From Code to Customers: The CTO’s Role in Early GTM Success

The world of GTM is changing fast. AI tools promise to automate prospecting, outreach, and pipeline generation, but many early-stage teams struggle to harness them effectively. 

We’ve been working directly with our Portfolio companies CTOs to turn technical expertise into a real GTM advantage. Why is this so powerful? It allows a technical founder to see, learn, and actively shape the GTM motion, from cold outbound strategies to pipeline building, rather than treating GTM as a black box.

Turning Technical Skill into GTM Leverage

For many technical founders, GTM can feel foreign. But when they’re involved in the process, they bring an analytical mindset that’s perfect for structuring experiments, understanding data, and creating repeatable systems.

Here’s how we’ve approached it:

Defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Using AI in Google Sheets, we enriched datasets to identify the companies most likely to convert. This allowed us to filter by industry, size, or behavior patterns and get a clear, actionable ICP list.

 

Finding the Right Contacts: With the ICP in hand, we leveraged tools like Clay to discover individual contacts, titles, and further refine who on the team we should be talking to.

 

Creating a Repeatable Process: The combination of AI enrichment and manual refinement leaves us with a clean, validated list and a repeatable approach to build pipeline. This isn’t just a one-off — it’s a system the technical founder can understand, iterate on, and scale.

 

Why This Matters

By integrating the CTO into GTM planning, we’re accomplishing several things:

Technical rigor meets GTM strategy: The team can see how data-driven decisions influence outreach and conversion.

 

Faster iteration: A technical founder can quickly test hypotheses and implement improvements to the process.

 

Repeatable processes: Rather than relying on guesswork or intuition, the team now has a systematic way to find and reach the right prospects.

 

How Technical Team Members Can Drive GTM Success

It’s a common misconception that GTM is solely a sales or marketing function. Technical team members, engineers, data scientists, and product builders, can play a critical role in shaping and executing GTM strategies in a faster, more efficient way. 

Here’s how:

Data-Driven Targeting: Technical team members can structure and analyze customer data, identify patterns, and build clean ICP lists. Their analytical skills ensure that outreach is focused on the right prospects rather than scattershot attempts.

 

Automating and Streamlining Workflows: Engineers can design repeatable processes for prospect enrichment, CRM updates, or outreach sequencing. Automation reduces manual errors and frees the sales team to focus on high-value conversations.

 

Experimentation and Measurement: Technical team members bring a scientific mindset to GTM. They can design tests, track KPIs, and help determine which channels, messaging, or sequences are most effective - turning GTM into a repeatable, data-backed function.

 

Bridging Product and Market Insights: Technical teams often understand the product better than anyone. When they’re involved in GTM discussions, they can translate features into value propositions that resonate with prospects, refine messaging, and provide feedback to improve product-market fit.

 

By involving technical talent in GTM, companies not only gain efficiency and precision, but also create a culture where growth is a shared responsibility — and learning flows both ways between product and revenue teams.

Why CTOs Bring a Unique Edge to GTM

Beyond general technical support, CTOs in particular bring a unique advantage when it comes to adopting AI in GTM. Their ability to quickly grasp concepts like data waterfalls, enrichment logic, and AI-powered formulas means they can accelerate processes that might take a sales or marketing team weeks to figure out.

Instead of wrestling with how to link datasets or set up a repeatable enrichment workflow, a CTO can build it in a matter of hours. They understand how to structure data pipelines, debug errors, and optimize formulas so the outputs are reliable — not messy. This technical speed translates into GTM agility: cleaner ICPs, faster testing of outbound motions, and ultimately a shorter path to finding what works.

In many ways, the CTO becomes the “growth hacker” for the early GTM motion. Not because they’re sending emails or taking sales calls, but because they make the underlying systems smarter, tighter, and more scalable from day one.

Closing Thoughts

The AI GTM tooling boom is an opportunity, not a replacement for human insight. By working alongside technical founders and team members, Bowery Capital helps portfolio companies turn raw tools into real, repeatable GTM advantage.

The result is cleaner pipelines, smarter outreach, and technical teams who understand and own their company’s growth motion. AI accelerates the process, but the real advantage comes from combining technical skill with hands-on GTM experience.