V. Solving GTM Tax
The first step to solving GTM Tax is to calculate its impact at your organization. Use the following formulas to get started:
GTM Tax Calculator
- Average hourly rate of senior-level GTM operator in your org: [Avg. base salary of senior GTM operator] / 2080
- Weekly GTM Tax: [Avg. hourly rate of senior-level GTM operator] x Hours per week on GTM Tax Activities
- Annual GTM Tax: [Avg. Weekly GTM Tax x 4] x 12
This gives you a basis to more effectively two primary approaches to tackling GTM Tax: compliance and defiance.
Compliance
Compliance with GTM Tax is surrender. It’s the decision to accept mental drain as a necessary burden and permanent cost of doing business.
Compliant GTM organizations recognize that complexity has compromised visibility, and pile on headcount, tools, and resources to improve it. The goal of this approach is to pay GTM Tax more efficiently, reducing its toll by making information more accessible. This usually looks like automating fragments of broken workflows and celebrating marginal efficiency gains that slightly reduce demand on Human Attention Hours.
The tax itself, however, is never eliminated. It’s merely optimized around. Because compliance doesn’t address the root cause of GTM Tax: cognitive dependency on senior-level operators to provide meaning to every datapoint. Even AI copilots capable of whipping up a report in seconds require humans to know what to ask, how to interpret the response, and then translate it into action. Experienced GTM practitioners are still required to manually contextualize nuanced B2B buyer’s journeys.
Compliance is tempting. In some ways, it’s easier to throw another tool into the mix or streamline an isolated function than confront a fundamentally broken approach to GTM. But it also creates a false sense of security and illusion of progress while locking teams into perpetual overhead that compounds as they grow. At best, compliance can only ever make GTM Tax slightly less painful to pay.
Defiance
Defiant organizations don’t try to regain Human Attention Hours here and there or improve efficiency through random acts of automation. Instead, they eliminate GTM Tax entirely with an intentional, autonomous system—built on a unified GTM data foundation—that can collect, analyze, retain, and respond to contextual insights across every GTM motion. It’s essentially equipping your GTM engine to not only learn from itself, but independently improve—without the need for constant human intervention.
This approach dramatically replenishes the mental bandwidth of GTM operators, who finally have the space to think deeply and creatively. With self-improving systems to take on the cognitive load, teams change. Drive-by requests for explanations stop interrupting high-value focus work. Meaningful insights get surfaced automatically, instead of forcing operators to trudge through dashboards or think of the right prompt. Brain power is reclaimed and restored. And GTM Tax vanishes—not from changing tools, but adopting GTM grounded in true autonomy.
Defiance is recommended for organizations with fast-growing teams, who are anticipating an increase in data surface area with new products, regions, or GTM motions being expected.
About HockeyStack
HockeyStack is a GTM AI platform combining unparalleled buyer’s journey visibility with agentic workflows that respond to real-time behavior. Ready to replace the cognitive toll of GTM Tax with deep insights and autonomous pipeline improvement? Learn more at hockeystack.com.
