So who owns your pipeline machine?

Quick test. Ask three people on your team who owns the machine that produces your pipeline. Not the strategy, not the messaging. The machine - the outbound infrastructure, the enrichment, the routing, the CRM automation, the reporting.

You'll get three different answers. That's the problem.

Here's what usually happens. Marketing owns the leads until a form gets filled out. Sales owns them after a call gets booked. And everything in between - the domains, the warmup, the data, the sequences, the handoffs - belongs to nobody in particular. It works until it doesn't, and when it breaks, everyone notices the same week the number dips.

A GTM engineer owns the in-between. The whole thing, end to end. Your outbound runs on infrastructure that's warmed and monitored before deliverability is ever a fire drill. Your enrichment happens in pipelines instead of someone's browser tabs. Every inbound lead gets routed in seconds, with a reason attached. Your CRM updates itself, because the automation writes what reps never will.

And you get the documentation for all of it. You're never hostage to the person who built it - including us.

If you're hiring for this or bringing someone in, listen for how they talk. You want the one who describes systems they've built, not strategies they've recommended. That difference is the whole job.