Enterprise selling normally rests on a division of labor. Engineering understands the machine, the commercial leader understands the buyer, and value gets created in the space between them. Gregg Carman describes a market where that space has closed.
In quantum, the buyer is often a physicist, which means the customer can evaluate the technology as competently as those who built it. “They can tell in a minute whether you understand what they’re building or not,” he says. Positioning cannot compensate for a thin grasp of the science when the person across the table reads the physics directly.
Carman has spent 34 years leading commercial and go-to-market (GTM) work at the front of breakthrough technology markets, owning global profit and loss, and advising chief executive officers across quantum, AI, and deep tech. Most recently, he has built and led North America for a quantum computing infrastructure company, growing it past half of worldwide revenue from no team, process, or playbook.
Technical Fluency Is the Entry Requirement
Carman’s method starts with respect for the science and engineering, learning it well enough to speak it before anything commercial enters the conversation. He describes earning the scientists’ trust first, after which everything moves faster. A commercial leader without technical fluency in this market has nothing to offer either side, since engineers will not lend credibility and buyers will detect the gap immediately. What looks like relationship-building is closer to qualification. In most industries, a commercial leader can be effective while treating the product as a given. Here the product is the entire conversation.
Three Markets That Only Look Like One
The same fluency governs how the category gets read. Sensing, networking, and computing serve distinct use cases, reach different buyers, and run on separate timelines. Carman argues that a single GTM approach trivializes all of it. The reason companies collapse them is worth naming. From outside the physics, the three appear to be variations on one technology, and a commercial leader who cannot perceive the technical distinctions has no basis for building separate motions. Distinguishing them requires understanding what each actually does, at which point a distinct motion for each becomes the obvious response rather than an added complication. The error is invisible until much later, when a unified strategy calibrated to the average of three markets fits none of them.
Building the Commercial Motion Before the Product
Timing is where the requirement becomes concrete. Enterprise and government procurement cycles run 12 to 18 months ahead of delivery, so a company planning 2028 shipments faces a 2027 pre-order window opening now. “Companies without commercial infrastructure in place by early 2027 won’t just miss this next wave in quantum,” Carman says. “They’ll watch it from the shore.”
That compresses the timeline for acquiring the fluency the market demands. A commercial organization cannot be assembled after the hardware is finished, which means the technical understanding has to be built alongside the technology rather than after it.
Carman separates the stages precisely. Readiness opens the window, execution determines who climbs through it, and operational excellence is what makes the result repeatable. The science comes first, and the market is built deliberately behind it, which is why the outcomes are largely settled before any hardware ships. To learn more, connect with Gregg Carman on LinkedIn.
