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Two paths forward
Reference
Every role, and what it owns
Each page covers what the role owns and explicitly does not own, when it is too early and too late to hire it, what it pays and how the package should be structured, the titles it gets confused with, the red flags that show up in job descriptions, and the interview questions that reveal fit.
Marketing roles
Sales and revenue roles
Systems and operations roles
At a glance
Compare every role on the same criteria
| Role | Level | Core question | Base range | Variable | Right window |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chief Marketing Officer | Executive | Who is the market, what do they need to hear, and how do we reach them at scale in a way that compounds. | $228,000 to $337,000 | 25% | Five million to seventy five million in ARR, or earlier when the company is defining a category rather than entering one. |
| VP of Marketing | Vice president | How do we build a repeatable demand engine and a message the sales team can actually carry. | $178,000 to $248,000 | 20% | One million to forty million in ARR. This is the most common marketing leadership hire at pre IPO companies. |
| Head of Growth | Director or head of | What is the fastest path to more qualified volume, and what experiment proves it this month. | $163,000 to $223,000 | 20% | One million to twenty five million in ARR, strongest at companies with a self serve or product led surface. |
| Demand Generation Lead | Manager | Which programs will produce the pipeline number this quarter, and what is the cost per opportunity. | $129,000 to $178,000 | 15% | Two million to fifty million in ARR, and frequently the first specialist hire a marketing leader makes. |
| Product Marketing Manager | Manager | Why does this buyer choose us over the alternative, and does the sales team have what it needs to prove it. | $139,000 to $198,000 | 15% | Two million in ARR and up, and effectively required once there is more than one product or more than one buyer persona. |
| Content Marketing Lead | Manager | What do we publish that a buyer would actually seek out, and how does it get discovered. | $109,000 to $163,000 | 10% | Two million in ARR and up, particularly where the buyer researches heavily before talking to sales. |
| Marketing Operations Manager | Manager | Does the data behind our marketing reporting hold up, and can campaigns ship without breaking lead flow. | $119,000 to $173,000 | 10% | Three million to fifty million in ARR. |
| Chief Revenue Officer | Executive | Is the whole revenue system aligned to one number, and where is it leaking. | $257,000 to $356,000 | 50% | Fifteen million in ARR and up, particularly where marketing, sales and customer success are already fighting. |
| VP of Sales | Vice president | How do we convert interested buyers into signed contracts, repeatably, with a team that can do it without me. | $188,000 to $257,000 | 50% | Two million to fifty million in ARR with at least two or three reps already selling successfully. |
| Account Executive | Individual contributor | Which opportunities in my territory are real, and what has to happen for each one to close this quarter. | $119,000 to $163,000 | 100% | Any stage past initial product market fit, in whatever quantity pipeline supports. |
| Business Development Representative | Individual contributor | Which accounts are worth reaching right now, and what gets a response. | $59,000 to $84,000 | 40% | Once messaging is validated and account executives need more pipeline than inbound provides. |
| Sales Engineer | Individual contributor | Will this actually work in their environment, and can I prove it before the evaluation stalls. | $144,000 to $193,000 | 25% | Once technical evaluation is a standard part of the sales cycle, commonly around two million in ARR in a technical category. |
| Head of Customer Success | Director or head of | Are customers getting the outcome they bought, and will they renew and buy more. | $149,000 to $208,000 | 30% | One million in ARR and up, earlier in a high touch enterprise motion. |
| Head of Partnerships | Director or head of | Which partners can reach our buyer more cheaply than we can, and what makes them want to. | $158,000 to $218,000 | 40% | Five million in ARR and up, or earlier where the category sells predominantly through a channel. |
| Head of Revenue Operations | Director or head of | Do the numbers the board sees hold up, and does the process behind them work the same way every time. | $153,000 to $218,000 | 15% | Five million to one hundred million in ARR, which is where the function is most commonly built out. |
| GTM Engineer | Individual contributor | What workflow, automation or data pipeline needs to exist so reaching and closing can happen without a human doing each step. | $129,000 to $198,000 | 10% | One million to five million in ARR, at the point where a working motion exists and the constraint shifts from what should we do to how do we do more of this without hiring linearly. |
Bands are directional, for scoping a description or a target range rather than making or accepting an offer. Benchmark figures are triangulated from the sources listed and refreshed with the data file. Live posted ranges come from GTM Radar and are only shown once enough matched postings exist to be meaningful.
The builder
Two ways in
I know the role
Pick the title, answer the context questions, and get a job description scoped to your stage, your team and your stack, with the scope load checked before you post.
Build a job descriptionI have a gap and no title
Work through the coverage grid and the bottleneck question first. The builder recommends the role, explains why, names the titles it will get confused with, and then produces the description.
Diagnose the gapThere is also a candidate mode. Paste a live job posting and the builder decodes what the company is actually asking for, flags where the description is mis scoped, and gives you the questions worth asking in the interview.
Method
The 20 functions the builder maps
Titles are a shorthand. The work is what matters, so the builder starts by asking which of these functions are covered well today, covered thinly, not covered, or not needed yet. The gaps define the role.
Strategy and positioning
The work that decides what the company says and who it says it to.
- Positioning and messaging
Value proposition, message hierarchy, proof architecture, and the words the whole company uses. - Category and brand narrative
Long arc market perception, category definition, brand equity, board level story. - ICP definition and market research
Who the buyer is, what triggers a purchase, TAM and segmentation work. - Competitive intelligence
Win and loss patterns, battlecards, displacement plays, pricing pressure tracking.
Demand and awareness
The work that creates and captures interest at the top and middle of the funnel.
- Demand generation and paid
Campaign strategy, paid channels, nurture, pipeline targets and channel mix. - Content and editorial
Thought leadership, research reports, blog, video, and the editorial calendar. - Product marketing and launches
Launch management, pricing and packaging input, sales narrative, competitive positioning. - Website, SEO and answer engine visibility
Site conversion, organic search, schema and structured data, visibility inside AI answers. - Events and field marketing
Conferences, booths, dinners, regional programs, and the pipeline that comes off them. - Analyst relations and PR
Gartner and Forrester engagement, press, awards, customer references and case studies.
Sales and revenue
The work that turns interest into signed contracts and keeps the revenue.
- Pipeline generation and outbound
Prospecting, cold outreach, list building, meeting setting, top of funnel sales activity. - New business closing
Discovery, evaluation management, negotiation, procurement and signature. - Sales team leadership
Hiring reps, quota and territory design, forecast accountability, coaching and performance management. - Sales enablement
Onboarding, certification, playbooks, call coaching, and the content sellers actually use. - Technical pre sales
Demos, proof of concept, technical evaluation, security review support, architecture conversations. - Customer success, renewal and expansion
Onboarding, adoption, retention, upsell and cross sell motion. - Partnerships and channel
Resellers, MSSPs, technology alliances, marketplace listings, co selling motion.
Systems and infrastructure
The connective layer that makes everything above run without a person doing each step.
- Marketing operations
Marketing automation platform, campaign infrastructure, lead flow, attribution reporting. - RevOps, CRM and forecasting
CRM architecture, data hygiene, process definition, forecast models, board reporting. - GTM automation and data engineering
Enrichment pipelines, signal monitoring, routing logic, AI drafted outbound, internal tooling.
Questions
Go to market hiring questions
How do I know which go to market role to hire?
Start with the type of gap rather than the title. If the company does not know who its buyer is, what message resonates, or how to position against competitors, the gap is strategic and it needs marketing leadership. If the ICP and messaging are validated but the team is drowning in manual work, the gap is execution capacity. If the systems and data behind the numbers cannot be trusted, the gap is infrastructure. These three gaps require entirely different hires, and automation does not fix a strategy gap.
What is the difference between a CMO, a VP of Marketing and a Head of Growth?
A CMO carries board and category level accountability and is expected to build the organization. A VP of Marketing runs the marketing function against a strategy that may already exist. A Head of Growth biases toward acquisition velocity, performance channels and experimentation rather than the full funnel including brand and product marketing. Below roughly forty million in ARR the first two often describe the same day to day work with different signals attached.
Is a GTM engineer the same as a RevOps or marketing operations hire?
No. RevOps owns process, systems architecture and reporting integrity at the company level and sets the rules of the system. A GTM engineer builds the specific automations and AI driven workflows that execute inside those rules. Marketing operations stays inside marketing systems specifically and skews toward administering existing platforms rather than building new ones. At small companies one person often covers all three, which is fine until the volume outgrows it.
How do I know if a job description is asking for too much?
Add up the go to market functions the description assigns to one person and compare that against the capacity that person will actually have, meaning themselves plus any team they inherit. If the scope represents more than roughly one and a third people, the description is describing more than one job. Searches that run four months without producing a hire almost always trace back to a description at that load.
When is it acceptable for one person to cover several of these roles?
Below roughly one million in ARR it is usually the right answer. One person doing the work of three or four titles is normal at that size, and hiring narrow specialists too early is a more common mistake than the blending itself. The failure mode is not the interchangeability, it is not noticing when the interchangeability has stopped working and the blended role has become the bottleneck.
Should compensation for a go to market role be salary or commission weighted?
Match the structure to the accountability. Roles that carry direct revenue accountability commonly run close to an even split between base and variable. Roles that build systems should be salary and equity weighted, closer to an engineering package. Attaching heavy variable pay to a building role signals the wrong thing and filters out the candidates worth hiring.
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