Every Empty GTM Seat Costs You Pipeline, Revenue, and Time
For two decades I've recruited go-to-market talent — sales, pre-sales, customer success and partnerships — for high-technology companies, either as their main source of GTM talent or alongside internal teams on challenging roles. Databricks brought me in for two and a half years, across the run that took them from a $6.2 billion valuation to $38 billion. Twelve of the eighteen I placed there are still with the company today, and not one of them left inside four years. Your search gets the same desk and the same standard. You'll interview three to five candidates per search, not fifteen.
Three separate buyers have engaged me at four different companies each. The searches are named below, not implied.
About WaterMark LLC
I'm Paul Barrett. I've spent 20+ years recruiting go-to-market talent in high technology, and I still run the searches myself — sourcing, screening, and the calls with candidates. When volume requires it, I bring in two full-cycle recruiters I've worked with for years. That's the whole bench, and I'd rather tell you its size than call it a network.
I take three or four active searches at a time. Past that, the partners come in deliberately — not as overflow. It's the reason a search here produces a short list instead of a long one.
Every 24 hours counts on an open req. I work in your time zone, pull feedback from both sides immediately after every interview, and fix scheduling problems the same day they appear. That's not a differentiator so much as the minimum, but it's where most searches quietly lose two weeks.
Our Specialization
While many firms scratch the surface, WaterMark LLC specializes across the full GTM organization — identifying and placing superior talent in:
AEs, sales leadership, and technical pre-sales talent who can win and scale complex deals.
Leaders who retain, expand, and grow your most valuable customer relationships.
Channel and alliance executives who build and scale ecosystems beyond direct sales.
Growth, product, and brand leadership that shapes category-defining companies.
Most of the people worth hiring aren't looking. After two decades in this market, a lot of them take my call — and some of them I placed the first time fifteen years ago. That's a different asset than a database, and it's the one that gets a senior candidate on the phone.
You'll typically interview three to five candidates per search, because they're vetted against the actual requirement rather than filtered by title. If the market for a role is genuinely thin, you'll get two and a straight read on why — how big the addressable pool is, and what it would take to widen it. I'd rather hand you a short slate with an honest market read than pad it to look busy.
Built for Scale
Retained Search
Contingency Search
Contract Recruiting
Proof, Not Promise
Most of my searches are confidential, so most of the work never appears on a page like this. What follows isn't a client list. It's one example — a single cluster of people I've worked with, drawn out across seventeen years. There are several others.
One Cluster, Seventeen Years
In January 2009 I placed Sean Walters as a sales executive at BMC/BladeLogic, working for Dan Fourgere. Sean stayed four years. Dan took him to Medallia in 2013, and to Datadog after that. Sean climbed the management ranks the whole way — he is Datadog's Chief Revenue Officer today.
I recruited for Medallia from 2012 to 2017, for Scott Davis and Dan Fourgere. In 2015 Sean hired Matt Peloso from me there as a first-line leader. Matt has since hired me at four companies of his own — Medallia, BigPanda, Level AI, and TheyDo, where he has been Chief Revenue Officer since 2024.
Bryan Dell and Paul Szymczyk were clients of mine at Medallia too, from 2014. In 2018 they took the CRO and VP of Sales seats at BigPanda and brought Matt with them. They have contracted me at four companies as well — Medallia, BigPanda, Chronosphere and Axion Ray, through this year.
Then look at BigPanda, because two unrelated threads meet there. David Young brought me in first, in 2016 — a relationship with no connection to Medallia at all. When he left for Rubrik in 2017, he took me with him. The BigPanda work could have ended there. It didn't — in 2018 Bryan and Paul arrived from the Medallia side and ran the relationship through 2021. One person left, and I lost neither side of it. One company, five years, reached twice by two threads that never crossed until they landed in the same building.
Matt has engaged me at four companies. So have Bryan and Paul. So has David Young. Three separate buying relationships, four companies each — and after the first hire, not one of them was a cold call.
And this is a snapshot, not the whole thing. The cluster runs back further than seventeen years and involves a lot more people than the five I’ve drawn here. I cut it down so it would fit on a page.
Two of the people in this cluster started as candidates I placed. Both are Chief Revenue Officers today. The people I place don't usually arrive as CROs — some of them leave as one. That's the case for a book that's four-fifths individual contributors and first-line leaders, and it's why a senior candidate takes my call.
And This Is One Cluster of Several
A different set of people, a different corner of the book — and outcomes you can check without taking my word for any of it.
Databricks · 2019–2022
Databricks signed me at the end of October 2019 to augment their internal recruiting team on the roles they were struggling to fill themselves. When the conversations started that September the company was valued at $2.75 billion; by the week we signed, they had raised again at $6.2 billion. By the time we finished in July 2022 they were at $38 billion.
Three placements in 2020, three more in 2021 — enterprise sales executives and one first-line leader. Then in January 2022 Ciara Williams arrived from Salesforce to run GTM recruiting globally. A new recruiting leader is usually the moment an outside firm gets cut. She kept me on instead, and twelve more went in over the first six months of that year — sales reps, field engineers, and the field engineering managers above them.
Across the whole engagement, twelve of those eighteen are still at Databricks today — and every one of the eighteen stayed at least four years. Nobody left inside four years, which is the number I'd want to see if I were the one hiring.
The work wound down in mid-2022, once Ciara had her internal team built out. That was the right ending. I was there to cover what they couldn't fill themselves, not to become permanent overhead.
Caryl Yuhas, then at Databricks, in a LinkedIn recommendation: “Within 3-4 months of working with Paul, we have added two bar-raising and highly experienced pre-sales leaders to our Digital Native team at Databricks.”
Observo.ai · 2025
Two sales executives and three pre-sales executives, every opening closed. One of the three came in as a player-coach and was promoted into management before the company was acquired.
David Young — whom I'd first worked with at BigPanda in 2016, then followed to Rubrik — was Observo's CRO from 2024 to its acquisition by SentinelOne in September 2025. He introduced me to the founders himself. He is CRO at imper.ai now.
In his LinkedIn recommendation: “Paul has been an incredible partner to me at 4 companies to identify, recruit, and hire some of the best Account Managers and Sales Engineers across the entire US.”
Roughly four in five of my placements are enterprise AEs, senior solutions engineers, and the first-line managers above them. That's the shape of a GTM org — there's one CRO and thirty AEs. I've filled the top of the pyramid too; there's just less of it to fill.
The pre-sales side especially, which is where generalist executive search tends to be weakest — an SE is not an AE, and most firms recruit them as though they were.
And the Medallia cluster above is one of several. The Databricks group is a different one entirely — eighteen hires across two and a half years, with two of the hiring managers writing public recommendations. Different people, different relationships, same pattern.
Hands-On Expertise
I've never stepped away from the front lines. I still cold call, I still land my own clients, and I still work the network I've built over two decades — I like this work, which is a strange thing to say about recruiting and also true. Nobody hands your search to a junior after the pitch, because there is no junior.
What I'm actually good at is the judgment call — whether a candidate who looks right on paper will hold up in your seat, under your quota, reporting to the person they'd report to. That's the part you're hiring me for. The sourcing is table stakes.
I'm currently running confidential searches for several AI-native technology companies. If yours is one of the ones hiring, that's a reasonable place to start a conversation.
Whether it's a single mission-critical executive hire or scaling an entire GTM org, WaterMark LLC is ready to help.
