[00:00]
Ashley: Hello everyone, I hope you’re doing great; I am Ashley.
Ray: And I am Ray.
Ashley: All right, welcome back to Podcast7. Today we’re going to open up a LinkedIn tab and maybe look at your own company’s org chart with a bit of a side eye.
Ray: Okay.
Ashley: Because we are asking a very, very expensive question. There is this new job title that has just exploded onto the tech scene. It seems like it came out of nowhere completely: it’s called the GTM Engineer. Honestly, when I first saw it, I thought it was a typo.
Ray: It does sound a bit like word salad, doesn't it?
Ashley: It really does; like someone just threw sales, marketing, and computer science into a blender and just hit puree.
Ray: Exactly, like you need a hard hat and a physics degree to send an email. But the buzz around this is absolutely wild.
Ashley: It’s not just a few startups.
Ray: No, we’re talking about a role that companies are betting on to the tune of billions of dollars. Specifically, a company called Clay just raised a massive round.
Ashley: Right, the valuation is something like $3 billion.
Ray: Three billion, and their whole pitch was basically: we are funding the future of this one job title.
Ashley: It’s an incredibly bold bet.
Ray: It is; they think the GTM Engineer is the future of how companies make money, period. But, and we have to start here, to be honest, there’s so much scepticism mixed in with that hype.
Ashley: Oh yeah.
Ray: For every person calling it the future of sales, there’s an industry vet calling it "semantic chaos".
Ashley: I saw that exact phrase! Or even more brutally, I saw one comment that called it "RevOps with a better marketing budget and a hoodie".
[02:15]
Ray: That is just perfect, and that’s exactly what we’re here to unpack today. For you listening, whether you’re in sales, marketing, or just confused why your LinkedIn feed is full of these people.
Ashley: Exactly; we are going to figure out: is this a real revolutionary shift, or is this just a fancy rebrand for email marketers who wanted a raise?
Ray: I think the mission today is to look past that shiny object, because if you strip away all the buzzwords, the sources suggest there is a real systemic shift happening.
Ashley: A shift from what to what?
Ray: From hiring more bodies to solve your revenue problems to engineering revenue. That distinction is just crucial.
Ashley: So let's start there with the identity crisis, because nobody seems to agree on what this person even is, right?
Ray: If you listen to the creators, the Clay folks, they describe the GTM Engineer as this superhero figure who’s collapsing the traditional assembly line. But maybe let’s paint a picture of that old assembly line first.
Ashley: Yeah, that’s a good idea; think about the B2B sales floor from like 2010 or even 2020.
Ray: It was a factory. You had the SDR, the sales development rep; their job was just manual labour.
Ashley: The grunt work—smile and dial.
Ray: Exactly; smash the phones, send 50 generic emails a day, just trying to book one meeting—it was a volume game.
Ashley: Then what?
Ray: Then if they got a bite, they pass it to the AE, the account executive, the closer. And then maybe a sales engineer comes in for a demo; it was super segmented. The SDR didn’t even really need to know the product.
Ashley: And the argument now is that this whole model is broken, but why? I mean, companies made trillions this way.
Ray: Because the math just stopped working; the tactics all got commoditized.
[05:00]
Ashley: You mean...
Ray: Well, sending a thousand generic emails worked in 2012 because you were the only one doing it, right? But today, our inboxes are just graveyards for those "bumping this to the top" messages. Response rates tanked and the cost to get a customer just went through the roof.
Ashley: Exactly; so, the GTM Engineer idea asks this really dangerous question: what if one person using AI and automation could do the work of 10 SDRs?
Ray: And that’s the superhero narrative—that this isn’t just a salesperson, it’s a builder. I saw this term "Claygency" popping up in the research—these agencies that just appeared overnight.
Ashley: And that’s where the scepticism kicks in, and rightly so, because when you lower the barrier to mass outreach, you get bad actors.
Ray: We looked at this scathing LinkedIn post from a critic—he basically said GTM Engineers are just a fancy new title for people who were mediocre email marketers 6 months ago.
Ashley: Ouch, that is personal!
Ray: It was brutal. He said Clay gave them an identity and a tribe, but some of them are just doing what he calls "clay and spray".
Ashley: "Clay and spray"—I have to admit, that’s pretty catchy.
Ray: It is, but it nails a real problem: the idea that instead of engineering value, they’re just using powerful tools to blast spam faster.
Ashley: So, you’re not an engineer, you’re just a spammer with a better tech stack, and you’re burning your company’s domain reputation in the process.
Ray: Okay, so how do we tell the spammers from the real engineers? Because companies are posting jobs for $200,000 a year for this.
Ashley: They are, and CFOs don't sign off on that for spam. You don’t pay someone a surgeon's salary to hand out flyers.
Ray: No, you don’t; the difference is in the architecture. A true GTM Engineer isn’t just using a tool—they are building a machine. One of the best definitions we found called it architecting signal-to-revenue systems.
[07:45]
Ashley: Architecting signal-to-revenue systems—that sounds incredibly smart. Let’s break that down: what does that actually look like on a Tuesday morning?
Ray: It means moving away from "I think I’ll email CFOs today" to "I built a system that watches for specific signals". The research breaks it down into three layers, and if you want to spot a real one, ask them about layer one: the Data Foundation.
Ashley: Ah, the unsexy part—the vegetables.
Ray: It is the most boring, invisible work that makes everything else possible. It’s hygiene, deduplication, warehousing, and cleaning the lists.
Ashley: But why is that engineering? Can an intern do that?
Ray: Not at this scale. Imagine a CRM with 50,000 records where John Smith is in there five times.
Ashley: It’s a total mess.
Ray: A GTM Engineer writes a script, maybe using Python or SQL, to normalize all that data. They treat the customer database like a software product: garbage in, garbage out.
Ashley: Okay, so they programmatically clean the data; that's layer 1. What's layer two?
Ray: Data Modelling. This isn’t just filtering by company size; it’s scoring propensity to buy. It’s about synthesizing all these different data points to find actual intent.
Ashley: Give me an example of the deep stuff; what does synthesizing actually look like?
Ray: Okay, there’s a great example in the source material about ticket spikes. Imagine a GTM Engineer builds a workflow that connects to your customer support software like Zendesk, which is usually totally siloed from sales.
Ashley: Completely; sales is popping champagne while support is putting out fires.
Ray: So, this GTM Engineer builds a bridge. The script says: if a customer logs more than five critical support tickets in 24 hours, stop all upsell emails immediately.
Ashley: Wow, that’s churn prevention.
[10:15]
Ray: But you can flip it: what if a customer asks three questions about a feature they don’t pay for?
Ashley: Uh-huh, that’s a buying signal.
Ray: Exactly; the system flags it and sends an alert straight to the account manager.
Ashley: I love that because usually sales reps are flying blind. That's why they're called deal multipliers, not just deal closers. And that leads to the third layer: Data Activation.
Ray: The actual outreach. But notice it comes last. The "clay and spray" crowd start with activation; the real engineers start with the foundation.
Ashley: So what does a good activation look like then?
Ray: Instead of a generic list, a GTM Engineer might build a workflow that scrapes Google Maps for local businesses, cross-references them with LinkedIn job postings, and checks their website’s code for competitor software. That would take a human an hour per prospect, but the script does it in seconds.
Ashley: Speaking of systems that multiply your results, this feels like a good time to mention a couple of partners living in this space. [SPONSOR] If you’re looking for the strategy side where AI meets demand gen, check out Demand7 at demand7.ai. If you’re ready for the actual execution and building these systems, head over to GTM7 at gtm7.ai.
Ray: Demand7.ai for strategy, GTM7.ai for the build.
Ashley: Check them out. Okay, so we know what they do, but here’s the practical question causing all the fights on LinkedIn: where do you put this person?
Ray: The org chart battle. Is it marketing, sales, or ops? People say this is just RevOps with a hoodie, which is funny, but it points to real confusion.
Ashley: The research had this great analogy: the trunk and the branches. Traditional RevOps is the trunk—stability, owning the CRM, keeping Salesforce from crashing. GTM Engineering is the branches—experimentation and rapid prototyping.
Ray: If you make them go through a RevOps change management board, it dies in committee. But if you put them just in sales, they become a glorified list builder for a lazy account exec.
Ashley: Exactly. It has to be a hybrid.
[13:30]
Ray: They need the technical chops but also a commercial brain. A GTM Engineer understands human sales problems like budget approval delays and uses code to solve them.
Ashley: But there’s a trap here: the never-ending build trap. Technical people love to build; it’s fun to connect APIs.
Ray: You can spend weeks building a beautiful machine, but if it doesn’t drive revenue, you’re just playing with expensive Lego.
Ashley: So true. The metric has to be outcomes: meetings booked, revenue influenced.
Ray: Let’s zoom out: is "GTM Engineer" just a synonym for a power user of Clay?
Ashley: That is the vendor lock-in risk. It’s like being a Flash developer in 2010—great until the iPhone killed Flash. Although the problem they are solving—the need for efficient, data-driven leads—is eternal.
Ray: The math is just undeniable. If you can augment an army of 20 SDRs with a system built by two GTM Engineers, the sales floor starts to look like an engineering floor.
Ashley: It makes the nerdy side of sales cool. It validates the "under-engineered" thesis: most companies aren't under-staffed; they are just using human labour to do work that software should be doing.
Ray: That is a haunting phrase.
Ashley: It’s the reality for 90% of B2B sales teams right now.
Ray: So what’s the verdict? Is this here to stay?
Ashley: The title might change to "Revenue Engineering" in five years, but the function is inevitable. You cannot compete with a manual slingshot when your competitor has an automated machine gun.
Ray: The leverage is just too high.
Ashley: We’ve covered a lot today, but I want you to leave with one last thing to chew on.
Ray: Right.
Ashley: If your competitor is using one GTM Engineer to out-scale, out-personalize, and out-smart your army of 20 SDRs, is your revenue problem actually a people problem—or are you simply running a 2026 tech stack with a 2010 operating manual?
Ray: Efficiency is the new growth. Thanks for diving in with us; check your workflows and we will catch you on the next Podcast7 episode.
Ashley: Continue the conversation at podcast7.ai. Goodbye for now!
