We all know that building your founding go-to-market (GTM) team can make or break your business, but recruitment has evolved quickly in recent years. With the rise of AI and changing business priorities, your competitors have adapted, restructuring roles and teams for a new world.
To help build a better understanding of what a high-performing go-to-market team looks like in 2026, Andy Larkin held our latest roundtable event. Bringing together founders and function leaders – in marketing, sales and product – we have built a strong understanding of how to approach GTM recruitment in 2026. Keep reading for the key takeaways from this conversation.
Key takeaways
- There is no fixed GTM playbook anymore
- AI is collapsing traditional role boundaries, increasing demand for adaptable, commercially aware hires
- Product-market fit must come before scale hiring otherwise teams stall quickly
- Hiring for mindset consistently outperforms hiring for experience alone
- Alignment across product, sales and marketing is the defining differentiator in a successful team, not the tools or structure
The GTM recruitment playbook is gone
For most of the last decade, the process of building a go-to-market function has followed a familiar pattern:
- Hire early sales talent
- Layer in marketing
- Build out SDR teams
- Scale execution across a defined funnel
But that model is no longer holding up. Businesses are no longer working from a shared playbook. In fact, many of the leaders in the room were explicit about the lack of one.
As Search Partner, Mark Paterson, put it, “Anyone that says they know how to do it is not wrong… because I don’t think many businesses know how to do it. There’s an element of figuring it out on the fly.”
This is how quickly the landscape is shifting – disrupted by three key forces:
- The acceleration of AI and automation
- Changing buyer behaviour, particularly in enterprise environments
- The speed at which products can now be built, tested and iterated
These factors are fundamentally changing how GTM teams are structured, how roles are defined, and how quickly organisations expect results.
AI is changing GTM strategies and teams
The most influential factor is the rise of AI. While most conversations about AI in go-to-market strategies centre on how teams execute, it's important to recognise the impact it’s having on the definition of roles.
The shift is already visible in hiring decisions, with one member of the roundtable reporting, “When I look at people that I would hire in previous roles, I’m looking today at different things… do they know how to work with AI platforms? Do they have the right knowledge, skills, network to really move the needle?”
For others, the integration of AI tools is changing the structure of teams itself.
“It’s very easy to build an extremely lean team, but you also have risks there.”
AI enables smaller teams to move faster, execute more efficiently, and operate across multiple functions. This increases the pressure on team members, as fewer people are now expected to do more, across a broader scope of responsibilities.
Roles are converging
One of the clearest shifts is in job descriptions, with role boundaries beginning to collapse.
Where GTM teams were once built around clearly defined functions – sales enablement, marketing, revenue operations – those distinctions are becoming less meaningful, particularly in early-stage environments.
As Mark raised, “Roles are blending. There is a blurring of lines where sales and marketing are merging.”
This shift is being driven in part by AI, but also by the realities of the modern go-to-market recruitment landscape. Companies, especially early-stage brands, no longer have the luxury of hiring highly specialised individuals to operate within narrow lanes. Instead, the expectation is for individuals to operate across the funnel, contributing to:
- Discovery and customer experiences
- Messaging and product marketing
- Product feedback and iteration
- Revenue generation
That doesn’t remove the need for specialisation entirely, but it delays it. The focus at early-stage is increasingly on adaptability over defined expertise.
Building a founding GTM team in 2026
Recruitment in this landscape is especially difficult for founders of early-stage start-up businesses. Building a founding GTM team is complicated whether you have or haven't hired before.
Previously, early hires were defined by experience – candidates who had “seen this before” and could replicate a known model. But as discussed throughout the roundtable, that logic is increasingly flawed.
Early-stage businesses are still exploring
Most early-stage companies are not scaling a proven model – they are still discovering what works for them.
Many founders make the mistake of engaging talent with the same skills as them, which just means they’re doing more of the same. As a founder, identifying where your own gaps are and hiring to resolve them is how you build and grow.
In this early discovery stage, you need a specific candidate profile. Rather than executing a defined process, early hires are expected to:
- Test hypotheses in-market
- Identify where demand actually exists
- Shape messaging through direct customer interaction
- Feed insight back into product and positioning
It's crucial to avoid hiring talent accustomed to operating inside a defined playbook, because the playbook doesn’t yet exist.
Begin with generalist GTM hires
Across the discussion, there was strong alignment around the type of individual best suited to this early stage.
The most effective founding salespeople are not specialists, but generalists. They need to be able to come in and help you write the playbook. To do this, they should be comfortable:
- Selling and running outbound
- Engaging in product conversations
- Working alongside founders and engineers
- Adapting quickly as priorities change
These individuals are often responsible for:
- Writing the first credible version of the GTM playbook
- Stress-testing the ICP
- Translating customer feedback into actionable insight
Ultimately, they are not waiting for direction – they are helping to create it.
What great early GTM hires look like
Altogether the most effective founding hires need to demonstrate:
- Commercial curiosity: they want to understand how the business makes money
- Adaptability: they are comfortable operating across roles
- Resilience: they can handle rejection and ambiguity
- Ownership: they take responsibility for outcomes, not just activity
Or, as one contributor summarised more simply, “You need someone who actually cares… someone who can almost replicate a founder in some shape or form.”
GTM recruitment has changed
Building a successful GTM team in 2026 is no longer about following a familiar hiring sequence or replicating what worked before. The pace of change across AI, buyer behaviour and product development means businesses need teams that can learn quickly, challenge assumptions and adapt as the market evolves.
For support building your own go-to-market team or insight into the current state of the hiring market, feel free to get in touch with our specialist team. Leveraging our Advise, Attract, Develop methodology, we’re best equipped to deliver new hires into your team.
