Mid-stage B2B companies are now spending the equivalent of two senior engineering salaries to keep their go-to-market stack stitched together. The work is called GTM engineering. The job is to connect your CRM to your outreach tool to your conversation intelligence to your enrichment provider to the next thing your CRO read about on LinkedIn — and to maintain those connections as each of those vendors changes its API every quarter.
This is the same job, with a different title, that built every consulting empire of the early 2000s. The licence was a million dollars. The implementation was ten. A whole industry grew around the gap.
Why the modern stack made it worse.
The SaaS era was supposed to fix this. Off-the-shelf, configurable, self-service. What actually happened is that every vendor shipped an API and an MCP server and called it done. Your CRM has an API. Your outreach tool has an API. Your enrichment provider has an API. The fact that they don’t actually talk to each other in a way your team can rely on is somebody else’s problem.
Somebody else, in this case, is the GTM engineer you hired or the contractor you’re paying. The stack has been re-fragmented by the abundance of APIs. Each integration is a maintenance liability with a six-month half-life.
When integrations are the product’s job.
The alternative is software where the integrations are the product’s job, not yours. When the upstream API changes, the vendor absorbs it. When the workflow needs to change, the vendor ships it. The customer’s job is to use the software, not to engineer it.
This is the bet CHRM is making. Not better AI. Not more workflow nodes. Software that does not require an Industrial Complex to make it run.