Senior GTM Strategist

Overview

You're on the GTM Strategy & Planning team at Vanta, helping leadership figure out where and how to grow next. You'll design major initiatives (new market entry, channel expansion, new sales motions), run analysis to support annual planning, and build repeatable frameworks that improve how GTM decisions get made across the org. You work directly with GTM leadership on their most strategic questions.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage (Series C+, 1,628 employees)

Size: 1,628 employees

Growth: Rapidly scaling in the compliance automation space, serving startups to enterprises across healthcare, fintech, government

Market Position: Category leader in automated compliance - they've scaled past the early adopter phase and are now figuring out how to penetrate new markets, segments, and go-to-market motions

Product: AI-powered platform that automates compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, etc.), integrates with 400+ tools, serves customers from startups to enterprises

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

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

Key Activities

• Designing Major GTM Initiatives: You're handed questions like "Should we build a channel partner program?" or "How do we enter the mid-market?" You scope the initiative, build the business case, design the operating model, and create the execution roadmap. You don't implement it yourself, but you own making sure the right people have a clear plan.
• Supporting Annual Planning: You pull together data on bookings trends, pipeline coverage, capacity models, and territory productivity. You translate messy spreadsheets into clear recommendations for leadership. You're in a lot of planning meetings from August-November.
• Building Repeatable Frameworks: You notice GTM teams making similar decisions inconsistently (like "how do we prioritize which industries to target?"). You build frameworks, scorecards, or decision trees so teams can move faster next time. Some get used. Some don't.
• Acting as Thought Partner to Leadership: The CRO or VP Sales has a question about whether to split the commercial team or how to think about PLG vs sales-led motion. You do the research, structure the options, and pressure-test their thinking. You're in a lot of 1:1s and working sessions.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Ambiguity Is the Job: You're given big, fuzzy questions ("How should we think about our channel strategy?") with incomplete data. You have to figure out what the real question is, what analysis would actually be useful, and how to structure an answer that's actionable.
• You Don't Control Execution: You design the plan, but sales ops, marketing ops, enablement, and the GTM teams execute it. Sometimes they ignore your recommendations. Sometimes priorities shift and your project gets shelved. You have influence, not authority.
• Lots of Stakeholder Wrangling: Getting alignment across sales, marketing, CS, ops, and finance is slow. You'll spend a lot of time in meetings, rewriting decks based on feedback, and managing up to executives who all have different priorities.
• Long Feedback Loops: You design an initiative in Q1, it launches in Q3, and you won't know if it worked until Q4 or later. You need to be comfortable with delayed gratification.
• Analysis Paralysis Risk: There's always more data you could pull or another scenario you could model. You have to make judgment calls on when "good enough" is good enough.

What Success Looks Like

• Your initiatives actually launch and get adopted (not just theoretical PowerPoint)
• Leadership uses your frameworks to make decisions months after you built them
• You build a reputation as the person who can untangle complex GTM problems and give clear recommendations
• Your analysis changes the direction of major bets (we do X instead of Y because of your work)

Who You Work With

Internal Stakeholders:

• GTM Leadership (CRO, VP Sales, VP Marketing, VP CS): They bring you their biggest strategic questions. You help them think through the options.
• Rev Ops, Sales Ops, Marketing Ops: They own implementation and have opinions on what's realistic. You need their buy-in.
• Finance/FP&A: You partner with them on financial modeling, capacity planning, and ROI analysis.
• Enablement/PMM: They're often the ones who have to execute on the GTM changes you design.

What They Care About:

• Leadership wants clear options and risk-adjusted recommendations: Not just analysis, but "here's what I think we should do and why"
• Ops teams want things that are actually implementable: They've seen too many strategy decks that ignore operational reality
• Finance wants the math to work: They'll poke holes in your assumptions about ramp time, conversion rates, and capacity

Requirements

• 5-8+ years in GTM strategy, rev ops, management consulting, or Corp Dev: You've designed and executed strategic initiatives before, ideally in B2B SaaS
• Strong analytical chops: You're comfortable in spreadsheets, modeling capacity and pipeline, running cohort analysis, and making projections with incomplete data
• Experience with GTM at scale: You understand how sales, marketing, CS, and ops work at a company past the 500-person mark. You've seen the complexity that comes with multiple segments, products, and motions.
• Frameworks and structure: You can take a messy problem and turn it into a clear framework or decision tree
• Stakeholder management: You know how to influence without authority, manage up to executives, and navigate organizational politics
• Bias toward execution: You're not just a "strategy consultant" - you care about implementation and want to see your work get used
• Comfort with ambiguity: You don't need perfect data or a clear spec. You can figure out the right question and build the analysis from scratch.

Reality Check

This role is strategic but not glamorous. You'll spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, refining slide decks, sitting in planning meetings, and trying to get alignment across teams with competing priorities. You won't be running deals or talking to customers - you're behind the scenes designing the systems and motions that the GTM org uses.

You need to enjoy structured problem-solving, be comfortable with long project timelines, and be okay with the fact that some of your best work will get deprioritized or ignored. If you want fast feedback loops and immediate impact, this isn't it. If you like designing how things should work at scale and seeing your frameworks get adopted across a large org, this could be great.