Charlie Saunders’ Post

Inspired by a post from my friend Tiziano Cembali - on why motivation & execution across marketing teams falls short. I would add that this is one of the biggest problems in operational teams all up - be it sales enablement, marketing, rev ops - and is for sure one of the easiest traps to fall into as a leader and as a team, when requests and shifting priorities are coming fast and furious… I’ve been here. We all go here. What’s causing the spin? - Insufficient time and headspace to set a clear vision - Deprioritization in favor of short-term tasks - Misallocation of requests to inappropriate teams - Rushed leaders who do not provide context or regularly check in with teams - A lack of confidence in asking "why" - A general misunderstanding of the importance of knowing why and what - teams not looking at the same data and same goals - not checking in across the revenue stack In particular across the revenue creation as a team sport, this causes misfires. It means marketing creates demand a sales team can’t catch. It means sales doesn’t create funnel needed to maintain pipeline, it means deals stall. It means wasted money and effort everywhere across the revenue stack. Tiz is a great person to follow here on LI Data driven, marketing truth teller. #revops #marketingops

The truth is that companies can succeed with or without a GTM operations structure. That’s because GTM ops is an org design strategy - a deliberate choice of team arrangement. To understand this, take basketball for example: 2 popular defense strategies in basketball are 1 to 1 (often called man-to-man) and zone defense. 1 to 1 assigns a defender to each member of the opposing team, and zone defense assigns a defender to specific areas of the court. Two DIFFERENT strategies - that would unlikely be applied in every single situation. GTM operations is a strategic choice to combine ops teams (marketing, sales, CS, finance etc) into one team. Here are some pros and cons of GTM operations as a strategy: ADVANTAGES - Natural alignment on top business priorities - Less conflict between ops teams from different departments - More visibility and transparency across data and work streams - Enables quicker decision-making - less hoops to jump through - More holistic view of customer journey More objectivity in priority-setting DISADVANTAGES - Few leaders have the skill set to effectively run a team of this varied scope - Without nuanced prioritization, low-hanging fruit and smaller requests may go unfulfilled - This can create a very technology-focused team and culture that can lead to disconnect from business stakeholders - Brand, community, and experience can be deprioritized since it is difficult to connect these initiatives to revenue - Overtime, unified team can produce bottlenecks Overall - consider all of these efforts when planning the best team structure for your organization. What do you think? #marketing #martech #marketingoperations PS: Two things for you 1 - Join our marketing ops career success at our virtual breakout event, link in the comments. 2- Subscribe to the marketing ops leader newsletter for more guidance like this: https://lnkd.in/g_3YC7BZ

Hey RevOps leaders, something for you to hear... Stop drowning in admin tasks and juggling tech stuff. Pass it on. Your role isn't about mastering every tool. It's about crafting a killer strategy that gets sales, marketing, and customer success in sync and ramps up revenue. Process > Tools.

There are many ways to elevate your strategic game at work. Here are some of my favorites: 1 - Be the one to bring ideas to the table first. Be proactive. Approach leadership with strategic recommendations on how to bring the business forward. Especially: - Operational improvements to unlock growth - Campaign optimizations to increase revenue 2 - Don’t just report data - analyze it Push yourself to review the reporting and metrics and ask: “Is this good or bad? What can we do today to make this better?” Some great ones are: - Conversion rate optimization recommendations - Compare best and worst performing programs 3 - Translate ops work into business language In every meeting, frame your work in terms of how it impacts revenue, customer acquisition, retention, and efficiency. Use phrases and terms that leaders care most about. Here are some examples: - “This project will decrease our time to market by 20%” - “This platform will help us realize an annual cost-savings of $30K” 4 - Identify bottlenecks across the business Don’t limit yourself to one department - call out inefficiencies in all areas to demonstrate holistic thinking. Thinking department by department can lead to missed opportunities. To find bottlenecks: - Identify the slowest step of any system or process - Divert time and resources to alleviating the constraint - Remember to measure success on “value moved through the system” and not on the efficiency of individual steps 5 - Be the go-to technology and process innovation expert Perception is important. Demonstrate thought leadership by showing how tech and process can drive the future of the business. Try this: - Start conversations about new strategies, tactics, and tools - Lead training and educational sessions to elevate your team on best practices 6 - Be a connector across teams Strategy is not done in a silo. Become the bridge between marketing, sales, product, CS, IT, and finance. Try this: - Create tiger teams to tackle big rock issues - Setup data and technology councils to drive better decision-making By taking these actions and focusing on the perception of your role within the company, you’ll help elevate yourself and the ops function as critical, strategic contributors to business success. What resonates with you? What would you add? PS: I’m writing more about this in the marketing operations leader newsletter, subscribe to stay updated https://lnkd.in/g_3YC7BZ #marketing #martech #marketingoperations

Advice: don't own operational and growth metrics simultaneously. It's a two-hat trap, one that most experimentation folks and CROs, especially in centralized structures, know well. A ton of the industry conversation on Linkedin and at many conferences is commiseration about the symptoms of conflating and combining/not-delineating these roles and jobs. > If you own operations: then you are likely a center of excellence, experimentation or product or marketing ops role. This means your job is to help others make decisions fast. You should care about customer insights and learning systems. This is the role that I see Jonny Longden promoting and elevating, as well as others like Manuel Da Costa and André Morys > If you own growth: then you are a mini-CEO of some touchpoint/swimlane/product. You are a product manager or channel OWNER. This means that you need to hold yourself accountable for business bottom-line metrics like revenue. You are the decision maker. You also need authority over your own roadmap ideally, as well as the responsibility. This is what clients (internal or external) are hiring you to do most of the time. This is what Guillaume "𝑮" Cabane and Elena Verna and Leah Tharin talk and post about so much. ^ doing these both at once is like a CEO who is also the COO. It's like the PM who is also the analyst and secretary. It's not a proven way to be efficient I think. But also, these are two different echo chambers on Linkedin. We need to do better to see this I think. Mainly, I fit in the former, but I'm wanting to push for systems of growth so I'm thinking a ton about the latter.

"As a CMO, if you don't get the right data and measurement in place, you're writing your own death certificate." Thank you for the quote Lindsay Slipacoff Cournoyer (hopefully, I got the quote right from our chat). We see this over and over: A marketing leader starts at a new B2B SaaS company. The company hasn't invested in ops, has terrible GTM ops foundation/data. CMO tries to make decisions with zero data to help them. They try to invest in ops but there are budget and resourcing hurdles. The pain grows, they can't do their job effectively, and they leave (or worse). Every situation has its own nuances, but I believe that if a company is ready to invest in a CMO, they should either have: 1. [Preferred] Invested in building a solid GTM operations foundation BEFORE hiring them vs. AFTER. 2. [Better than nothing] Give them a budget to fix the foundation from day 1. It can take 3-6 months for some companies to have the foundation fixed and starting to generate reliable data. So, CEOs, need to be honest with themselves when hiring marketing leadership if they are actually setting the CMO up for success. CMOs are given several months to prove themselves, but if they are inheriting a operational diaster and can't make clear decisions (and there isn't a clear roadmap to improving the data and measurement) how are they going to be successful? TLDR: invest in ops earlier than you think. #gtmoperations #marketingoperations #revenueoperations  

6 Steps to Marketing Operations Success

People don't want to hear this... but as a scaling company you need to learn to say no to business. If you try to have it all, at some point you could end up with nothing. So many times I have seen CEOs and CSOs actually agree to this in principle and then in practice just do the opposite. There is a strategy, culture and skill element to implementing this shift in approach. It starts with thinking about customer fit vs the easy and reactive shiny object syndrome. You have to create a safe space for your sales managers to tell sellers to opt out of poor fit opportunities. You have to change the metrics for your CMO so that it isn't about volume but qualified quality opportunities and shared outcome metrics. It is about teaching the GTM team to embrace hard truths about your differentiation - or often lack there of - so you can really understand the difference between your serviceable and obtainable markets vs your TAM. This is just the tip of the iceberg but it will start to tilt the scales in your favor. What else have I missed? Insight Revenue #InsighttoRevenue #saleseffectiveness #commercialtransformation

Picture this: You're discussing an important growth project with your leadership team and it's feeling like a huge downer. Product wants to validate more before allocating so many resources. Engineering is concerned about adopting new tech taking longer than we think. Marketing is pushing back on adopting a more complex GTM strategy without more resources. Even though they're pointing out valid concerns, it feels like everyone is creating internal headwinds – and it's stressing you out. Sound familiar? Friction is inevitable and necessary in a growing organization. It's how you build something great instead of something mediocre. The way you handle friction makes all the difference in how fast (of if) you continue to scale. Here's how to shift from friction to flow: 1. Foster open communication If people don't feel supported sharing their valid concerns, they'll stop pointing them out and you'll miss the opportunity to build a stronger product. Encourage your team to voice their concerns and actively listen. The goal is to collaborate on a solution. 2. Focus on common goals Remind everyone of the bigger picture and the goals you're all working towards. When cross-functional teams focus on what they have in common, they will organically work together to negotiate solutions and resolve challenges. 3. Check yourself We're human. Poor responses to uncomfortable emotions, stress, anxiety and the like are heightened in the face of friction. If you feel yourself having an oversized emotional reaction to a business conversation, look inward to explore why. If the concerns being raised are valid, it's likely that you need to adjust your expectations (and your attitude) in order to make positive progress. 4. Celebrate wins and learn from losses together Building a product is a team sport. When a project is successful, make sure to celebrate as a unified team. When it didn't go as planned, work together to understand why and what to do different the next time. This helps to build camaraderie and shows the cross-functional team that all disciplines involved are valued for their contribution. By working together and supporting each other, you can overcome any friction that comes your way.

/// ESC \ 3 ways tech leaders are unknowingly offering terrible choices to clients (and what to do instead).... Bad decisions stem from bad offers Here's something you need to know. As a CxO, Sales, customer success, marketing or tech leader, it’s critical as we often Make bad offers which come From bad decision trees Why this is a problem: We don’t notice bad choices as humans We focus on what’s asked, not on quality. But were the options even any good? We don't ask as we don't want to appear Stupid with all our degrees and engineering Minds 'we think' well someone already asked that 1️. We ignore poor input How often has tech failed you or your company? The preverbial black box of bug fixes Post disaster when asked you find out No one was asked 'that one' essential question It's common to miss critical questions. We aren’t versed in good decision-making. 2️. Bad naming hurts sales good names helps framing What’s a good product name you know? Outside the global players, it’s tough. Your service name should be memorable. Otherwise, customers pick @ random. Imagine: "Red or white wine?" 🥂 Everyone just goes along with it. But it doesn’t meet their true need. Good framing gets us in the right Mindset to chose the best outcome 3️. We are not rational Economists think we're rational creatures. Truth is, we’re biased we have hundreds of biases. And decisions? They’re based on our emotions Which we post rationalise once we're done Crazy, right? But it's the truth. Avoid Those, Test Those and Follow Me Mindframe, Set & Match #Whiteglovedelivery #DecisionMaking #TechLeadership #CustomerExperience #ProductStrategy