Welcome back to GTM Exclusives. Every two weeks we take a popular story and check it against our own data.
This time: the traditional GTM org is collapsing. We think what replaces it runs as one GTM system, built around the judgment of senior operators and shared context that reaches everyone in the org.
By the end of this issue, you'll know what our hiring data shows about where GTM orgs are heading, and how we've approached the same shift ourselves.
Why the traditional GTM org is breaking down
The traditional GTM org was built as separate functions. Marketing and sales each had their own goals, and work moved from one team to the next through a series of handoffs.
Each handoff made sense on its own. Marketing's part ended when it passed a lead, and sales picked it up from there.
The cost of that setup was context, some of which was getting lost at every handoff. Marketing passed leads over to sales knowing which signals were firing, and sales could tell which deals were stalling, but nobody had the whole account in view.
The quick rise of AI in GTM made it fair to ask whether that split still made sense. Using AI to speed up each team would still leave every handoff in place. Running one system on shared context can remove those handoffs.
We believe the model that replaces it is marketing and sales running as one GTM system on shared context, instead of multiple departments effectively passing leads over a wall.
In practice, this means less time spent moving information between teams. More of the work sits with senior operators making judgment calls, supported by the people who orchestrate context through the org so it reaches whoever needs it.
We wanted to see whether hiring across the market is shifting toward senior operators, so we checked our data.
What our data reveals
ZoomInfo tracks the jobs people hold across the companies in our database. For this issue, we looked at around 6.1 million people who started a new GTM job between 2022 and 2025, in sales, marketing, revenue operations and AI-titled roles. We also compared how senior they were.
We grouped everyone into four levels:
Below manager
Manager
Director
VP and above
Everything that follows is about the mix of new hires. For each year, we looked at what share of the people companies hired were junior, and what share were senior.
The hiring figures below describe that mix. We also compared tech and non-tech businesses, as the two don't always move together.
Sales and tech marketing are hiring more senior
Let's start with sales. In 2022, companies hired around three junior salespeople for every manager or more senior hire. By 2025, it was just over two.
On the senior end, the share of new sales hires at director level or above nearly doubled, from 6.5% to 11.6%.
This is happening even faster outside tech. The junior share of sales hires fell 7.6 points at non-tech companies, compared with 2.4 points at tech companies.
And tech marketing is going the same way. Between 2022 and 2025, director-level and above rose from 15% to 18% of new tech marketing hires, while juniors fell from 55% to 50%. This means tech companies went from hiring nearly four junior marketers for every director-level marketing hire to under three.
2022 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
Junior sales hires per manager (or above) hire | 3.0 | 2.2 |
Sales hires at director level or above | 6.5% | 11.6% |
Tech marketing hires at director level or above | 15% | 18% |
Tech marketing hires below manager level | 55% | 50% |
AI-titled roles are exploding; RevOps hires skew senior
The kinds of roles companies hire for are changing as well.
AI-titled jobs went from 1% to 5% of all the hires in our data between 2022 and 2025, but in tech we're seeing it surge: AI-titled jobs went from around 1 in 27 hires to 1 in 7 over the same period.
They're moving up the ladder as well. At VP level and above, AI-titled roles went from about 1 in 30 hires to closer to 1 in 10.
RevOps is already a senior hire. About a third of new RevOps hires in 2025 were director level or above, against 11.6% in sales.
Our take: companies are gearing up to build the orchestration that moves context between teams and into the hands of senior operators.
The shared context and systems that both teams are working on is one of the most important aspects of the new structures being built - companies are investing in the people building that infrastructure.
A real example of what running GTM on shared context looks like
When ZoomInfo was at $100M in revenue, everybody on the sales team saw every deal that came through. One deal in particular stands out.
A logistics business bought our product because logistics is a commodity space where the winners have dialed-in sales motions, and ZoomInfo gave them that edge.
Our other salespeople heard that story, then went and found 20 more logistics companies that looked just like it.
At $1 billion in revenue, this sort of thing doesn't happen on its own, due to the sheer size of the business. ZoomInfo has around 1,400 people in its sales org now, and we might sell five completely new use cases in a single day, with not many other reps finding out.
Because of this, the lesson from those deals disappears quickly, so the campaign never gets built, and the next 20 lookalike companies never get called. Put simply, the information stops flowing when the org gets to this sort of size.
So we built a system to replace it. Every day, an AI agent runs through these steps:
It looks at every deal we closed that day. It analyzes the call and why the customer chose us over competitors, then uses ZoomInfo's MCP to find that customer's competitors.
It checks whether those competitors are already ZoomInfo customers. If they are, it does nothing.
If they aren't customers and the accounts are already owned, it routes them to the owner, along with the reasons we won the first deal.
If nobody owns them, they go back to the rep who closed the first deal, with a simple message: “Here are 5 accounts that are in nobody's name. They're all yours.”
We've now done the same for SDRs. When an SDR books a demo, they instantly get an email with five similar VPs of sales.
Playbooks like this are essential, and you have to fight to keep that kind of sharing alive at scale.
This is shared context in practice. What happened naturally at $100M has to be built into the system at $1 billion. The agent gets the context to the right people, and senior operators decide what gets built and acted on.
The final word
The traditional GTM org is changing, and we think what replaces it is one system built on shared context and the judgment of senior operators. It's a direction we've been moving in ourselves. The agent in the last section is one example of what that looks like day-to-day.
The market is moving in the same direction.
Before you set your 2027 hiring plan, look at who you're bringing in and how context moves between your teams.
- Dennis
