Alignment Led Growth

Alignment Led Growth – YouTube

Alex, welcome to another edition of Unsubscribe Shorts, where we take our traditional podcast format and shorten it down into like a 10-ish minute segment. In this case, we’re going to be spending those 10-ish minutes talking about the Growth Guiders webinar that we ran towards the middle of December 2023. Hard to imagine that it’s already 2024 and it’s been close to a month since we’ve done that. But there’s a whole lot to unpack from the 30 to 40 minutes that we spent with our guests. I did want to get some opinions from you as technically like an audience member, someone who wasn’t participating in the discussion about what the big takeaways that you got from our panel were, and then I can dive into some of my favorite takeaways. But just to recap for everyone who has no idea what Growth Guiders is, we grabbed go-to-market leaders in sales, marketing, and customer success, brought them together into a room and told them, companies are having issues developing pipeline, how can you fix it? And they basically took off for 30 minutes and talked about all the different ways that they can work individually and together to help fix some of the common pipeline challenges that companies are facing these days. So, Alex, you were the first official listener of the panel event. Talk to me about some of the biggest takeaways that you got from our discussion. Yeah, definitely was an interesting discussion to listen to and go back through as I was editing it. And the biggest sort of overarching takeaway for me was definitely centered around just like these three individuals, Matt, Tom, and Daryl, their dedication to alignment in order to make sure that it’s not just, you know, marketing’s pipeline or sales pipeline or customer success is like renewal pipeline that they’re focused on.

They’re focused on, right, go-to-market strategy, revenue development as a whole, as an organization. And they talked about a lot of the different ways that companies fail when they’re just focused or just siloed within their department versus sort of the benefits that you can get that far outweigh any kind of negatives of just like, okay, maybe sales is whatever happened, external factors or something else. Maybe we’re not going to hit our target today or this week, this month, this year. What can we do to help make sure that the organization’s targets are still hit? Like is the economy doing something where marketing is just more impactful right now? Do we need to focus more on upsells and renewals and help the customer success team? But just having that mindset about it, being able to say, okay, like we’re just one arm of this larger goal that we’re trying to hit. If our arm’s not doing what it’s supposed to and can’t for whatever reason, goals change, sort of situations change, how can we still make an impact? And a lot of that falls under being aligned, knowing what the other departments are doing, and being able to help them and sort of have, you know, the various feedback loops and goal-setting meetings and all that to make sure that you keep that alignment in order to, yeah, if you do fall on any kind of hard times or difficulties in your department, still be able to make an impact towards the overall bottom line. Yeah. Alignment definitely was sort of the focal point of everything we talked about, right?

Like none of the tactical things that the panelists spoke about in terms of like how you can help your sales team stop getting ghosted or how you can help marketing figure out where the best like bang for their buck is. Like all of that doesn’t work if you aren’t properly aligned with other departments. And I think what you said really encompasses everything for me is that like you understand what other departments are doing and how that, how you can make an impact on their goals and how they can make an impact on your goals. Oftentimes, and Matt brought this up, like when tough times hit a company, it’s normal for a department head to like put up their four walls and go like, okay, like we’ve got to weather this storm. I’m going to protect myself and my department and all of the people within it. And then after we weather that, we’ll come out on the other side and see sort of like what the carnage looks like for the rest of the company. And that’s such like a debilitating mentality to have the idea that you’re only responsible for your goals is what I think a lot of the biggest fallacy for a lot of go-to-market leaders. Understanding how you can impact other departments and how they can impact you to your point helps like move the company forward in sync rather than just like taking these weird, like staggered step towards growth when like marketing makes two steps forward, sales takes it one step back, CS moves it two steps forward, marketing takes it a step back. Like that’s not a great way to sustainably or predictably grow revenue. And a lot of the stuff that the team, Daryl, Matt, and Tom were talking about really focused on this idea that understand your goal, your numbers, understand other departments, what their goals and their numbers are. And then above everything else, like figure out how you can align with other go-to-market leaders and work together to hit each other’s goals.

The quote that kind of encompassed all of it for me was from Tom, where he said something along the lines of like, your mentality or mantra for 2024 should be one team, one mindset, revenue. And if that’s the way that you’re thinking about growing the company at large, then that’s going to percolate into other departments so that like sales doesn’t just grow, but it also helps CS. You’re also bringing in marketing, you’re bringing in product, you’re bringing in leadership, et cetera. Like getting everyone to work together towards that one common goal forces you to change the inputs that you’re using to get the output that you’re looking for. That was like my big takeaway there is bash down those walls and start to figure out how to work together. Yeah. And the other perspective that was touched on a little bit that I thought was nice to hear and look at it from is how it impacts the buyers and the prospects and the customers that you have. Because this alignment, the more aligned you are in on the business side of things, the more aligned that buyer’s journey is going to feel as they move through the process, right? How many times have you gotten, you know, oh, interesting piece of marketing content, you read it, and then all of a sudden you’re bombarded by like marketing emails and an STR is reaching out and you tell one of them to stop, but it doesn’t communicate with the other. Like that’s just a small example that’s happened to me personally, but I know there’s a ton of those different ways for a buyer to be irked by the process. And the fact of the matter is whether they need you or not, it can be impacted.

Whether they feel like they need you or not is impacted more by the journey that they’re on and the experience they’re having than necessarily the needs that their company has. Especially when there are so many competitors, depending on the marketplace, that do something similar enough that the difference really could just be like, did your marketing talk to your sales team about what this person actually needs? Or are you just sending in a salesperson who’s like, here’s all the things we sell.

Here’s all the things we do. I don’t know what conversations you had with us before.

Why does it matter? Right. So yeah, I think thinking about it, if you want to sort of convince someone why this is important outside of just like your own alignment internally, thinking about it from the buyer’s perspective is a good way to track like, okay, there’s a good way to identify areas where there is misalignment and where you can clear that up as they move through the funnel and even continue to renew within the customer success life cycle, right? Have marketing sent different things to current customers than they do to prospective customers, which sounds simple, but definitely doesn’t happen all the time, right? Somebody signs on, but their email stays on the database. All of a sudden, now they’re getting that one-on-one connection that they want as a customer, but also getting bombarded by marketing emails, bad experience. Don’t let that happen. And the best way to prevent that is being aligned across the board through those departments. For sure. Yeah. The example that you brought up, I think, I want to say Daryl talked about it, but you can see those inflection points throughout the buyer’s journey, like you were saying, where you can identify like, oh, we’ve messed up here in terms of like this department alignment, but like very often marketers are very, they’re desperate.

They’re like any lead that I can possibly bring in and get over to the sales team, I’m going to do that. Sales and marketing, not aligned there. And then sales, they’re desperate to hit quota. So they’re going to sign anything they can, and then we’ll figure out what to do after the fact. Sales and CS, not aligned in that capacity. So I, the whole panel was talking about it, but like they’re, those are common issues that a lot of organizations face that can be solved with some very simple like feedback loops or the heads of these go-to-market departments getting together and figuring out like, what are your goals?

What are my goals? How can we work together to hit them? And how can I make sure that like, we’re thinking ahead far enough into the future? So I’m not solving my problem, but saddling you with more problems. All of that was very, I think, impactful for me as someone who participated in the discussion, but like any go-to-market leader listening to that can probably pick out a couple of moments where they’re like, oh, you know, we actually do that. Like we have this problem at our company and now there’s some tactical way for us to try and solve that. I think that was the big like goal of the entire conversation in general, but great point by you in thinking that like, it’s not just you that you’re helping, but like you’re helping your customers. And if you can help your customers and that becomes a lot more seamless, then your revenue growth will come with it. So all good points. Yeah. Overall, I thought it was a great episode, great webinar to not only just edit, but watch as an observer.

The three guests we had, Tom, Daryl, and Matt were really good at riffing off of each other. Honestly, AJ, you as the moderator, you didn’t do anything, you know? Well, it was a really entertaining conversation to listen to. So just for that, I think it’s worth a listen or a watch. It certainly was. I’ll say this, I’ve moderated a good chunk of events, et cetera. I did the least amount of in, like active in conversation work for this one, which was very nice.

I took a lot of notes. I’ll say that. I did a lot of work on the backend.

Thank you very much, Alex. Putting together all of like the promo materials and whatnot. But if you are interested in watching the webinar, getting an idea of, you know, what the panel talked about and getting an ebook where we actually wrap up the top six takeaways from the event in totality, you can find it on our website. It’s under the webinar section of our resources page, and it will be linked in the description of this video as well. So you can go and check it out there. But it’s definitely worth the watch.

I think it’s like 36 or whatever minutes. So if you watch it at 1.5 times speed, it’s sub 30 and you can still understand everyone.

And that’s the key. So make sure to check it out. It’ll be linked in the description and let us know what you think. So what did you want to?

I don’t know. I don’t own a cat. You do. First of all, I don’t own a cat. My roommate.

You live with a cat. Yeah. My roommate is a cat.