III. Research & Methodology
We used a three step approach to quantify the impact of GTM Tax:
1. Survey of senior-level GTM operators
The primary goal at this stage was to determine the precise number of hours teams spend each week on GTM Tax activities. To accomplish this, HockeyStack surveyed over a dozen GTM operators at mid-scale B2B SaaS organizations with the following characteristics:
- Approximately 200 employees
- A dedicated Go-To-Market function across Sales, Marketing, and Revenue Operations
- Multiple core GTM tools, including CRM, marketing automation platforms (MAPs), and product analytics
- Established operating cadences for planning, forecasting, reporting, and review (weekly, monthly, and quarterly)
While GTM Tax impacts execution-oriented roles—like sales representatives and individual marketing contributors—by confuddling or delaying work downstream, it’s primarily levied against strategic leaders responsible for synthesizing fragmented data, maintaining historical context, and translating analysis into organizational action.
This study was exclusively focused on senior-level GTM operators (director and above)across Sales, Marketing, and Ops.
2. Benchmarks
This report referenced two categories of benchmark data to quantify the value of hours organizations are spending on GTM Tax Activities: average base salary of senior-level GTM operators and the median average number of GTM employees in senior roles (director and above).
Salary
HockeyStack compiled data from Built In, Glassdoor, and Wellfound to calculate the average base salaries for the following roles—correlating with the titles of survey participants—in the United States in 2025-2026:
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Chief Sales Officer
- Marketing Director
- Sales Director
- VP of Sales
- VP of Marketing
The average base salary across this group was divided by 2,080 (based on working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year). HockeyStack used the result of $103.35 to quantify the value of one hour of attention from a senior-level GTM operator. Note that this figure is a conservative estimate. GTM Tax will likely be significantly higher in locations that overlap with Tier-1 salary bands, such as New York City and San Francisco.
Number of senior-level GTM operators per team
To validate the hypothesis that GTM Tax increases with GTM complexity, data volume, and organizational growth, HockeyStack also measured its impact by the number of GTM operators in senior-level roles. This study referenced the following benchmark data from Pave: GTM team size by company size and percentage of GTM teams in senior-level roles (director-level and above) by company size.
HockeyStack used the above percentages to calculate the average number of senior-level GTM operators by company size. Since benchmark data breaks down companies by range ((i.e. 201-500 employees), the median average was used.
3. Corroboration
Lastly, the findings were corroborated examples of first-hand experiences from HockeyStack’s customer base. Since customers frequently come to HockeyStack with the need to replace fragmented systems with a unified GTM command center, this report sourced contextual insights to illustrate the true depth and pervasiveness of GTM Tax, especially on high-performing teams.
