GTM Engineering Outside of B2B Tech

Short one -- it's been a while since I've posted anything here. Mostly that's because I've had my head down in a new role.

I work at a PE-backed company that brings together local businesses in a fragmented market. It's the kind of market you can't easily get data for in a public dataset. There's no ZoomInfo for it, no clean list of buyers, and most of the tools GTM people take for granted don't fit.

The way I'd put it: as more people in tech become GTM engineers and the technical skills get commoditized, there's a growing gap between what SaaS GTM engineers do and what those same skills can solve in other industries. I'm biased, but I think that's where a lot of the opportunity is right now. When anyone can write the code, how you think about the problem matters more, and right now there's a lot of value in taking what we learned in B2B and applying it to go-to-market everywhere else.

What's different

A few of the situations that are new

• There's no database to buy. Nobody sells a clean, current list of the people you want to reach
• The data lives in a dozen places that don't agree with each other: public records, listings, weird esoteric third-party datasets you have to try and eval, and more
• The channels are different. Direct mail is something I've never thought I'd be a fan of.
• B2B datasets have spoiled us. Most of them don't fit out here, so you end up building more of the infrastructure yourself. And the other datasets for some of these older industries kind of suck a lot of the time.

Some cool stuff I've been doing

• An enrichment pipeline that works out who actually owns a property, through a dizzying number of rules across public and private data sources, then skip traces the owner for a phone and email.
• A matcher that turns a public listing into the exact address and owner
• A request queue on top of the pipeline, run from Slack and Linear, so sales can ask for a list and get it back without waiting on me.
• Competitor teardowns that take a competitor's public inventory, resolve every property to its owner, and score each one against our own performance data
• A cold outreach program built from zero: the positioning, the messaging and the sending infrastructure behind it.
• Internal tools for sales I can't speak too much about

.... And a lot more

The part I like most is that it's built once and runs for every brand. In PE terms, each local business that joins is a portco with its own name, market and team. Building a separate setup for each one would mean a dozen half-finished versions of the same thing. So the pipeline, the outreach infrastructure and the internal tools are built one time, and a new brand gets all of it the day it joins.

Why I like it out here

It's exciting to work on go-to-market outside of B2B tech, which can feel like a bit of a bubble. Most of what you learn there about growth and GTM engineering carries over well. Lists, signals, attribution and automation, etc.

Some of these buyers are also less sophisticated, and I mean that in the nicest way. Nobody has hit them with a perfectly personalized sequence and an AI-researched opening line yet. That leaves a lot of open ground, and a small team can make a big difference quickly.

It's changed how I work, too. I spend most of my time building custom solutions instead of stitching software together.

If you're a GTM engineer wondering where your skills go as tech gets more crowded, look at the industries nobody has built for yet. The data is messier, but there's a lot more to build.