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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.
3-in-5 open GTM roles are AEs or solution engineers. Buyers still want to talk to a human.
Sales is by far the largest category of GTM hiring. The typical GTM hiring ratio is 10 in sales for every 4 in solutions (SE), 4 in marketing, 3 in customer service, and 2 in RevOps. For analysis purposes, forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) have been bucketed into solutions.
Sales and solution engineer job posts are both fairly resilient. These jobs seem to be at a lower risk of being replaced by AI tools like Claude as buyers still want to talk to a real person.
These ratios are reflected in overall GTM headcount data as well. The Sumble dataset shows that >400,000 people are employed in GTM roles at US digital native companies with sales accounting for 40% of all GTM headcount.
Growth marketing is the only marketing role that's actually up year-on-year.
Marketing job posts are down 20% year-on-year, and marketing now represents 15% of all GTM job posts within US digital native companies.
Marketing teams need to balance what Emily Kramer calls fuel activities (messaging, content, design) and engine activities (channels, tools, analytics). The pendulum is certainly swinging from fuel to engine. Perhaps it’s overcorrecting?
Growth marketing is the only marketing role that’s up – growth marketing job posts increased by 8% year-over-year. Meanwhile, marketing operations is down 13%, product marketing is down 17%, and events marketing is down 23%.
GTM engineering headcount has doubled. It’s coming into its own with 400+ GTM engineers at US digital natives.
There is one GTM role that’s clearly, unambiguously growing. That’s the GTM engineer.
There are now more than 400 GTM engineers at US digital native companies, and GTM engineering headcount has doubled year-on-year. Titles vary quite a bit for this role and might be called Growth Ops, AI Ops, RevOps Engineers, Lead to Opportunity Systems Engineers, or even the vague Member of Revenue Staff.
To put this in perspective, there’s now one GTM engineer for every seven people in RevOps among AI-native companies. Across all digital native companies, the ratio is one GTM engineer for every 50 people in RevOps. The rise of GTM engineering has helped the total number of RevOps jobs remain stable even as all GTM hiring is down.
Clay pioneered GTM engineering; Claude Code is becoming the go-to tool.
While Clay pioneered GTM engineering as a category, Claude Code is becoming a go-to GTM engineering tool as well. Claude was mentioned in 12% of Q1 2026 GTM engineering job posts, up 3x compared to Q4 2025. Clay mentions were fairly steady at 20% of job posts. This tracks with my recent Claude for GTM Pulse Report where GTM engines and outbound prospecting was the #1 GTM use case for Claude Code.
Many tech startups aren’t ready for a dedicated GTM engineer, as I wrote last year. But the conversation around GTM engineering does show where GTM seems to be headed. GTM in 2026 requires great data hygiene, automating wherever possible, fast iteration cycles, and adopting state of the art AI tooling.
Marketers are more Claude-pilled than every GTM function outside of GTM engineering.
Despite the growth of GTM engineers, it’s still a highly niche role – 0.1% of all GTM employees within US digital natives. Many more companies are opting to mandate AI fluency across new GTM hires rather than a handful of specialists.
Marketing is the most aggressive AI adopter. 2.3% of marketing job posts in Q1 2026 explicitly mention Claude or Claude Code. This is double the percentage in Q4 2025. Marketing job posts mention Claude more than any other GTM role outside of GTM engineering.
Not all GTM roles are embracing AI, though. The pendulum seems to be shifting back to human-first among BizDev roles as companies decouple automated prospecting (owned by GTM engineering or marketing) from 1:1 prospecting (owned by BDRs/SDRs). Sales roles appear to be the least impacted by AI. Just 2-in-1,000 sales job posts mention Claude.
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The shift in GTM hiring
The GTM hiring market in H1 2026 reflects a shift rather than a collapse. Hiring is down across most traditional GTM functions, while AI-native startups and more technical GTM roles are gaining share. As companies continue adjusting to tighter budgets and more AI, GTM teams appear to be getting smaller, more specialized, and more systems-oriented.
What hasn't changed: B2B companies still need people to sell AI. The question is whether the people doing the selling will look anything like they do today.
Special thank you to Sumble for providing the data for this report. They’re one of my favorite sources of GTM data, and premium subscribers can unlock 90 days free of the Pro plan.
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