Senior GTM Strategist

Overview

You design and execute major GTM initiatives for Vanta's compliance automation platform. This means building the strategic frameworks for entering new markets, launching new sales motions, expanding channel partnerships, and running annual/long-term GTM planning. You work directly with GTM leadership (sales, marketing, partnerships) to answer strategic questions with data and then make sure those strategies actually get implemented.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series D ($4.15B valuation, $150M raised in July 2025)

Size: 1,628 employees

Growth: Rapidly scaling - hiring across GTM teams, expanding into new markets and buyer segments, recently acquired Riskey for security reviews

Market Position: Category leader in compliance automation (4.6 stars on G2, 2,300+ reviews). Main competitors include Drata, Secureframe, and Sprinto. Vanta is the established player with 400+ integrations and serves everyone from startups to enterprises.

GTM Reality

Current State:

• Vanta has product-market fit but is scaling into new segments (enterprise, government, healthcare)
• Multiple buyer personas: security teams, compliance officers, CISOs, IT leaders
• Mix of PLG motion (freemium/self-serve), mid-market sales, and enterprise deals
• Channel partnerships becoming more important (consultants, MSPs, resellers)

Your Role in It:

• You're not running the day-to-day sales ops or RevOps systems work
• You're the person designing the new playbook when they decide to go after a new vertical or launch a partner program
• You translate leadership's strategic questions into analysis, frameworks, and action plans

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Strategic Projects (40%) | Analysis & Planning (30%) | Stakeholder Management (20%) | Documentation (10%)

Key Activities

• Designing GTM initiatives: When leadership says "we want to go after healthcare" or "we need a channel partner program," you build the strategy. This means market sizing, competitor analysis, go-to-market approach, success metrics, resource requirements, and a 12-month execution plan.

• Annual/long-term planning: You run the process for annual GTM planning. This means working with sales, marketing, CS, and partnerships to build bottoms-up and tops-down forecasts, set territory structures, allocate headcount, and create the operating plan. Lots of spreadsheets, scenario modeling, and executive presentations.

• Building repeatable frameworks: You create the templates and processes that make GTM decisions faster and better. Examples: new market entry framework, deal desk escalation criteria, pricing/packaging decision trees, segment prioritization models. You're building the infrastructure for how decisions get made.

• Thought partnership with leadership: You get pulled into strategic conversations early. "Should we hire more AEs or more SDRs?" "Do we need a sales engineer team?" "How should we structure our enterprise sales team?" You're expected to bring data, comparable examples, and clear recommendations—not just present options.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Ambiguous problems with high stakes: You're often working on questions where there's no clear answer and leadership is debating different approaches. You need to bring clarity and conviction, but you'll rarely have perfect data. You're making recommendations that affect headcount, budgets, and team structure.

• Cross-functional influence without authority: You don't manage the GTM teams—you're trying to get sales, marketing, CS, and partnerships aligned on a strategy and then convince them to execute it your way. Lots of stakeholder management, selling internally, and following up to make sure things actually happen.

• Constantly shifting priorities: Leadership will come to you with urgent strategic questions that take priority over your planned work. One week you're building a new market entry plan, next week you're doing emergency analysis on why pipeline conversion rates dropped. You need to context-switch quickly and be comfortable with half-finished projects.

What Success Looks Like

• Leadership uses your frameworks to make decisions consistently across quarters
• Initiatives you designed actually launch on time and hit their goals (new segment generates $XM in pipeline, channel program contributes Y% of revenue)
• You build planning processes that the organization uses year after year
• GTM leaders seek you out early for strategic questions instead of building plans in silos

Who You're Working With

Primary Stakeholders:

• VP/SVP of Sales (setting sales strategy, territory planning, headcount allocation)
• VP Marketing (segment prioritization, campaign planning, lead routing)
• VP Partnerships (channel strategy, partner program design)
• VP Customer Success (expansion motion, customer segmentation)
• Finance (forecasting, budget allocation, headcount planning)

What They Need From You:

• Clear recommendations backed by data—not just analysis
• Frameworks that make their decisions easier and faster
• Someone who understands the tradeoffs between different GTM approaches
• A person who can drive cross-functional initiatives to completion

Requirements

• 5+ years in GTM strategy, strategic finance, management consulting, or corporate strategy (ideally with some time in sales ops or GTM roles)
• You've built GTM plans before—you know what a good market entry strategy or annual plan looks like
• Strong analytical skills: you can build financial models, do cohort analysis, and translate messy data into clear insights
• Executive communication: you can present to VPs and C-level, distill complex analysis into simple narratives
• Project management: you can run multi-workstream initiatives with multiple stakeholders and actually get them across the finish line
• Experience at a high-growth B2B SaaS company (Series B+ preferred) where you've seen GTM scale from one motion to multiple
• Comfort with ambiguity: you don't need perfect instructions or complete data to start making progress