IV. Findings

Key takeaways

Findings of this report demonstrate: 

• GTM Tax is universal among scaling B2B organizations with both mid-market and enterprise GTM motions.
• GTM Tax impacts teams regardless of industry, GTM maturity, or tool spend.
• GTM Tax primarily hits organizations with two major cost categories: Human Attention Hours (Time cost) and its equivalent in hourly cost of average annual base salaries for senior-level GTM operators (Salary cost).
• GTM Tax disproportionately punishes high-performing teams, whose growth leads to expanded GTM motions with broader data surface areas.

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Tax on Time

This report estimates that a mid-scale B2B SaaS organization incurs approximately 9,000–12,000 Human Attention Hours per year in GTM Tax. At the organizational level, this is equivalent to the full annual attention capacity of 4-6 experienced GTM operators.

This figure spans all primary GTM Tax activities: 

• Responding to ad-hoc requests for data or insights
• Defending, validating, or explaining numbers
• Preparing reports, decks, or analyses for reviews
• Reconciling data across GTM tools
• Rebuilding or re-explaining historical context

However, some GTM activities incur a higher amount of GTM Tax than others. Findings indicate: 

• The majority of senior-level GTM operators (53%) spend 2-4 hours per week responding to ad-hoc requests for data/insights and another 27% spend 4-6 hours per week on the same activity.
• Over half of senior-level GTM operators (53%) spend at least two hours per week defending, validating, or explaining numbers.
• Nearly one-third of senior-level GTM operators (33%) spend at least four hours per week preparing reports, decks, or analyses for reviews.

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What this means:

While GTM Tax activities vary, they all require human effort for the same reason: GTM organizations lack the ability to collectively organize, retain, and access contextual information required to understand and respond to nuanced B2B buyer’s journeys. This shows that GTM Tax is not just a tooling or dashboard problem. It’s a systematic design failure across the entire GTM function. 

This also means that certain roles are taxed in time and attention at a higher rate. GTM Tax is mostly incurred from operators responsible for cross-functional coordination and decision support. As the primary GTM orchestration and reasoning function, RevOps incurs the highest concentration of GTM Tax.

Our findings indicate that RevOps teams devote approximately 400–520 Human Attention Hours per person per year to GTM Tax activities. This jumps to 2,400-3,100 Human Attention Hours annually when RevOps comprises 3-5 roles.

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Tax on Salary

GTM Tax is a multi-layered expense. While primarily incurred through Human Attention Hours, the impact is magnified against the compensation of experienced  GTM operators diverted from  high-value work.

GTM tax costs organizations an average of $930,150-$1.2 million per year in Human Attention Hours measured against the hourly cost of the average base salary for one senior-level GTM operator. This surges to $5.58-7.4 million per year for GTM teams with six experienced operators.

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This report found that GTM Tax scales dramatically as teams expand and add more senior-level operators to tackle additional products, regions, or GTM motions.

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What this means:

GTM Tax swells exponentially as teams grow, with more data—bigger contracts, larger accounts, longer sales cycles—landing organizations in increasingly higher tax brackets. More GTM motions amounts to more stakeholders, definitions, decision pathways, and data sources to align and interpret across systems. Every new variable introduces complexity that must be routinely measured, assessed, and revalidated, both independently and part of the bigger GTM engine. 

This means GTM Tax compounds over time, punishing team performance that enabled and necessitated expanding data surfaces with increasing demands on human attention. Instead of experimenting, learning, and building on their success, high-performing GTM teams are strangled with constant cognitive load.

In terms of actual dollar amount, a growing organization with a median average of 11 people on their GTM team—including three in senior-level roles—can expect to pay between  $2.7-$3.7 million per year in GTM Tax. On the other end of the spectrum, an enterprise with 500 people on their GTM team—including 43 senior-level operators—can expect to pay between $40-53.5 million in GTM Tax per year.

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The $3K question

Responding to ad-hoc data or insight requests was the second most time-consuming GTM Tax activity ,with 27% of respondents reporting this takes 4-6 hours per week. That’s the equivalent of $430-620 per operator in weekly GTM Tax, just on answering questions.

However, this activity can cost a lot more, especially with more mature or complex GTM motions. Global influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ previously estimated 30 hours of custom dashboard development required to answer more nuanced GTM questions—around $3,101 per question. They eliminated this GTM Tax by implementing an autonomous GTM system that was more aligned with their high-performing team.

While benchmarks are a good starting point, it’s important to use your own numbers to quantify the true impact of GTM Tax at your organization. Use our GTM Tax calculator to get started.