Working with sales & marketing
Turn requests from reps, marketers and leaders into systems they'll actually use.
Roadmap: Portfolio & interview readiness
Why it matters
GTM engineers sit between sales, marketing, RevOps and leadership, and everyone has requests. Reps want better leads now, marketing wants attribution, the CRO wants more pipeline, and RevOps wants nobody to touch the CRM. The engineers who succeed understand how a rep spends their day, say no to low-value work with reasons, and launch things in a way reps adopt. Technical skill without this usually produces clever tables nobody uses.
What it's made of
- Understanding how reps, SDRs and marketers spend their day
- Turning a request into the decision or workflow behind it
- Prioritising by expected pipeline impact and effort
- Agreeing definitions: MQL, SQL, meeting, opportunity
- Launching to a pilot group of reps first
- Getting feedback from the field and acting on it
- Reporting results to leadership in business terms
- Saying no, or not yet, without damaging relationships
Shadow before you build
Spend a few hours watching reps work: how they pick who to call, which tabs they keep open, what they copy by hand, what they skip. You'll often find that the real problem isn't the one requested. "We need more leads" can turn out to mean "the leads we have arrive without context, so nobody calls them quickly". That second problem is cheaper and faster to fix.
A simple intake and priority rule
For every request, write down:
- Who asked, and what decision or workflow it changes.
- Expected impact in meetings or pipeline, even as a rough range.
- Effort in days, and what ongoing maintenance it creates.
- How you'll know in 30 days whether it worked.
- Then rank by impact divided by effort, and share the list so people can see why their request is where it is.
Launch like a product
Start with two or three reps who want it. Explain what changed, why, and what you need from them. Check their usage after a week and ask what's annoying. Fix the top issue, then widen the rollout with a short demo and a one-paragraph explanation in the channel reps actually read. Track adoption: if reps aren't using a new lead view after two weeks, find out why before building anything else.
Speak in pipeline
Leaders care about meetings, pipeline, win rate, cycle length and cost. "I built a 12-step enrichment workflow" means little to them. "The new hiring-signal play produced 18 meetings and $240,000 in pipeline last month at $45 per meeting, about half our previous cost" gets attention and budget. Lead with the number, then explain how.
Mid-level looks like
Delivers what's asked clearly and on time, and checks in with users after launch.
Senior looks like
Shapes the roadmap from sales and marketing goals, negotiates shared definitions, pilots with champions, and kills or changes projects based on adoption and pipeline data.
Common pitfalls
- Building what the loudest person asked for rather than what moves pipeline.
- Launching a new lead source to every rep at once with no explanation, then wondering why they ignore it.
- Reporting technical output (rows enriched, workflows built) instead of meetings and pipeline.
- Letting sales and marketing argue over lead definitions in your dashboards instead of getting them agreed.
Practice drills
Drill 1
Five requests arrive in one week from sales, marketing and the CEO. Write a one-page prioritisation with impact, effort and your recommendation for each, including what you'll say to the people whose requests wait.
A strong answer: Impact estimated in pipeline terms, honest effort, clear reasoning, and respectful, specific replies to those deprioritised.
Drill 2
Role-play: a top rep says the leads from your new signal play are "garbage". Run the conversation and write the follow-up actions.
A strong answer: Curiosity rather than defensiveness, asking for specific examples, checking the data, and a concrete follow-up with a date.
Drill 3
Write a 150-word monthly update to the CRO on GTM engineering work, results and next month's priorities.
A strong answer: Results first in pipeline terms, one honest miss, clear asks, and no tool jargon.
Best resources for this skill
Repos, courses, articles and podcasts, ranked by how much they teach.
Read next
Predictable Revenue
Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler
The book that split prospecting from closing and turned outbound into a repeatable machine. Most of the SDR and outbound systems you will automate trace back to this model, so it helps to know the original design.
Revenue Operations
Stephen G. Diorio, Christopher K. Hummel
Lays out how marketing, sales and customer success data, process and tooling get unified under one operating model. Useful framing when a stakeholder asks why your CRM and enrichment work should sit in RevOps.
From Impossible to Inevitable
Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin
Covers niching, lead types (seeds, nets, spears) and how pipeline actually compounds. Good for deciding which signals and channels deserve automation first.
The Sales Acceleration Formula
Mark Roberge
An engineer-turned-CRO describes running hiring, training, demand gen and sales management off metrics. It shows how a data-minded builder can earn credibility inside a revenue org.