the gtm engineer GTM Engineering in a Large Org with Umar Farooq Adam, Global GTM Program Manager at Hitachi Vantara
Umar Farooq Adam leads global GTM innovation and engineering at Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi Limited. Starting his career in the Middle East working for a small B2B SaaS startup, Umar then moved to an ISV selling to defense sectors in the US and Europe. Afterwards, he spent time at Microsoft working on customer lifecycle management, renewal operations, and solution design, giving him a strong sense of each component in GTM.
After Microsoft, Umar joined Hitachi Vantara as an inside sales rep covering APAC territories. While in the role, he noticed data quality and workflow problems firsthand, and started fixing them within his own territory. His work’s impact got attention from leadership, and he was able to get sign-off on running a 12-month POC that aimed to prove out whether the fixes he implemented could scale globally. By the end of the project, leadership created a dedicated role for him to lead GTM engineering globally.
In this podcast, we discuss:
* How Umar went from an individual sales rep to leading global GTM engineering at a 10,000-person company
* Why getting leadership buy-in early is key when building out a GTM engineering function across a large org
* What Umar focused on and deprioritized during the project that aimed to prove out the value of a GTM engineering function
* How to think about friction in separate terms that resonate with sales, marketing, and operations leadership
* Why data collection’s impact is minimized without activation
Episode highlights:
* Umar’s path in Hitachi started with fixing problems in his own territory. Data quality was a mess because CRM records weren’t updating when things like mergers and acquisitions happened. As a result, he set up alerts using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo to track company news, then manually raised requests with the data team to fix account hierarchies. He also built a manual waterfall enrichment process in Excel, pulling contacts from the CRM first, then ZoomInfo, then Lusha. Those fixes made enough of an impact that they were noticed by leadership and kicked off the POC to prove out implementing programmatic changes globally.
* During the POC, Umar deliberately focused only on data quality and workflow automation. By keeping his scope tight and working on high likelihood of success projects, he managed to move the needle in both areas. Data quality improved by at least 60% through waterfall enrichment in Clay. Workflow automation sped up tasks like account research, identifying what products accounts were in the market for, and crafting relevant messaging.
* Umar explains that one takeaway from the POC was the importance of aligning with regional leadership. In global organizations, people trust their local leaders more than global top-down initiatives. Once he started working closely with regional leaders, everything moved faster. They knew where the friction was, what was realistic to implement for their teams, and what didn’t work in their markets.
* In order to achieve cross-functional alignment, Umar learned to speak each org’s language. For sales, Umar aligned on sales plays and targets. For marketing, he aligned on campaigns and ROI. For operations, he layered on top of their existing work rather than competing with it. The key was showing value that would resonate with each stakeholder rather than pitching a tool.
* Umar calls out that the teams that win won’t necessarily be the ones who accumulate the most data, but the ones who can activate the data they collect across systems. He sees GTM moving from automating repetitive tasks to automating decision-making and triggering next best actions based on real-time account intelligence.
Where to find Umar:
Transcript details:
(00:00) Intro
(02:44) Umar’s background
(04:52) Starting as a sales rep and noticing data quality problems firsthand
(07:50) The specific problems Umar solved in his own territory before the POC
(08:50) How success in his own territory led to the global POC
(10:13) What happened during the 12-month POC
(12:19) Why these problems hadn’t been solved before
(13:50) Navigating cross-functional stakeholders and politics at a 10,000+ person company
(15:26) Challenges during the POC
(16:49) Why Umar focused only on high-likelihood wins and avoided experimentation
(18:19) How prompting and workflow design varied across APAC and EMEA
(19:44) Advice for implementing GTM change at large organizations
(23:02) How to build the skills and intuition for GTM engineering
(25:28) Regional differences in GTM execution across APAC, EMEA, and Americas
(28:13) Future trends in GTM
(30:34) How GTM engineering varies by org size
(31:40) Favorite tools, growth hack, and wrap up
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