sales infrastructure

I like the word infrastructure because it conveys many interesting ideas:

• *infra-*structure is under something else that runs on top, which is exactly the case when we talk about sales infrastructure: it’s the thing that sales run on top of.
• infrastructure is an integrated system, where any two points in the system are always connected, just like roads or railways.
• the whole system is only as good as your infrastructure: put the best of trains on a defective infrastructure, and the whole transportation system falls apart.

In this way, infrastructure is both a better term to describe where sales teams are going, and also an ideal to strive for — the opposite of siloed tools that don’t speak with each other.

engineering

Infrastructure and engineering come hand-in-hand. And who designed the internet infrastructure? Roads and railways? Engineers. Same goes with sales infrastructure: they’re a job for gtm engineers.

Some companies convince themselves that the engineering part is not as important as the gtm one, because hiring engineers is harder than hiring business people. So they hand off sales infra to their somewhat-technical business guy and it rarely works out.

intersections

The opposite is true too: your typical software engineer who doesn’t understand squat about sales or marketing won’t do either. The best operators are found at the intersection.

That’s one of my core beliefs btw: that value is found at intersections — whether you talk about locations, skills or content (like my newsletter).