Hello and welcome to The Modern GTM Executive by Lunar Executive Search - read by (now 2,446) 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.)

Media moat: OpenAI bought tech talk show TBPN as it battles Anthropic for enterprise customers, a reminder that distribution and mindshare are now part of the GTM stack. (The Modern GTM Executive might also entertain an offer if OpenAI is listening👂)

Cyber demand: Cybersecurity dealmaking stayed strong in Q1, reinforcing that security remains one of the healthiest enterprise categories for budget durability and GTM investment.

Vertical AI traction: Legal-tech startups just posted their second-busiest funding quarter on record, another sign that buyers are rewarding narrow, workflow-specific AI over generic tooling.

Bigger rounds, higher bar: Startup funding hit a record $297B in Q1, with 63% of it driven by four giant AI rounds, meaning capital is still flowing, but increasingly toward fewer companies with stronger narratives and execution.

Defense-tech momentum: Saronic raised $1.75B at a $9.25B valuation, showing that large, strategic buyers are still driving major funding momentum in mission-critical AI categories.

There’s a lot of noise in the market right now.

More tools. More dashboards. More “data-driven” hiring processes. More polished candidates.

And yet, most all hiring decisions at the executive level still come down to one thing (that’s been true for decades):

Do I trust this person to carry the number? To lead more organization? To represent my brand and organization?

To help eliminate risk, not grow it?

Not their resume.
Not their pitch.
Not even their references.

Trust.

It's the one true, first-principle thing that hiring leaders are looking for when they're judging your candidacy, many times just at a completely subconscious level without even knowing what they’re judging on.

It's the thing that helps organizations grow consistently, continue to hire talented people, and de-risk the entire exercise of entrepreneurship that everyone is participating in and hoping to reap the rewards of at the end.

Why do you think they say so many jobs go to internal referrals or people that network their way into the company? Because they have an additional layer of credibility that builds trust via a connection with that business. one of many ways that you can showcase this.

But trust is many times hard to qualify and hard to showcase in brief interview sessions, so here's how I recommend to do so.

The way I think about it is simple: Trust = Reliability + Credibility

If you’re hiring, or trying to get hired, everything maps back to those two variables.

Reliability: Will They Actually Do What They Say?

This is the most underweighted signal in hiring.

Reliability is about consistency, not peak performance.

The market is full of people who can sell a story. It is not full of people who can execute that story over 24–36 months (and back up that they have done so already with real data).

And at the executive level, inconsistency is risk.

Credibility: Should I Believe Them?

Credibility is where most candidates try to win.

But it’s often manufactured instead of proven.

Real credibility looks like:

If I can’t pressure test your story and get sharper answers, credibility breaks.

And when credibility breaks, trust disappears immediately.

We’re in a market where companies are hiring, but they’re hiring carefully.

Budgets are tighter. Timelines are longer. Tolerance for failure is lower.

Which means every hire is evaluated through a different lens:

Not “Can this person do the job?”
But “What is the risk/cost if they can’t?”

And that’s where trust becomes the primary decision filter.

Because trust is how organizations assess risk at scale.

If I trust you, I can move faster.

If I don’t, everything slows down.

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 & confidential roles:

Check out our latest episode of The GTM Kickback!, The 4 Decisions CEOs Must Make to Drive GTM Growth in 100 Days | #85 w/ Vanessa Goolsby

Want to be a guest? Ping me on LinkedIn! 😎

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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Reach out here: [email protected] 

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Till next time, 

Joey