, a VP of Sales obsessing over quota attainment, and a CTO evaluating pure technical chops. Nobody assesses the integration skills that make the role valuable.
Compensation becomes another puzzle. How do you price someone who bridges three different functions? Companies often benchmark against one component, like a Marketing Director salary, massively undervaluing the full skillset.
The candidates who do emerge often excel in one area while faking competence in others. The marketing automation expert who doesn't understand sales cycles. The sales operations professional who can't think strategically. The business strategist who panics when asked to build a Zapier workflow.
The Smart Alternative: Access Over Ownership
The companies solving this problem stopped trying to own the unicorn. They focused on accessing the skillset.
Specialized GTM agencies have become the de facto career path for these hybrid professionals. They aggregate rare talent by offering something traditional companies can't: a environment where systems thinking and GTM strategy are the core competency, not a nice-to-have add-on.
These agencies maintain teams with complementary skills. The strategic thinker who maps customer journeys and identifies optimization opportunities. The technical implementer who builds the automation workflows. The analyst who measures results and identifies new opportunities. Together, they deliver what you can't hire individually.
Why Agencies Win: Four Critical Advantages
1. Pre-Built Talent Pool: Agencies are the career path for these unicorns. They attract rare GTM strategists with varied challenges, sharp peers, and zero corporate ladder politics. No ramp time. No hoping your hire will develop missing skills. You get battle-tested frameworks from day one.
2. Proven Systems & Speed: Instead of one person wearing multiple hats poorly, you access specialists who collaborate seamlessly. They deploy proven integration patterns, not theoretical frameworks.
3. Embedded Engineers: Technical executors who build with your team, not just advise. Scale engagement up or down based on needs. No long-term HR commitment for capabilities you might not need year-round.
4. Cross-Industry Intelligence (Your Blind Spot Killer): While your team sees one market, they see patterns across ten. That fintech automation strategy might revolutionize your SaaS onboarding. The attribution model that works in e-commerce could unlock insights for your B2B funnel. They know which tool stacks actually scale because they've stress-tested them under heavier loads than yours.
Your biggest gaps? They've likely solved them elsewhere.
The Embedded Engineer Solution
The most effective agencies go beyond strategy consulting to offer embedded technical talent. This solves the "who builds it?" problem that kills most GTM initiatives.
Here's how it works: The agency strategist designs your GTM systems and optimization roadmap. An embedded engineer joins your team full-time (via employer of record or contract arrangement) to implement and maintain the technical components.
This embedded professional handles the automation workflows, CRM configurations, data integrations, and ongoing optimization. They work directly with your sales operations, marketing operations, and product teams. Over time, they transfer knowledge and upskill your internal staff.
The economics make sense. A senior GTM engineer might cost $150K+ annually if you could find one. An embedded contractor through a specialized agency often costs less while providing higher expertise and built-in support systems.
For the technical execution layer, offshore talent can be highly effective. The key is ensuring proper communication structures and timezone overlap for collaboration with your internal teams.
Implementation Reality
The best agency partnerships don't feel like outsourcing. They feel like adding a specialized department to your company. The embedded engineer attends your weekly sales meetings. They collaborate on your marketing campaigns. They contribute to product roadmap discussions.
The agency strategist becomes your quarterly planning partner, helping identify new optimization opportunities and GTM experiments. They bring external perspective from working with similar companies while understanding your specific context.
Knowledge transfer happens continuously, not through formal handoff sessions. Your internal teams learn by working alongside professionals who live and breathe GTM optimization.
This model scales naturally. Start with strategy consulting and an embedded engineer for implementation. Add specialists for specific projects like customer journey mapping or attribution modeling. Scale back during quiet periods or when internal capabilities mature.
What This Means for Your GTM Strategy
The talent scarcity isn't temporary. As GTM systems become more sophisticated and competitive advantages increasingly depend on operational excellence, the demand for hybrid strategist-engineers will only grow.
Companies clinging to traditional hiring approaches will continue struggling with suboptimal GTM performance. They'll hire marketing specialists who can't think systematically about sales handoffs. They'll promote sales operations professionals who lack strategic vision. They'll invest in expensive tools without the expertise to implement them effectively.
The winners are already shifting to the access model. They partner with agencies that aggregate rare talent and provide embedded implementation support. They get world-class GTM capabilities without the impossible hiring challenge.
Your GTM strategy needs systems thinking, technical implementation, and deep business acumen. You can keep hunting for unicorns, or you can access the skillset through specialists who chose agencies precisely because they offer better career paths than traditional corporate roles.
The choice determines whether your GTM engine becomes a competitive advantage or remains a collection of disconnected tools and processes.
The Bottom Line
Stop trying to hire the impossible. The GTM strategist with deep business acumen, sales understanding, marketing expertise, technical fluency, and systems passion isn't browsing your job board. They're building careers at specialized agencies that value their hybrid skillset.
Smart companies access this talent through partnerships that provide both strategic thinking and embedded technical implementation. They get better results, lower risk, and the flexibility to scale capabilities based on actual needs.
Your GTM performance depends on finding these professionals. Just don't expect to find them in your HR pipeline.
About the Author
This article was written by our Chief GTM Strategist, Aya Montebon, who has been in advertising handling multinational brands such as Coca-Cola and Jollibee for traditional marketing, switched to quantitative and qualitative driven shopper behavior marketing, having led BBDO Proximity Shop in the Philippines. Has been in tech startups and recruitment process outsourcing for her personal business and has built automation-first sales processes for real estate and technology companies as a consultant.
