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New research from Cleverbridge shows that while sales-led GTM isn’t going away, it is changing.
Sales teams are focusing on upmarket, complex enterprise deals. Meanwhile, they’re offloading small deals, renewals, mid-cycle add-ons, and transactional upsells to self-serve tools. The result: more time actually selling, less time on busywork. And much healthier unit economics.
Cleverbridge just released part two of a new content series on this shift. It explores the cost-to-serve problem inside sales-led companies and how sales, CS, and digital buying paths work together.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to after looking at the data: the companies most associated with replacing GTM jobs are the ones hiring most aggressively into those same roles.
Cursor is hiring SDRs. So is Decagon. So is OpenAI. While the broader market pulled back on SDR hiring by 21% year-on-year, AI-native startups more than doubled their SDR headcount. The companies selling the automation apparently aren't buying all of it.
That's the biggest surprise in the inaugural H1 2026 State of GTM Hiring report, built on real-time job post data from Sumble across US-based B2B digital native companies. The headline number isn't pretty — overall GTM job posts are down 15%, a trend that continued through April. But if you're trying to make sense of where GTM is actually headed, the story underneath that number is considerably more interesting.
Here’s a preview of my favorite takeaways:
SDR job posts are down 21% – but the companies supposedly killing the SDR job have doubled their SDR headcount.
AI-natives are automating customer support with 67% smaller teams. They are still investing in customer success.
Overall GTM job posts are down 15%, even as AI companies raised $200B+ last year. More fundraising isn't translating into more jobs.
3-in-5 open GTM roles are AEs or solution engineers. Buyers still want to talk to a human.
Growth marketing is the only marketing role that's actually up year-on-year.
GTM engineering headcount has doubled. It’s coming into its own with 400+ GTM engineers at US digital natives.
Clay pioneered GTM engineering; Claude Code is becoming the go-to tool.
Marketers are more Claude-pilled than every GTM function outside of GTM engineering.
Methodology note:
This analysis is based on data from Sumble, which captures real-time job post data across 3 million verified companies. It focused on job posts in the US at B2B digital native and AI-native companies. Companies with a significant B2C motion were excluded.
Sumble uses job titles to auto-categorize job posts into top-level categories (Sales, Marketing, etc.) along with more specialized sub-categories (Growth Marketing, Product Marketing, GTM Engineering, etc.). Job post data can be noisy – one job post might have multiple open roles behind it or vice versa – and so the analysis was cross-checked against headcount data as well.
SDR job posts are down 21% – but the companies supposedly killing the SDR job have doubled their SDR headcount.
SDR/BDR jobs have not been spared as more companies are turning to automated and signal-based outbound workflows. New job posts are down 21% year-on-year, below the rest of the hiring market.
Here’s the surprise (and narrative violation). AI-native companies are aggressively adding SDR headcount while the rest of the market is pulling back.
SDR headcount at AI-native companies has more than doubled year-on-year. It’s now the second fastest growing GTM role by headcount within AI-native companies. This trend is continuing today: AI-native companies are hiring 50% more SDRs as a share of their GTM job posts compared to all digital natives.
Recent examples include Legora, Cursor, LangChain, Fireworks AI, Decagon, and even OpenAI. Anecdotally, many tech companies hire SDRs as a training ground for junior employees; top-performers quickly get promoted to AE. If you’re building an AI company, this is your permission to keep hiring SDRs.
OpenAI is one of many AI-natives hiring SDRs to sell AI
AI-natives are automating customer support with 67% smaller teams. They are still investing in customer success.
AI-natives aren’t automating SDRs. They are, however, automating customer support.
Customer support represents only 2.2% of GTM headcount at AI-native companies, which is 67% smaller than other B2B digital natives (6.6% of GTM headcount). This is especially striking because customer success headcount is comparable between the two.
In the job post data, customer support saw the biggest year-over-year decline of every GTM role (down 37%). This speaks to the growing traction of AI customer support products like Sierra ($15.8B valuation), Fin (formerly Intercom), Decagon ($4.5B valuation), Parloa ($3B valuation), Crescendo, and others.
Overall GTM job posts are down 15%, even as AI companies raised $200B+ last year. More fundraising isn't translating into more jobs.
There were 22,988 GTM job posts in Q1 2026 for roles at US digital native companies. This is down 15% compared to Q1 2025, and the trend continued in April amidst the sell-off of SaaS stocks. These figures include sales, marketing, solutions, customer service, and business development jobs.
AI-native companies did accelerate GTM hiring by nearly 50% year-on-year. That said, the overall volume is low: these are still only 5% of all digital native GTM job posts and 2% of GTM headcount.
I expected this to be higher given the fundraising headlines. AI companies raised over $200B last year according to Crunchbase and venture funding was up 30% in 2025. More fundraising isn’t translating into more hiring.