Umar Farooq Adam leads global 📝GTM innovation and engineering at Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi Limited. A GTM 🏷️#engineer with roughly seven years of global experience, he began his career in the Middle East at a small B2B SaaS startup, moved to an ISV selling into defense in the US and Europe, then spent time at Microsoft on customer lifecycle management, renewal operations, and solution design — building a feel for every component of the GTM stack.
His path inside Hitachi Vantara is the memorable part: he joined as an inside sales rep covering APAC, noticed data-quality and workflow problems firsthand, and started fixing them within his own territory — setting LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo alerts to catch M&A that broke CRM account hierarchies, and running a manual 📝waterfall enrichment in Excel. The impact drew leadership attention and earned him sign-off on a 12-month POC to test whether the fixes could scale globally; by the end, the company created a dedicated role for him to lead 📝GTM engineering worldwide. He deliberately kept the POC scoped to data quality and workflow automation, lifting data quality at least 60% through waterfall enrichment in 📝Clay, and stresses that activation matters more than accumulation — the teams that win activate the data they collect rather than hoarding it.
I had Umar on the gtm engineer to learn what GTM engineering looks like inside a large org.