Growth infrastructure

If the last chapter was about plumbing, this one is the wiring. Growth infrastructure is about more than data—it's about how your tools connect, support, and accelerate your team. When it’s working, execution feels smooth. When it’s broken, everything drags.

In every assessment I run, I do a deep dive into the tool stack—not just what exists, but how it's being used. I’m a certified Zapier Expert, and I believe automation is one of the most underused levers for B2B growth teams. Done right, your stack should do the heavy lifting: routing leads, syncing data, triggering alerts, consolidating reporting, and letting your team focus on high-leverage work.

This chapter helps you understand whether your tech stack is a growth engine—or a source of drag.

Start with the basics. What’s being used for CRM, marketing automation, lead capture, reporting, project management, experimentation, and outreach?

Is it a patchwork of free plans and one-off tools, or is there a clear structure? Are the tools designed for B2B sales cycles, or are they borrowed from B2C playbooks? This is your tool inventory.

Are they the right tools?

Just having a CRM doesn’t mean it’s the right one. Are tools being stretched beyond what they’re designed for? Are they fit for the team size and motion?

In one team I worked with, Airtable was being used as a CRM. It worked—until it didn’t. Leads were slipping through, and reporting was manual. The cost of switching seemed high, but the cost of staying was higher.

Are tools actively used?

Adoption is everything. A beautifully configured HubSpot instance is useless if the sales team is still working from their inbox. Ask: is the team using the tools every day? Do they trust the data? Is there friction?

Low adoption is often a sign of complexity, lack of training, or tools being forced into workflows that don’t fit. Sometimes, it’s a signal of internal misalignment.

Is data flowing properly between tools?

This is where Zapier shines. When tools live in silos, you get double entry, inconsistent records, and no single source of truth. I always map key automations:

• When a lead is captured, does it hit the CRM instantly?
• Are Slack alerts being triggered on key behaviours?
• Are forms, meetings, and campaigns syncing correctly?

Good integrations reduce human error and surface insight fast. They also create leverage: the same small team can get more done with fewer blockers.

Is there a project management tool?

Every fast-moving team needs a way to track work. That might be Notion, Asana, Linear, or ClickUp—it doesn’t matter much what you pick. What matters is whether growth activity is tracked, prioritised, and owned.

No tool? That’s chaos. Too many tools? That’s confusion. The right tool, used consistently, becomes the heartbeat of execution.

This is the final test. Can your team launch a campaign this week without waiting on a dev? Can they update a page, test a new offer, pull a report?

Every blocker adds friction. Every manual task slows down momentum. Your stack should be designed for action.

Growth doesn’t happen in Google Sheets. It happens in teams that can move fast without breaking things. And that only works when the underlying infrastructure is solid. If tools are clunky, disconnected, or poorly adopted, the bottleneck isn’t strategy—it’s execution.

Get the wiring right, and the whole system starts to move faster.

This is the final test. Can your team launch a campaign this week without waiting on a dev? Can they update a page, test a new offer, pull a report?

Every blocker adds friction. Every manual task slows down momentum. Your stack should be designed for action.

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