Hello and welcome to The Modern GTM Executive by Lunar Executive Search - read by (now 2,400+) leading Sales, Marketing, and Executive Leaders within Growth-Stage Technology businesses. We’re here to help people redefine their perspective on modern revenue acquisition models, understand what talent & skills are necessary to do so, and how to find the top 10% of GTM Leaders to execute.

To help readers stay grounded in the reality of today’s GTM hiring landscape, I’ll be sharing a weekly snapshot of active sales roles on LinkedIn. These metrics offer a simple but powerful pulse check: where demand is rising, where it’s cooling, and how the broader software market is shifting beneath the surface.

(Our updated news & trends sections to highlight all relevant stories you need to know going into this week.)

Defense AI boom: The U.S. Army signs a defense tech deal with Anduril worth up to $20B.

AI cloud arms race: Meta inks a massive $27B AI infrastructure agreement with Nebius.

Chip cooling unicorn: Frore Systems raises $143M and hits a $1.6B valuation for AI chip cooling tech.

AI research shakeup: Meta’s Yann LeCun launches a new AI startup with $1B in seed funding.

Funding surge: Nearly 40 new tech unicorns have already been minted in 2026 — many in AI infrastructure.

AI infrastructure race: Startups continue raising massive rounds to build hyper-scale compute and data-center capacity.

SaaS resilience: Software companies push back on the “SaaS apocalypse” narrative as enterprise demand holds steady.

Industry reset: More than 45,000 tech layoffs have occurred in 2026 as companies restructure around AI (so they say)

One of the most common mistakes founders and boards make when hiring a sales leader is optimizing for the wrong signal.

They hire based on brand-name companies, years of experience, or how polished someone sounds in an interview.

But in practice, the strongest predictor of success is usually much simpler:

Stage-fit experience.

Meaning: Has this person scaled a sales organization at the same stage & maturity your company is currently in?

A leader who helped grow a company from $5M → $30M ARR (very) often struggles in a $100M+ scale environment. And someone who ran a 200-rep enterprise sales org frequently fails when asked to build the first repeatable motion from scratch.

Different stages require completely different skills.

Early-stage leaders build the first playbook.
Mid-stage leaders build process and structure.
Late-stage leaders build predictability and efficiency.

Those are fundamentally different jobs.

Interestingly, we saw similar patterns in the actual data when analyzing the 50 highest-performing VC-backed SaaS sales organizations in our recent research report that you all saw last year.

A few key insights:

• The top-performing companies averaged ~80% quota attainment, despite having relatively lean teams (median of just 9 AEs). Generally because their leadership teams had experience at their stage before.
• Performance was less about hiring the most “experienced” leaders by volume of years in role and more about having the right mix of experience aligned to the stage.

In other words:

Performance improves when the talent profile matches the market and stage of the business.

Not when the resume simply looks impressive.

This is why so many sales leadership hires fail.

Companies hire someone who succeeded in a completely different operating environment, then expect them to replicate the same results.

It rarely works.

When evaluating sales leaders, I encourage founders and boards to ask a much simpler question:

“Have they solved the exact problem we’re about to face?”

Because in sales leadership, the best predictor of future success is usually having already navigated the same stage of chaos before.

If you want our full breakdown of our thoughts on GTM compensation in 2026, and all appropriate salary bands across Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and more, the data is in this report.

A few select openings: 

I'm also always looking to speak to great candidates for future roles:

Check out our latest episode of The GTM Kickback!, Command the Room - The 7 Skills of Tonality | The GTM Kickback #84 w/ Michael Hewitt

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We're looking for: High-performance GTM Operators, VC/PE Investors in SaaS, and Leading GTM Consultants for early stage technology businesses

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This newsletter is powered by Lunar Executive Search - Finding Premier GTM Talent for Growth Stage Tech Businesses. 

We help disruptive technology companies grow. For venture-funded start-ups and PE-backed enterprise software firms, we have a track record in finding the Top 10% of Sales and Marketing Leadership Talent, and doing so swiftly. 

Reach out here: [email protected] 

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Till next time, 

Joey