You just closed your Series A. You have $10M in the bank and pressure to scale revenue from $1M to $10M ARR in 18 months. Your CEO wants to hire sales, marketing, and customer success immediately. You have budget for maybe 15 GTM hires total.
Who do you hire first? Should you build a sales team before you have marketing generating leads? Do you need product marketing before or after sales? When does customer success enter the picture? Hire in the wrong order and you'll have salespeople with no pipeline, marketers with no one to hand leads to, or PMMs creating messaging for sales reps who don't exist yet.
The sequence of GTM hiring matters as much as the roles themselves. Here's the roadmap that actually works.
Seed Stage: $0-$1M ARR (0-10 People)
At seed stage, you don't have a GTM team. You have founders doing everything. But your first GTM hires set the foundation for everything that follows.
First GTM hire (at $200-300K ARR): Founding Account Executive. Not a VP of Sales—an individual contributor who can carry quota, close deals, and give feedback on messaging and process. Look for someone who has sold similar products to similar buyers at a similar stage. They should be comfortable with ambiguity and willing to do their own prospecting.
Second GTM hire (at $400-500K ARR): Solutions Engineer or Sales Engineer. Only if your product is technical and requires demos or POCs. If your product is self-serve or simple, skip this and hire a second AE instead.
Third GTM hire (at $600-800K ARR): Founding Product Marketer. Now you have enough customers for research, enough sales conversations to identify patterns, and enough market feedback to build real positioning. The founding PMM creates your first messaging framework, battle cards, and pitch deck based on what's actually working.
Don't hire demand gen yet. At this stage, your deals come from founder networks, manual outbound, and word of mouth. Paid acquisition doesn't work until you have repeatable sales.
Series A: $1M-$5M ARR (10-30 People)
Series A is about proving you can scale what worked at seed stage. You're hiring multiples of roles that already work, not experimenting with new motions.
Sales expansion (Years 1-2 of Series A):
- Hire 3-5 more AEs who match the profile of your successful first AE
- Add 1-2 more SEs if you're technical product
- Hire your first SDR when you have 4+ AEs who need pipeline
- Add SDR manager at 5+ SDRs
Marketing foundation (Mid Series A, around $2M ARR):
- Hire demand gen marketer focused on one channel where you have early traction (content, paid, events, etc.)
- Add content marketer if you're doing PLG or developer marketing
- Promote or hire Head of Marketing at $3-4M ARR once you have 3-4 marketers
Product Marketing expansion (Throughout Series A):
- Hire second PMM around $2M ARR to split competitive intelligence and sales enablement from positioning and launches
- Add third PMM around $4M ARR for customer marketing and expansion
Customer Success (Late Series A, around $3M ARR):
- Hire first CSM when you have 30+ customers and churn becomes visible
- Add CSM manager at 5+ CSMs
- Don't hire CS too early—AEs should own the full customer lifecycle until revenue proves it's worth splitting
The key principle: hire sellers before marketers, and marketers before specialized roles like customer marketing or partner marketing.
Series B: $5M-$20M ARR (30-100 People)
Series B is about specialization and building repeatable systems. You're adding layers and creating departments.
Sales specialization:
- Segment AEs into SMB, mid-market, and enterprise teams with different compensation and quotas
- Add sales leadership layer: Regional VPs, Director of Sales Development
- Build sales ops function (2-3 people) to handle forecasting, comp, territories, and tools
- Hire enablement manager (distinct from PMM) at 20+ quota-carrying reps
Marketing expansion:
- Build out demand gen team (4-6 people) across channels: paid, content, ABM, events
- Add product marketing manager for each major product line or segment
- Hire brand and corporate marketing if you're doing enterprise motion
- Add marketing ops to manage tech stack and attribution
Product Marketing becomes a function:
- Hire PMM lead/director at 4-5 PMMs to manage the team
- Specialize PMMs: competitive intel, sales enablement, launches, customer marketing, pricing
- Add technical PMM if you're selling to technical buyers
- Regional PMM if international is 20%+ of revenue
Customer Success maturity:
- Build CSM team segmented by account size
- Add renewal manager role separate from CSM at scale
- Hire CS ops to manage health scores and playbooks
- Add customer marketing/advocacy manager
The Right Ratios at Each Stage
Use these benchmarks to guide hiring decisions:
Seed stage ($0-$1M ARR):
- 1 PMM per 2-3 AEs
- No dedicated marketing yet
- No dedicated CS yet
Series A ($1M-$5M ARR):
- 1 PMM per 5-7 AEs
- 1 demand gen marketer per $2M ARR
- 1 CSM per $500K-$750K ARR (late Series A)
Series B ($5M-$20M ARR):
- 1 PMM per 10 AEs
- 1 marketer per $1.5-2M ARR
- 1 CSM per $1M ARR
- Sales ops person per 15-20 quota carriers
These ratios flex based on your GTM motion. PLG companies need more PMM earlier. Enterprise companies need more SEs and fewer SDRs.
Common Hiring Mistakes
Hiring leadership before the team happens when companies hire a VP before they have anyone for them to manage. Either the VP does IC work (expensive) or spends months recruiting while providing no output.
Building marketing before sales can close leaves you with lots of leads and no one to work them, or salespeople who can't close so marketing gets blamed for "bad leads."
Hiring specialists too early means bringing in a customer advocacy manager when you have 12 customers, or a partner marketing manager when you have two partners. Generalists first, specialists later.
Copying big company org charts causes startups to hire AR managers, corporate comms, and field marketing before they have the basics working. Build for your stage, not the stage you want to be.
Underinvesting in PMM creates a sales team with no messaging, competitive intelligence, or enablement. PMM is a force multiplier—hire it before you scale sales headcount.
Building Your Hiring Plan
Start with your revenue target and work backward. If you need to get from $5M to $15M ARR in 12 months with a $100K ACV and 70% close rate on qualified opps, you need:
- $10M new ARR = 100 new customers
- 100 customers at 70% close rate = 143 qualified opportunities
- 143 opps with 3-month sales cycle = ~12 opps per month
- 12 opps per month at 20% opp-to-MQL conversion = 60 MQLs/month
That tells you how much pipeline marketing needs to generate, which tells you how many marketers you need. Then you work out how many AEs you need to close 100 deals, and how many PMMs you need to enable them.
Don't hire based on "we should have a content person." Hire based on what you need to hit revenue targets with the sales capacity you're building.
The companies that scale GTM successfully hire in sequence: sellers first, marketers second, specialists third. They staff for the bottleneck, not for the ideal org chart. And they recognize that the best GTM hire at any stage might be a PMM who makes everyone else more effective.