Founders often talk about go-to-market (GTM) hiring as though the market were neatly organised. It rarely is.
The shorthand is familiar. Hire from a big-name software company. Look for a recognisable title. Assume the best candidates have followed a predictable commercial path. Zeki’s research shows the market works differently. The strongest GTM talent is sourced more diffusely than technical talent, and the usual shortcuts are weaker than founders think.
That matters because commercial hiring in deep-tech has become more expensive to get wrong. GTM hiring is now outpacing technical hiring across most scale-up verticals, while the role itself is changing in shape. This is not simply a question of adding sales capacity. It is a shift in the kind of operator companies need—and, by extension, where those operators are found.
The first mistake is assuming GTM talent maps like technical talent
In engineering, the sourcing map is relatively legible. A small set of companies and institutions consistently produce high-quality technical talent. The signal may be competitive, but it is widely understood.
GTM does not follow that pattern. Zeki’s research shows the search for GTM talent is more diffuse, with much lower concentration among leading employers. Strong commercial operators are less likely to come from a small cluster of dominant firms, and more likely to be distributed across adjacent markets.
That makes provenance harder to read. In GTM, the route matters as much as the employer: what was being sold, how defined the product was, how much of the role depended on process versus interpretation. Those details are less tidy than a company logo, but they carry more real signal.
There are still pockets of concentration. Salesforce stands out as a major source of GTM talent and a reliable producer of enterprise sales capability.
Percentage of Companies Hiring Technical Talent from Top Technology Employers by Vertical
But the broader pattern remains fragmented. Zeki’s data shows that GTM sourcing varies materially by sector: enterprise-heavy verticals draw more from large software vendors, while others lean more heavily on their own ecosystems or adjacent advisory firms. The point is not that there is a single best source. It is that GTM talent sits across several overlapping pools, and the right one depends on the nature of the sale.
Treating it as a single market is where many searches begin to break down.
In deep tech, the strongest profiles often do not look commercial
This becomes clearer in more technical markets. Zeki’s research shows the rising importance of solutions-oriented roles, particularly in enterprise AI. Customer engagement is more iterative, more consultative, and less defined by a fixed product.
As a result, the pipeline into these roles is changing. The people stepping into commercial positions are not only coming from sales engineering, but also from data, systems and technical backgrounds.
Some of the most valuable GTM operators no longer sit on a pure sales track. They sit between product and customer, translating complexity into something that can be trusted and adopted. That is a different capability from traditional revenue execution, and it appears earlier in different types of careers.
This is where founder instinct often misfires. Searches are framed around “enterprise sales”, when the real requirement is the ability to reduce uncertainty in a technically complex purchase.
Founder-shaped operators are part of the signal
Another pattern sits slightly outside conventional GTM sourcing. Zeki’s data shows a higher concentration of former founders in faster-growing companies, particularly where GTM roles intersect with technical work.
Percentage of Individuals by Year of Hire
The implication is narrow but important. As complexity increases, there is greater demand for operators who are comfortable without a defined system around them — people who can navigate ambiguity, shape a motion as they execute it, and engage credibly across technical and commercial boundaries.
The same research shows that years of experience do not vary meaningfully across growth cohorts. Faster-growing companies are not simply hiring more senior people. They are selecting for a different kind of experience.
This is why title-led hiring breaks down so often in GTM. The relevant capability is not always visible through standard career progression.
Sector matters more than most hiring briefs reflect
Zeki’s broader analysis shows that the commercial market is not uniform. In some sectors, GTM roles skew more experienced, reflecting high-trust buying environments. In others, sourcing leans into ecosystems or adjacent professions that better match how value is delivered and adopted.
The underlying point is simple. The question is not just where good GTM talent comes from. It is where the right GTM talent for a specific commercial model is most likely to exist.
Treating all GTM hiring as interchangeable produces predictable errors.
What founders should stop doing
The clearest mistake is treating GTM provenance as a proxy for capability.
A recognised employer can still be useful context. A senior title can still matter. But in this part of the market, they are often weak signals on their own. Zeki’s research shows that sales-representative experience at a large technology company does not translate as directly to the scale-up environment as technical experience does.
More precise questions are required. Did this person operate inside a mature system, or help build one? Did they move customers through a defined process, or through ambiguity? Did they execute a motion, or help shape it?
Those distinctions are harder to screen for. They are also closer to the real work.
Where great GTM talent actually comes from
It comes from more places than most founders expect.
Some of it comes from large enterprise vendors, particularly where discipline and buyer credibility matter. Some comes from technical roles that have shifted outward, where commercial work depends on interpretation rather than presentation. Some comes from founder-shaped operators, whose experience reflects the absence of structure rather than its refinement. And some comes from sectors where the commercial function has already adapted to complexity, regulation or trust.
That breadth is what makes the market difficult to navigate. It is also what creates the opportunity.
Great GTM talent is rarely concentrated in one place. More often, it is dispersed—and occasionally disguised.