You need someone to wire up the GTM stack. Enrichment, outbound infrastructure, CRM, routing, reporting. There are three ways to get it done, and the right one depends less on budget than on what you need to own at the end.
The three options
- A full-time GTM engineer. One person, on payroll, inside your team.
- An agency. A team that runs outbound or RevOps for you, usually on a monthly retainer, usually on their own tooling.
- A fractional GTM engineer. A senior engineer embedded part time, building inside your stack and handing it over.
How they compare
- Time to start. Full-time hire, 2 to 4 months to hire, then ramp. Agency, 1 to 2 weeks. Fractional, 1 to 2 weeks.
- Seniority you get. Full-time hire, whatever you can hire. Agency, senior people sell and junior people deliver. Fractional, senior and hands on.
- Who owns the systems. Full-time hire, you. Agency, often the agency. Fractional, you.
- Works in your stack. Full-time hire, yes. Agency, often theirs. Fractional, yes.
- When it stops. Full-time hire, knowledge leaves with the notice period. Agency, the pipeline often stops with the contract. Fractional, a documented handover.
- Best for. Full-time hire, a stable stack that needs daily care. Agency, a channel you want run, not built. Fractional, building or fixing the stack.
When a full-time hire is right
Hire when the stack already exists, works, and needs someone in it every day. A full-time GTM engineer earns their salary maintaining and extending systems, answering the sales team's requests and owning data quality week to week.
The risk is hiring before the architecture is set. A first GTM engineer at a growth stage company spends months deciding what to build, often alone, and the person you need to design the system is rarely the person you need to run it.
When an agency is right
Use an agency when you want a channel run and do not care how. Outbound as a service is a legitimate choice for a company testing whether cold outbound works at all.
The catch is ownership. Many agencies send from their own domains, enrich on their own accounts and keep the sequences in their own tools. When the contract ends, the pipeline ends with it, and you start again from nothing. If you go this route, ask three questions before signing. Whose domains and inboxes send? Whose enrichment accounts and API keys? What do we keep when we stop?
When a fractional engineer is right
Go fractional when you need the stack built or fixed, and you want to own it afterwards. Typical triggers:
- The product exists, but outbound is manual and nobody trusts the CRM.
- Leads arrive without enrichment, routing is a spreadsheet, and reporting takes a week.
- You are scaling, and there is no technical owner on the revenue side.
- You plan to hire a full-time GTM engineer, but want the architecture right first.
A fractional engineer designs the system, builds it in your accounts, documents it and either keeps running it part time or hands it to the person you hire. You get senior judgement without a senior salary for the months when you only need part of a week.
The AI engineering shift
This choice has changed in the last year. One engineer running coding agents in parallel now covers work that used to need a small team. Research, enrichment logic, CRM migrations, test suites and reporting can run at the same time, with the engineer reviewing every change before it merges.
That favours the fractional model. The bottleneck is no longer typing. It is knowing what to build and checking that it is right, which is exactly what a senior engineer is for.
How I work
I take on at most three companies at a time, so each one gets real hours, not a slot in a queue. Everything is built in your accounts and your repos, reviewed line by line, and documented. Most systems are live by week two. You own every line.
Read signal data vs intent data, see the case studies, or book a 30-minute session and we will work out which of the three fits where you are.
