gtm-leadership

name	gtm-leadership
description	GTM leadership playbook for revenue leaders — how to hire and fire sales talent, run difficult conversations (performance, comp, forecast honesty), and design SaaS comp strategies. Grounded in Roberge, Lemkin, Kim Scott, Bridge Group, Pavilion, and WbD. Use when firing a rep or leader, having a hard conversation, evaluating a VP/CRO hire, or approving comp plans. Triggers on: "fire sales rep", "fire VP Sales", "difficult conversation", "performance conversation", "PIP", "terminate employee", "GTM leadership", "sales leader evaluation", "when to fire", "how to hire sales leader", "crisis management", "incident comms", "outage communication", "holding statement", "PR crisis".
license	MIT
compatibility	Claude Code, Jesse, Codex, Hermes, Windsurf, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Copilot, Zed, VS Code, Goose
metadata	{"version":"1.7.0","author":"LeadMagic","category":"management-leadership","tags":["gtm-leadership","hiring","firing","difficult-conversations","comp","performance","pip","revenue-leaders","team-design","project-management"],"related_skills":["gtm-recruiting","gtm-role-descriptions","sales-team-building","hiring-by-role","team-management","sales-coaching","employment-compliance","buyer-indecision","pipeline-management","gtm-operations","revenue-team-onboarding"],"frameworks":["Mark Roberge — Sales Acceleration Formula (hire traits, train skills)","Jason Lemkin — SaaStr GTM leadership and hiring triggers","Kim Scott — Radical Candor (difficult conversations)","Bridge Group — SaaS compensation benchmarks","Pavilion — Revenue leader standards and comp council data","Winning by Design — REKS coaching and POD leadership","Patty McCord — Powerful (talent density, no brilliant jerks)","Marc Benioff — V2MOM annual alignment, trust-based culture","Force Management — Cross-Functional Alignment Cadence","RevOps Co-op — RevOps project manager hiring guide","John McMahon — The Qualified Sales Leader (MEDDICC, inspection, board reporting)","Frank Slootman — Amp It Up (execution, consumption GTM alignment)","Snowflake GTM case study — consumption land-expand (Degnan, public earnings)","Ali Ghodsi / Ron Gabrisko — Databricks PLG-to-enterprise hybrid","Jason Lemkin — bad news transparency, investor trust in crisis months","Laurie Ruettimann — layoff and workforce crisis humanity"]}

Crisis leadership disclaimer: GTM/founder crisis playbooks in this skill are not legal advice. Security breach notifications, regulatory inquiries, and liability language → counsel + deal-desk/references/legal-gtm-playbook.md (Pattern 29) before external statements.

GTM Leadership

Overview

Revenue leadership is not "hit the number and yell louder." GTM leaders hire the machine, design comp that produces the right behavior, coach through difficult truth, and remove people who poison velocity — fast enough to protect the team, slow enough to be fair. The mistake: firing without a documented system, or avoiding hard conversations until a quarter is lost.

This skill is the people operations layer for GTM leaders: hire decision framework, performance and termination conversations, comp approval, and when to exit a leader. Comp strategy (canonical) → executive-compensation/references/gtm-compensation-strategy.md (Pattern 35). IC bands + JDs → gtm-role-descriptions. Interview scorecards → hiring-by-role. Hire sequence → sales-team-building.

When to Use

• "How do I fire a sales rep / AE / SDR?"
• "When should I fire my VP Sales?"
• "Script for difficult performance conversation"
• "PIP for underperforming AE"
• "How to tell someone they're not hitting quota"
• "Approve a comp plan for my team"
• "Evaluate CRO / VP Sales candidate"
• "Conversation about forecast sandbagging"
• "Employee resigned — what do I do?"
• "Exit interview questions"
• "Counter-offer when rep quits"
• "Security breach — what do we tell customers?"
• "Outage war room — who owns what?"
• "Draft holding statement / crisis comms"
• "Layoff communication plan"
• "Bad press going viral — CEO response?"

Do not use for legal termination requirements alone — load employment-compliance. Do not use for statement liability review alone — load deal-desk → legal-gtm-playbook.md. Do not use for buyer-side indecision — load buyer-indecision (JOLT).

Authoritative Foundations

• Mark Roberge. Hire for traits (Coachable, Curious, Prior success, Intelligent, Work ethic); train for skills. Mis-hire cost compounds — use structured scorecards, not gut. Ramp is a curriculum, not sink-or-swim.
• Jason Lemkin (SaaStr). Founder closes 10–20 deals before first AE. VP Sales after ~$2M ARR with reps at quota. Rushed leadership searches (30 days) produce attribution-error hires — "scaled X to Y" at wrong stage.