Growth starts with people: A case study on GTM team design

Context: A GTM org held together by optimism and duct tape

Our client, an all-in-one business management SaaS for SMBs, had made impressive progress despite a chaotic growth stage. But as they edged closer to scaling, their GTM org was straining at the seam. Things only kept running because of the impressive commitment--and firefighting skills--of its core team members. It was inspiring to watch, but really unsustainable.

They had tried building up their marketing function multiple times. None of it stuck. Campaigns sputtered, brand consistency was a mess, and internal teams didn’t know where marketing began and sales ended. Alignment between product, marketing, and sales? They felt like it mostly existed in theory. Meanwhile, leadership knew things weren’t working, they just didn’t know exactly why.

That’s where we came in.

How we did it: By focusing on what most people skip

Designing your GTM org isn't about copying a template from a VC blog. It’s an iterative, nuanced process that requires digging through the reality of what’s not working.

At ESM, we started with bottom-up research:

• Interviewed stakeholders across GTM
• Mapped actual day-to-day tasks (not job descriptions)
• Identified where work was falling through the cracks

Instead of handing over a shiny PDF and walking away, we worked alongside their team, flagged the biggest breaking points, and helped operationalize the new setup, fast.

We also kept it lean. No endless meetings. No bloated slides. No “let’s circle back on this next quarter” energy. Just execution, iteration, and outcomes.

The challenge: When talent becomes the bottleneck

Here’s what we found:

• Campaigns would launch... and then vanish. Nobody held a long-term view on performance.
• Campaign would also launch...kinda whenever. No one owned the calendar, and it was a feast-or-famine situation. Some weeks, they crowded the same channels, other weeks, it was crickets.
• Sales tracked leads in a series of Excel rabbit holes because no one had defined who owned handoff processes.

The org had been reshuffled several times, trying out different configurations — without ever identifying the right missing pieces. The team was tired. And more importantly, they were unsure what to try next.

Starting from first principles: Our approach

Instead of asking “What roles do we need?”, we asked:

“What jobs are not getting done?”

This flipped the conversation. For example:

• Campaigns were not being 'project managed': The product team launched experiment after experiment without actually formalizing any learnings, everyone agreed on what a good campaign should look like and yet no one collected actual performance benchmarks, and of course, there was no calendar planning, and campaigns just went out the door whenever they were ready, on all channels, to everyone.
• The company's brand didn't result in trust. So we dug deeper: “Why do we not have brand trust?” Multiple reasons came up, one of which being, “We have lost the intentionality behind our brand”. This was not surprising given that no one on the team was mandated with developing the brand, or monitoring its progress.
• Metrics didn't give the full picture. Lagging indicators like revenue or sales conversions were tracked, and there was a decent amount of visibility into high-level KPIs, but the teams couldn't answer detailed questions around leading indicators. By looking deeper, we realized that the way data moved in the org did not match the way the teams were set up.

Right after this first session, we rolled up our sleeves and mapped the current org in full color. For each team member, we outlined what they were supposed to own, what they were actually doing, and which metrics (if any) they were being measured on. This process revealed misaligned roles, unclear ownership, and people being held accountable for things they had zero control over. Once the gaps were clearly identified, only then did we head back to the whiteboard to explore org structures that would actually work.

From there, we designed multiple org structure options:

1. One version centered around a CRO
2. Another split responsibilities between Heads of Product & Growth, Marketing, and Sales
3. A third version stripped things down even further: Head of Product & Growth, Head of Sales, and a killer Comms Manager.

We walked the client through the trade-offs, collaborated on tweaks, and iterated with their input until the structure fit like a glove.

What made it work was understanding the full ecosystem: how processes flow (or don’t), how tools are used (or ignored), how data is tracked, and how all of that affects what people can actually achieve in their roles. When you understand the interplay between workflows, tech stacks, analytics, and accountability, the gap analysis becomes sharper, and the resulting recommendations more actionable. That’s what turns an org design from a theoretical exercise into a practical, durable solution.

How to pick the right structure: The questions that matter

There’s no one-size-fits-all GTM team. But there is a right one for where you are right now. Here's how we helped them figure it out:

• What’s your Go-To-Market strategy today, and where is it stuck?

They were sales-led, but new client acquisition had hit a wall. In the mid-term, they knew growth would have to come from deepening usage within their existing base, which meant shifting toward a product-led motion. Long-term, they were eyeing a new market where their product would scale more efficiently through product-led growth, too.

• What’s your most urgent job to be done?

A consistent brand voice and campaign coordination became a priority not just for polish, but because brand sentiment was slipping. Despite their market dominance, perception didn’t always match reality. Messaging was fragmented, campaigns felt disjointed, and it was starting to erode the credibility they’d worked hard to build. Fixing the brand wasn’t cosmetic, it was strategic.

• Do you have existing talent you can build around?

Yes. They already had solid growth marketing and product-led experience in-house. Our role was to help shape the structure around that existing talent, so it could actually deliver at scale.

• What’s your hiring capacity today?

Limited. So we phased hiring in a way that gave them breathing room without stalling progress.

Takeaways: What should your GTM Org look like?

If you’re building a B2B SaaS company and asking yourself:

• “Why aren’t my campaigns working?”
• “Do I need a CMO, a CRO, or something else entirely?”
• “How do I hire without over-hiring?”

Then maybe it’s not your product, or your messaging. Maybe it’s your org design.

Here’s our recommendation:

• Start with your go-to-market bottlenecks, not your fantasy team list. By starting with tasks that are not getting done, you have a more flexible draft to work with. Various tasks can be shuffled in different configurations depending on the profiles you already have on the team, and the ones you think you're more likely to be bale to hire easily.
• Design for what’s not getting done today, not for what’s trendy. It's tempting to see other teams hiring for specific job titles and to think that surely, if everyone else is doing it, then it must work for you. Some teams need 'Acquisition managers', other teams need 'Product Growth Leads'. Design the roles that work for your unique needs.
• Consider your real constraints: budget, available talent, urgency. Available talent in particular is one that gets skipped often; yes, you need to design the right roles for your org (see above), but these new roles ned a decent amount of overlap with the available talent in the market where you're hiring.
• And for the love of SaaS — don’t hire a CRO just because everyone else is.

How we made it work

We know how some founders feel:

• “Bringing in an external team can feel risky”
• “Will they slow us down with endless syncs?”
• “Will they disrupt how we work?”

That wasn’t the case here. We integrated seamlessly, operating more like interim team members. We streamlined communication through async feedback loops, built a shared doc stack, and introduced just the right number of structured check-ins. We (politely) hounded people and kept up the energy and raised motivation so that work would get done. Think less “Zoom fatigue,” more “clarity in ClickUp.”

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