A theme has been building across both the data and the hiring boards our community watches every day: the companies winning right now aren't the ones shipping the most features. They're the ones building the go-to-market muscle to sell what they've already got.

We pulled the strongest signals from the last quarter, cross-checked them against what leaders in our own community are actually hiring for, and added an EMEA lens. Here's what's trending, and what to do about it.

For years the default startup org chart was engineering-heavy: build the product, growth will follow. The data this quarter suggests that assumption is flipping.

Across high-divergence software and AI companies, sales teams are scaling several times faster than engineering. In the most extreme cases, GTM headcount is growing by 900–3,600% while engineering barely moves. Account executive roles, specifically, are showing the steepest role-level growth of any function, a clear sign that companies are pouring resources into revenue generation over R&D.

What's striking is that the community is hiring in exactly these terms. This month alone, leaders in our network posted a wave of SDR and BDR leadership openings, and the language has shifted. One cybersecurity firm's manager, JD, describes sales development as "a strategic GTM pillar, not a cost centre or a marketing handoff." Another leader put it bluntly: he's hiring "GTM builders, not managers."

That's the real story. Sales development is being repositioned from a feeder function into a strategic pillar, and the leaders being hired to run it are expected to build, not just maintain.

The counterweight worth knowing: Zoom out beyond the hypergrowth names and most B2B SaaS companies are still dramatically engineering-heavy. The typical ratio sits at roughly one salesperson for every eleven engineers. So the pivot is real, but it's concentrated in the companies that have decided to commercialise aggressively. Those are your hottest accounts.

For SDR leaders: if your target accounts are scaling sales faster than engineering, they're signalling a commercialisation push, and they need pipeline infrastructure, tooling, and talent to support it. That's your opening.

The prospecting takeaway of the quarter: recently funded companies are hiring aggressively, and that window doesn't stay open long.

Companies that raised in the last year are growing headcount at a healthy clip. Those that raised two-plus years ago? Many are flat or contracting: a "funding cliff" where growth stalls without fresh capital. The implication is simple: time your outreach to the raise. A company three months past a round has budget and urgency. The same company, eighteen months later, may be in efficiency mode.

Again, the community data backs this up in real time. Newly funded firms in our network are building outbound from scratch right now:

For SDR leaders: build a "freshly funded" tier into your account scoring. Series A–B companies in the first 6–9 months post-raise are buying, hiring, and open to new tools and partnerships. Get there before the cliff.

The EMEA cut: the same dynamic is firing across Europe. Around 50 EMEA startups closed fresh Series A rounds in a recent six-month window, with the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland the most active hubs and strong activity in AI, quantum and biotech. Closer to home, the Netherlands had a notably busy season, with dozens of Dutch companies raising Series A across climate tech, deep tech and SaaS. These are the European accounts entering their buying window now.

If the US story is "build mode → sell mode," the EMEA story is simpler: the sell-mode build-out is well underway, and it's accelerating.

European SDR hiring is concentrated and climbing. The enterprise anchors (SAP, Sage and UKG) led recent sales-development hiring across the region, while fast-growing scaleups added meaningful SDR headcount on top: Tines, Synthesia and Hostaway each brought on 17–20 new SDRs in a single stretch. UK and Germany dominate the volume, but Irish names like Tines and Workvivo are punching well above their weight.

Amsterdam is having a moment. SDR/BDR hiring in the city jumped roughly 5x in 2025 (about 55 new roles versus the ~10 a year it averaged in 2022–2024), with Elsevier, Mews and Bynder leading the charge. For a market this size, that's a genuine step-change in go-to-market investment.

The map is widening, and getting more cost-conscious. Two patterns are running in parallel. First, emerging European markets (Cyprus, Lithuania, Portugal, Estonia) are posting tech hiring growth of 19–24%, outpacing the 15–16% in the US, UK and Germany. Second, and more specific to our world: Spain has emerged as the leading lower-cost hub for SDR/BDR teams, ahead of Poland and Estonia. A clear signal that distributed, cost-aware go-to-market builds are becoming the norm, not the exception.

New logos are landing in your territory. US companies like Crescendo and Groq are standing up EMEA sales presence for the first time, and the enterprise giants are expanding hard across the continent: Salesforce alone added several thousand sales hires across 19 European countries, with Google, Microsoft, AWS and Oracle each adding hundreds more. Most of that expansion is concentrated in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

For EMEA SDR leaders: the demand signals are unusually clear right now. New entrants are building teams from zero (warm partnership and talent conversations), the cost-of-talent map is shifting south and east, and a wave of US firms is landing on your patch with fresh territory to cover. If your plan still centers only on London, Berlin and Paris, it's leaving signal on the table.

Before anyone over-indexes their entire pipeline on the idea that AI companies are hiring like crazy: they're not, at least not uniformly. Net hiring across AI companies dropped sharply from its early-2025 peak, swinging from net-positive to net-negative by late in the year. The takeaway isn't "avoid AI accounts." It's "stop assuming every AI logo is in hypergrowth." Qualify on funding recency and actual GTM hiring, not the category label.

That last point is about AI companies as targets. The bigger question most of you are wrestling with is AI inside your own team, so here's the honest field report, and it's exactly what we're getting into at Funnel.

Six months in, here's what I'm seeing across SDR teams that have meaningfully adopted AI versus the ones that haven't.

What's actually working:

What isn't working:

The honest take: AI is helping teams that already had decent processes. It's not rescuing teams that didn't.

This is what we're getting into on Day 1 of Funnel 26: a single expert, single operator case study. Concrete examples of workflow automation, AI call prep, and signal prioritisation: what worked, what failed, and the headcount impact. No vendor demo disguised as a talk.

You walk out with a clear answer to the question every CRO is asking right now: where is AI moving our number, and where is it wasting our time?

Funnel 26 EMEA, 14–15 October, London ⏳ Early Bird ends Tuesday 30 June

The thread running through all of this: sales development is being taken more seriously than it has in years, repositioned as the engine, not the afterthought. The leaders who treat it that way, and who time their plays to the market's actual buying signals, are the ones who'll come out ahead.

See you in London!