You can bring in a GTM Engineer in three ways: full-time, fractional or freelance, or through an agency. For most B2B scale-ups in the Benelux, fractional hiring is the smartest starting choice – you get senior expertise without carrying a full-time salary of €100,000+ for a role you cannot yet fill completely. This article walks through the three routes, what they cost, and how to choose.
The wrong move here is expensive in a specific way: hire full-time too early and you burn a year and a salary on a role you could not yet scope; delay too long and you leave pipeline on the table every month your systems stay manual and leaky. So it is worth getting the shape of the decision right before the person.
Three ways to bring in a GTM Engineer
1. Full-time
The most obvious option, and often the most expensive and slowest to start. A full-time GTM Engineer only works if you have structurally enough work – at least a few days a week of building and maintenance, sustained over time. That is usually only the case from a certain scale, when your GTM stack is complex enough to keep someone busy full-time.
The catch: good GTM Engineers are scarce and expensive, and the role is so new that candidates are hard to assess if you have no experience with the function yourself. Many companies hire full-time too early, or hire the wrong person because they did not know what to screen for. If you are set on a permanent hire, read hiring your first GTM Engineer before you write the job spec.
2. Fractional or freelance
An experienced GTM Engineer for a fixed number of days per week or month. This is where most of the market sits, and for good reason. You bring in senior expertise exactly when you need it, pay only for the time you use, and are not locked into an employment contract for a role that might be set up differently a year from now.
Fractional works especially well in the build phase: there is a spike of work to set up your stack – CRM architecture, enrichment, scoring, outbound – and after that it drops to maintenance. A fractional engineer scales with that curve. Indicatively you are looking at €500 to €1,200 per day for a senior, or a monthly retainer.
3. Through an agency
A specialised agency delivers a team, or an engineer plus backup capacity. The upside: continuity (if someone drops out, another steps in), pooled experience across multiple clients, and access to a broader skillset than one person can offer. The downside: usually a higher hourly rate, and sometimes less deeply embedded in your team and context.
An agency is strong when you want to stand up a well-defined project – a complete signal-based outbound engine, say – or when you do not want to build the knowledge in-house (yet). This is also where the phrase "GTM as a service" tends to show up: outsource the whole build-and-run of your revenue systems to an outside team rather than owning it internally.
What does hiring a GTM Engineer cost?
Roughly: a full-time senior costs €90,000–€120,000+ per year in salary, plus employer overhead. Fractional and freelance run from €500 to €1,200 per day depending on seniority. An agency usually sits above the freelance range on rate, but without the overhead of recruiting, onboarding and the risk of a wrong permanent hire. The full breakdown is in what a GTM Engineer earns.
Factor in ramp time too. A fractional senior who has built these systems before is often productive in week one, while a full-time hire – however good – needs onboarding into your product, data and team before they ship anything. That ramp is a real, if hidden, part of the cost of going permanent early.
The real cost question is not the rate, though – it is the opportunity cost of doing nothing. Every month your GTM systems stay manual and leaky, you leave pipeline on the table. Frame the decision against that number, not against the day rate in isolation.
What to screen for when hiring
Whether you go full-time, fractional or agency, judge on these points:
- Proven builds. Can they show concrete systems they built, and the impact? Drill into one example until you understand exactly what they did – not what the team did, what they did.
- Commercial understanding. Do they get ICP, funnel and sales motion, or do they just wire tools together? Without commercial insight they build the wrong things, however clean the automation.
- AI in production. Not "I have played with ChatGPT", but working AI systems that run reliably. In 2026 this is the fastest way to separate strong candidates from the rest.
- Tool-agnostic thinking. Do they pick the right tool for the problem, or push their favourite stack through everything? See also build vs buy for GTM Engineering.
A practical test: give a candidate a real problem from your business – "here is how leads reach us today, here is where they leak" – and ask how they would approach it. You learn more from ten minutes of that than from an hour of walking through a CV.
Fractional vs full-time: which, when?
Rule of thumb: start fractional, go full-time when the work structurally fills a full-time role and you know what you are looking for. Fractional gives you more than flexibility – it gives you the chance to learn what the role actually looks like in your organisation, so that a later permanent hire is far more targeted.
Concretely, fractional or agency is the right first move when: you are still in or just past founder-led sales, the work is front-loaded (a build spike followed by maintenance), or you cannot yet confidently interview for the role. Full-time makes sense when the maintenance load alone justifies the seat, you have a clear picture of the systems you need to own long term, and the knowledge genuinely has to live inside the company.
Start fractional, make it permanent once the work fills a full-time role and you know exactly what you are hiring for. The first engagement is also how you learn to screen for the second.
Where to start
If you are not sure which route fits your stage, do not over-think it in the abstract – the answer usually falls out of two questions: how much of this work is structural, and how mature is your GTM stack today? A short conversation about those two is often enough to point clearly at full-time, fractional or agency.
Want to talk it through for your situation? Book a call, or see how I work as a fractional GTM Engineer. Not sure you are ready yet? Start with the free GTM Scan to find where the biggest gains are before you hire anyone.