Tip of the Spear: Erin Felton, GTM Operator, Wayfair & Shopify

January 15, 2026

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Tip of the Spear is an interview series highlighting The Artemis Fund’s expert network. In this edition, we sat down with Erin Felton, Fractional GTM Operator, former Wayfair & Shopify.

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Q: What was your first job, and what did you learn from it that still shapes how you work today?
A: My first job out of college was at Staples as a product marketer in their B2B business. This was long enough ago that “campaigns” as a formal, structured discipline weren’t really a thing yet. We were producing a lot of one-off assets: flyers, brochures, emails, sales enablement collateral.
A huge part of my job was writing creative briefs. I worked with product, other marketers, and business stakeholders, then translated everything into a brief that our creative team would execute against. Early on, I wrote some pretty unclear, poorly thought-through briefs, and I very quickly saw the downstream impact. Execution stalled, there were endless clarifying questions, and a lot of unnecessary friction.
As painful as that was, it was one of the most valuable early lessons of my career:
Be crystal clear on what we’re doing and why
Make sure everyone is genuinely aligned before you ask people to execute
Poor inputs create chaos even when everyone is talented and well intentioned
That experience ingrained in me the importance of thoughtful, structured communication and alignment before you press “go.” I’m still grateful I learned that so early.
Q: You helped scale Wayfair’s B2B business from the ground up and later led both sales enablement and marketing ops. What did those experiences teach you about building alignment between teams?
A: The short answer is: alignment is everything. You can have a great marketing team and a great sales team, but if they’re not operating as one cohesive revenue engine, you will leave a lot of money and impact on the table.
At Wayfair, I built out the campaign program. Within about two years, we were running around 65 campaigns a year and seeing roughly 135% year-over-year growth. On paper, that sounds fantastic. But we were still leaving a significant amount of revenue on the table because marketing was largely doing its own thing. Sales wasn’t really in the loop.
To fix that, I pulled together a small cross-functional group and focused on three things:
Establishing shared metrics between sales and marketing
Building enablement playbooks so sales could actually use and speak to what marketing was creating
Setting a regular operating rhythm to share learnings, surface what was working, and course-correct what wasn’t
It took about six to nine months to really take hold (which felt long at the time) but the outcome was meaningful. Just by bringing sales meaningfully into the loop, we were able to drive an additional ~27% in attributed revenue.
The experience fundamentally changed how I think about go-to-market:
Alignment is not a project; it’s a practice. You don’t “get aligned” once and call it done. It’s ongoing work.
Sales is a marketing channel. That’s become a bit of a personal mantra. If marketing isn’t thinking about sales as a key channel, and vice versa, you’re missing the point.
Q: You’ve seen GTM evolve from outbound-heavy to data-driven to increasingly automated. What new capabilities or mindsets do you think the next generation of GTM leaders will need that didn’t exist even five years ago?
A: Five or ten years ago, you could get away with being excellent in your lane. You could be a phenomenal marketer or a top-performing salesperson and largely stay in that swim lane.
That’s no longer enough. Today’s GTM leaders need the ability to see the whole system:
The full customer journey, end to end
Where touchpoints exist and how they compound
How marketing spend flows into pipeline
How enablement impacts sales velocity and customer experience
I think “systems thinking” will become non-negotiable. Go-to-market doesn’t control everything, but it has to influence almost everything. That means building real partnerships with product, finance, customer success, and operations. Not just sitting off to the side “running campaigns.”
There’s also a mindset shift from: “I own this function” to “I am responsible for this outcome.”
And finally, GTM leaders need genuine comfort with speed and ambiguity. AI, new channels, shifting buyer behavior — the landscape is moving quickly. You can’t wait for perfect information.
Q: How do you see AI and automation reshaping GTM and enablement work — not just in tools, but in how teams are structured and led?
A: It’s such an interesting moment. I joke that in 20 years we’ll look back and say, “Do you remember the early AI days?” It’s going to feel like a very specific era.
Right now there are countless AI tools aimed at solving every imaginable problem. That’s exciting, but it also puts real responsibility on GTM leaders to be crystal clear about the problem they’re actually trying to solve before choosing tools.
I don’t personally buy into the narrative that “AI will take all our jobs.” What I see instead is AI removing a lot of the manual, mundane, coordination-heavy work that slows teams down today.
In many organizations I’ve worked with, go-to-market ends up functioning like a game of telephone. Not because it should, but because teams aren’t aligned. Marketing tells sales something, sales tells customer success something, and somewhere along the way, context gets lost or distorted.
AI has real potential to reduce that breakdown by preserving context across handoffs and taking on much of the busywork. That frees humans up to focus on the work that actually requires judgment: understanding customer needs, designing strategy, and testing and iterating on big bets.
Over time, I expect we’ll see fewer rigid silos between marketing, sales, and customer success, and more integrated revenue organizations where technology handles more of the plumbing and people focus on insight and relationships.
Q: When you look at growth-stage companies today, where do you see the biggest gaps in how they connect marketing effort to actual revenue impact?
A: The biggest gap I see is still alignment, particularly between sales and marketing.
A very common pattern is:
Sales says, “These leads are garbage.”
Marketing says, “We hit our MQL goal, what are you talking about?”
Most of the time, the root issue is that the teams are measuring different things, optimizing toward different KPIs, and don’t have a truly shared definition of success. Sometimes neither function is clearly accountable to revenue. Sometimes both technically are, but it’s vague or misaligned.
The companies that get this right have real connective tissue:
Shared metrics
Shared visibility into what’s working and what isn’t
Shared accountability to revenue and customer outcomes
Leadership plays a huge role here. Being a GTM leader is not just about owning a metric and a team. It’s about being deeply aligned with your cross-functional counterparts. If marketing and sales leaders aren’t aligned, their teams won’t be either, and the customer ultimately pays the price.
I’ve even wondered what would happen if you temporarily swapped sales and marketing leaders for a short stint, say six months. Let marketing run sales and sales run marketing, assuming there are strong teams under them. It would force deep empathy and understanding for each other’s constraints and pain points.
It sounds extreme, but at the heart of it, that’s what’s usually missing: empathy and a shared view of the customer.
Q: What’s one trait you consistently see in the most resilient GTM teams or leaders?
A: Adaptability. Resilient GTM leaders are willing to try new things, upskill and reskill, fail fast when something isn’t working, and learn from it and move on.
All of that requires low ego, which is especially hard at senior levels. You’re expected to have the answers and show confidence, but you also need to be able to say:
“This wasn’t the right call. Let’s change course.”
“I don’t know this new AI tool yet, but give me a few days to learn it and figure out how (or if) it fits.”
That combination of authority and humility is hard to cultivate but incredibly powerful.
Q: For founders who don’t yet have a full RevOps or enablement function, where should they start if they want to build the right foundation for sustainable growth?
A: It’s going to sound obvious, but it’s the first thing people lose sight of: deeply understanding the customer. Not just a persona on a slide, but:
Where do they encounter friction?
Where are they getting stuck in the funnel?
What does “value” actually mean to them in practice?
A very human impulse (and not just a founder impulse) is to throw money at the problem: “This isn’t working, we should hire someone,” or “We need a new tool.” Sometimes that is the right answer, but it should never be the first move.
The sequence I’d recommend is:
Understand the customer and the problem in real depth.
Then decide: is this a tooling problem, a people problem, a process problem, or something else?
Until you’re confident in #1, investing heavily in #2 is risky.
That connects to how I think about hiring senior GTM leaders too. I often see early-stage founders bring in someone too senior as their first sales or marketing hire. That person may be incredibly capable, but not necessarily set up for success in an environment where they’re expected to wear every hat and build from scratch.
That’s a big reason I’ve leaned into fractional work. Many growth-stage and earlier-stage companies don’t need a full-time CMO or VP right away. They need seasoned judgment and pattern recognition without immediately adding a full-time executive to the payroll.
Fractional or project-based support lets founders: tap into expertise, get the right foundations in place, and avoid mis-hires that leave both sides unhappy. Then, when they’re ready, they can make a more informed full-time hire.
Q: What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
A: Always run to a job, never run away from a job.
I think it’s some of the best life advice in general. For me, it means being really intentional and purposeful about what I’m doing now and what I choose next, not making a change just because I’m unhappy or restless.
It’s easier said than done. When you’re miserable in a role, the urge to jump at the first opportunity can be strong. But every time I’ve slowed down and asked, “Am I genuinely excited to run toward this?” I’ve made better decisions. At its best, a job is a relationship. It should benefit both sides.
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