I. Executive Summary
B2B Go-To-Market teams are being punished for high performance with a compounding toll on their attention. This hidden tax depletes experienced operators of their clarity and focus, creates drag between knowing and doing, and demands continual payment to maintain coherence, continuity, and decision-readiness as organizations grow.
HockeyStack conducted an independent investigation to determine precisely how much GTM Tax costs mid-market and enterprise organizations. The results were staggering: the average GTM team spends between 9,000-12,000 hours per year on activities that don’t actually drive revenue forward—defending data, justifying insights, explaining historical context, and reconciling reports.
What’s worse is the cost in value of these hours when measured against the average base salary of a senior-level GTM employee—annual GTM Tax conservatively ranges from $3.7 million per year for a smaller organization with just a handful of GTM leaders to $53.5 million per year for a mature team with several dozen directors, VPs, and executives.
This study details our findings on GTM Tax, including its quantifiable impact and how GTM teams can eliminate it.
Key takeaways
- GTM Tax is the hidden cost of running go-to-market. It is levied against senior-level GTM operators through repeated efforts, handoffs, and operational overhead that require attention, energy, and focus.
- GTM Tax occurs when B2B organizations primarily rely on manual effort to contextualize complex buyer’s journeys across campaigns, channels, and touchpoints.
- GTM Tax compounds with growth, as high-performing teams roll out more products, regions, and mature GTM motions that subsequently expand their data surface area and demand more attention.
- Teams spend between 9,000-12,000 hours annually on activities that don’t actually drive revenue forward. When measured against the hourly compensation of an average GTM operator (director-level and above), GTM Tax costs organizations anywhere between $3.7 million and $53.5 million per year.
- GTM organizations comply with GTM Tax by streamlining or automating isolated functions. This yields marginal efficiency gains at best. The only way for teams to effectively eliminate GTM Tax is by implementing an autonomous GTM system that can collect, analyze, and contextualize insights across every GTM motion.
