How GTM Engineering came to be
The origin of GTM Engineering
Ever wondered how GTM Engineering came to be?
Two key factors drive this change.
First — let's be honest, hats off to Clay to come up with the name.
(see image).
But let's trace back the last 2 years to dig into how it came to be.
2023 brought a shift in funding.
VCs pulled back a lot of money.
This forced startups to focus on GTM efficiency.
• Speed up time to market and revenue growth
• Without growing headcount or costs
But automation wasn't easy.
It often meant hiring growth engineers to build custom tools.
This was costly. Growth engineers are rare and expensive.
Enter the new wave of low-code SaaS.
Emerged between 2023 and 2024, they made GTM automation easier also for non-technical users. Think about:
• Custom waterfall enrichment for easy prospecting (FullEnrich)
• User-friendly workflows for multi-step GTM operations (Cargo 🧱, AirOps, Clay)
• LLM capabilities for scaling research and personalization (Clay, Anthropic, OpenAI)
• Strong integration with built-in APIs
Now, advanced tasks that once needed a growth engineer can be done with just a few lines of code.
You can even prompt ChatGPT to help with coding.
But that's not all.
In late 2024, layer on top “founder mode”.
Did this push the mantra of “doing more with less”? Especially in GTM?
Big time.
• With the pressure to perform and standout.
• And the right AI tools for the job
The rise of small, lean, semi-technical GTM Engineering teams is undeniable.
A new storm is coming.
Read the whole story.
