From Volume to Focus: The Path to GTM Alignment | Joe McNeill and Mike Carlson, Pavilion CRO Summit

[Applause] You're welcome. All right. Well, we're excited to be here. I think this is my third CRO summit. Um, I've been a member of Pavilion since it was Revenue Collective. So I'm a definitely a big believer in the community. So you know go to market alignment has been a hot topic in in our world for a long time, right? And I think it's always been one of those things that that we focused on we need to just get better at it, right? But we don't it doesn't need to be perfect. As long as we can get good enough, it's okay. But we have a few different market convergences that I think are really driving us to a point where go to market alignment is is like it's table stakes. We have to we have to be fully aligned or else we can't win. And part of that is is Thank you. I'll

take that. I'll take that. Um part of that is, you know, we used to think in the in the in the way of like, hey, let's optimize each of our channels. You know, we have an inbound channel, we have an outbound channel, maybe we have a partner channel, maybe we have a PLG channel, and and everybody's focused on abundance within those channels of how can we get more leads, how can we get more meetings, whatever, right? It's not really reflective of how buyers buy now, but that was also in the days where funding was abundant. And we really thought in this in this uh idea that like our success was centered around how big is our war chest, right? And how big our war chest was determined how much we could grow our pipeline. So, you know, as we grew, maybe cost per opportunity got a little more expensive, maybe cost per lead got a little more expensive, but we could really just plow through some of those inefficiencies with brute force, right? each individually do that. And really like now we're not in that stage anymore. Buyers have changed. You know, the individual silo channels are not reflective of how buyers buy, right? And we don't have the abundant funding

we used to have where we can't plow through it anymore with money. So like execution is the currency that works now. And if we can't execute as a cohesive unit within our commercial teams and our go to market units, like we just can't scale the way that we need to. Maybe you can make it to a certain point, but then you know you get bigger growth goals the next year and as your efficiency degrades, you just can't you can't do it anymore. Yeah. And I think the other thing and uh the folks before just talked about it with with AI being such a a huge disruptive in the market, right? Um is really buyers are typically unfocused, right? Uh companies have been unfocused. Well, AI is making it worse, right? people running around 15 different tools to do the same thing. Some are preede, some are new, some do this. So I think, you know, from a from a company perspective, the competitive advantage is we used to compete against other vendors. Now you're competing against not only other vendors do nothing, but you're competing for for buyer mind

share. Um because there's a lot going on, a lot of noise in the in in the day-to-day. And I think as as organizations what we can do is we can limit the noise in ours to actually uh go out and find new customers to help out. I suppose you probably should have started with this introducing ourselves. Uh I'm Joe McNeel. I'm I'm CRO at Influ 2 as Kathleen mentioned. Uh my background is you know I've been with two primary companies in my career. One uh grew through a PE exit 100% through outbound. The other one grew through an IP uh went to an IPO 100% through inbound. So I've kind of seen both sides of it on that side. Yeah. And Joe and I worked together if you didn't notice. So he actually invited me up here which is shocking because we worked together for seven years and he still wanted to hang out with me. Um but I've also seen some other channels, right? So we worked at Site Improve together. Um last company I worked for was uh a PLG company bootstrapped to 100 million. Didn't take a a dollar of outside funding. um which was it was PLG, right? That's a

different channel. Um and then prior to to site Improve, I worked at a uh supply chain company that was primarily a marketplace. Um so all of these different channels and all of our different experiences kind of led us to today. Yeah. And I think the the reason we bring this up is like both of us don't really have an allegiance to a channel, right? Like what's right is what works. And in the past, a lot of companies would have like they'd have a superpower. They're an inbound company, they're an outbound company. And I just don't think that that's the way it goes anymore. Now it's it's it's all about alignment, right? And so, you know, at Influ 2, we do contact focused advertising and really like our customers sales and marketing alignment is a big determination of their outcomes they're going to achieve with our platform, right? So, we work a lot, we talk a lot with commercial teams on aligning and we set out to really put together a comprehensive report on like what is the impact of alignment? What do you get when you're aligned and how many commercial teams are really aligned? So we deep dived into you know contacts that marketing is targeting contact sales is targeting how aligned the outreach is at the same time and then we looked at conversion rates of all the

things and what we see is that you know companies it's very some of the very simple fundamental things commercial teams when marketing and sales are aligned on their goals and their KPIs. So it's not leads versus revenue pipeline versus this. When they're aligned, they have 67% better chances at or better close rates, right? So just align goals. On top of that, when when they're uh aligned on their audience targeting, 87% increase in conversion rates, right? Like these are dramatic numbers and those numbers scale well. It's like compounding interest, right? And this is this you think about how this reverberates through the organization. Think of like your participation of your AES. how many of your AES are hitting quota, how many like how many you can retain, all those things that degrade your efficiency as you grow, like the simple fundamental pieces of alignment can dramatically impact those. And if you do those now, of course, they increase as you scale. And I think, you know, we see this a lot and I'm sure you guys in your orgs do as well, is we go into a meeting, rah rah,

we're all aligned, we're all in it together, and then we go back and we have our own separate dashboards. And I think to Joe's point, marketing is looking at MQLs, right? Like how many people do we put in, how many what's the number of people we put in. The SDRs are looking at pipeline. Sales reps are looking at how much revenue they closed. And ultimately, it just doesn't work. Um, if you look, you know, across the data, 11% of companies say their sales and marketing are actually aligned and who they're targeting from an audience perspective. Um, and actually handing off, right? like there's one thing to target the same people, but actually getting the leads to where we can actually execute on them. Um, and 53% of people say they have the same audience, but they're missing a handoff, which means 53% of companies have leads falling into a black hole. Um, so you think not only from a a spend perspective, all that money just going into a black hole, but from a revenue perspective, right? We can talk about costs and how much it costs to do that, but there's the opportunity cost of what

revenue you are not able to capture. Yeah. Just think about I mean these are dramatic numbers there. 89% of companies have a lot of room for improvement on alignment. A lot manifests itself and what happens with all this is is teams aren't aligned and they're not hitting their goals. Like pipeline goals are tough right now. If you you know if you walk around and ask how many people are ahead of their pipeline goal, not a lot of people raise their hands, right? And and what we see over and over is when when you get behind in your pipeline goal, what's the reflex, right? Go deeper and wider, do more and more, right? And this results in a lot of companies having like having a pipeline strategy that's a mile wide and an inch thin, right? And so what happens is like we've gotten to this point where, you know, it was funny back when, you know, outreach and sales loft were were like really growing, a lot of people would be like, "Oh, we have these spam cannons, right? and we we can just like spam the market and and as you get further behind the tendency to like do that, you know, increases. Well, now

like you know, with AI agents and whatnot, there's nuclear spam cannons. Like everybody's getting a million emails every day. And and it's because everybody's trying to do more to get more pipeline. And the reality is like the reflex, I get the reflex. It's the safe answer. When you're in a board meeting and you're behind, it's like we're going to go out and we're going to do twice as much as we did before. But the answer now is to to to focus, right? It's to decide who are we. If you try to be everything to everyone, you're going to be nothing to no one, right? And AI, as Mike said before, is making that more and more prominent of the sense like you need to pick a plot of dirt and you need to pick who do I serve and how am I going to stay relevant with those people. And what we see right now is 71% of cold emails are skipped due to irrelevance and 95% or 96% go unanswered. Cost of opportunities is up 18% year-over-year, right? Like those are numbers that make it tough to succeed. And I think, you know, as as we look at this, right, and and Joe brought up the the pipeline being a you know, the target being a mile wide and an inch deep. Focus is a posture. You choose to

actually have that posture. And I think if you if you look across, it's a hard thing to do, right? Because like to Joe's point, the knee-jerk reaction is do more, do more, do more. I think, you know, the point here is be productive together versus being super busy individually. Um because I think, you know, I I say this to my reps all the time. How was your week? Uh super busy. All right. Were you productive? The answer is no. 95% of the time because they were running from one thing to another. And I think what's happened is sales and marketing is very busy but super unproductive. Um yeah, I mean really understanding who that ICP is and just doubling down on it and being sure you're right. Um you can run experiments. Experiments are good, but if you just wholly open up your pipeline nuclear cannon, I guess as Joe put it, you're going to run into some problems. Yeah. And so like we've set the scene, right, of the issues with sales and marketing uh alignment right now. And we wanted to sort of take it a

step further and say like, hey, what are the five biggest friction points we see? And how do you resolve those friction points? Like what do we see with best-in-class companies that are successful with their go to market alignment? Yeah. I mean, I think this is this is the the the top one, right, in terms of the ultimate goal of most of our organizations is drive revenue and revenue growth. Um, so as long as that's everybody's goal, you're not going to go wrong, right? as as long as everybody's pointing in the right direction. I think sometimes we we get stuck in our own dashboards and sometimes comp plans are misaligned, right? If if your marketing leader has an MQL bonus plan and your SDR leader has a pipeline goal. Um the marketing leader may get their bonus at the end of the year and the SDR leader isn't, right? Because garbage in, garbage out. Um so I think fundamentally being aligned on revenue targets and revenue growth. Um, I think if you're a leader at your company and you have a different comp plan than the leader sitting next to you, you're ultimately going to have

you're going to make different choices. Um, so I think that's the number one thing you can do is is make sure you're aligned on revenue targets. Yeah, I remember uh Mike and I were at Site Improve before uh and we were in we were in a board meeting and and uh we were having a tough quarter at that point and I remember marketing put on the the board there like oh we were at 136% to MQL target this quarter, right? And we were like, "How did that happen? You guys were behind." And they're like, "Oh, we just changed the scoring for our MQL." And we caught up. And I was like, "Okay, sweet. That's great." They got their bonus and we did not. Yeah. Yeah. That must be nice. They were playing chess and we were playing checkers. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And and like I I touched on it earlier, but but the audience mismatch is another friction point that we see, right? And it's this concept of ICP. We've all talked about determining ICP, but it's like what does that mean within your company? And does it mean the same thing to everyone? If we ask your SDR leader, your SDR, your, you know, RVP of sales, your AE, your marketing leader, your demand gen

manager or your founder, what the ICP is? Are they all going to say the same thing? Like that's that's the test. Like go ask those questions, find out what people say, and then how do they come to that answer, right? Is it sticking your finger in the air and seeing which way the wind's blowing or are you using like data to determine this? And what like when we went through this uh exercise internally at our organization, we looked at at LTV of customers and NR. So it's not just like hey, how do we optimize our ICP around who's going to convert the most? It's how do we optimize our ICP around who's going to renew and who's going to upgrade, right? So it's really diving into the data of like who is our customer that we serve and how do we message them. And so what we see with best-in-class companies with our customers too is it's not just the account, right? like you see ICP and it's at the account level and maybe some demographics around the account and that's it but they don't have it mapped down to the personas. So it's like okay what's a quality meeting within that ICP. Okay. So like we have to have a binary definition of what quality is across our

commercial team and that's down to the persona level. So it's like you have your green personas that are like if we get a meeting with these these are best case scenario. This is like we bring everybody to these meetings right? Maybe your yellow personas are like these are our bread and butter. These are the the the users, the main people, the doers, the people that are influencers within our within our deals and these are all the titles. This is the messaging and this is how we're going to target them. And then you have your red titles of like these aren't the people that we want, right? These are not quality meetings and maybe maybe we'll talk to them at times if they come inbound and we'll try to we'll try to work our way to the yellow or green personas within there, but like this isn't who we're targeting. And you know, you also can have like maybe maybe you're you're marketing to the CFO. You don't want to talk to the CFO, but you just don't want, you know, when your proposal gets to the CFO, that to be the first time that they see your brand. But you have to have like this aligned definition of your ICP down to the persona level with the binary definition of quality. So if your if your AES come to you and they say like, "Hey, I'm not getting quality meetings this quarter." Then it's not

like it it's not anecdotal. You can dive in and you can look at the meetings and you can be like, "What do you mean these these like 85% of your meetings this quarter were quality." And you know what? If the definitions need to change, you can have that conversation, but then there's not all this squabbbling about, hey, are we getting good leads? Are we getting good meetings? What are the meetings? You have a binary definition of equality that you can all report on that you all agreed on. Yeah. I think back to the point of noise, right? Um, I think we've heard it from a lot of people, but noise when it comes to signals, super important, right? We have demo requests, you have third party affiliate intent signals, you have first party, you have signals coming from everywhere, right? And I think we've gotten overdone with signals um, where they don't mean anything anymore. So, I think even barreling it down to what's important, right? I think back to Joe's question, go ask an SDR what type of signals they want. um they're they might say something different than what you think because there's just a lot of noise and now we

have Slack integrations and constantly getting pounded with notifications all day about intent signals from this buyer this uh or this other person. So really barreling down what's important, right? And I think understanding your buyer, understanding your persona, understanding um the target target company you're looking for is going to help you barrel down what intent signals are important. Yeah. If everything's important, nothing's important, right? Like how can you hold your team accountable to reaching out to these signals within minutes if if all of the signals are important, right? What's my dad used to say to a hammer everything looks like a nail, right? Sometimes to a marketer everything looks like a lead. So it's like we need to be honest with ourselves of like, hey, what is a signal of influence? So it's warm cold outreach and what is actually a hot lead? Like what what is a a hand raise? What is going to convert with with minimal effort? And how do we how do we reach out to those quickly? Then on top of that, we talked about the relevance gap. I think I heard it in the last presentation too of like how do we make how do we make outreach relevant? And I think, you know, leveraging these

signals, being able to leverage the data of what's creating engagement with marketing and sharing those data back and forth to do that, but I think, you know, we talked about our last company being primarily outbound. I'd love to say, you know, oh, we walked uphill both ways. It was way harder back then. It's way harder now. It was way easier back then. And I know, you know, when we were training our STRs before, the way to differentiate and to provide relevance was really to do research on the person and to really write like a well-crafted personalized email that only a person could write. Unfortunately, we're at a point where like those can be automated now, too. So, so in my opinion, part of relevance is is humanization, right? Like like I think way back when Forester and Gartner were saying that buyers don't want to deal with humans anymore. They just want to buy. I think I think everybody's gotten a taste of that and it's like no, give me the humans again, right? And what I see work is like how how do you pro prove that you're a professional that can provide value to that person? How do you humanize your outreach? And part of humanizing your outreach is is taking the signals, digesting the engagement, finding out where they are in the buying buying process and meeting them there, not

trying to impose your sales process on them, right? Like Mike and I were joking earlier about medicing people, right? About like, oh yeah, we just layer in, you know, talking to to people looking for a new sales leader that we just need to add medic and like everything will be good, right? Nothing against medic, but it's just, you know, buyers need to be met where they are. Like the buying process is like a convoluted matrix. There's a lot of people within the buying group and they're all at different stages and we need to use the signals and use the data that we have to find out where each individual is at and what is important to that individual with this purchase, right? Because, you know, since co the number of buyers involved in a deal has gone up every year, right? And there's a lot of stuff going on within those buying groups as we can all attest. you know, this persona wants to get this out of the purchase. This persona wants to get this. And we need to we need to put all that data together. And we need to be able to be relevant to them and not just like peanut butter a horizontal message out to an entire TAM, scrape up the lowhanging fruit and and call it good because maybe that'll work once, but it won't work after that.

Yeah. I think I think the other thing that kind of gets lost in the shuffle is, you know, we talk a lot especially the sales leaders about top of funnel. One thing we can't forget about is is midfunnel. Um, and also postale. Um, midfunnel, you got a rep maybe with 30 opportunities, 25 opportunities. There's a buying group of 13 at each of them. They're trying to trying to manage 300 people. They need marketing help. um they need marketing to to continue to show them ads or if we we haven't cracked all 13 of them, continue to nurture those opportunities as they flow through the funnel because putting that onto a sales rep is is going to lead to failure. And the same thing, you know, 50 52% of of SAS revenue comes from expansions. So abandoning that channel and just having marketing focus on the top of funnel is also going to cost you revenue at the end of the day. It needs it needs to be an entire life cycle where sales and marketing are aligned throughout the entire process. Yeah, that's a new thing in our market. You know, 52% of the revenue coming from our

customers. That means most of our growth, the majority of our growth this year is going to come from our customer base, right? So, like the fact that, you know, we have the marketing machine for most companies that's only on the new logo side, those two things are out of balance, right? So essentially, you know, you guys have taken in a lot of this today. We just have a takeaway solution. So the deck, uh, this will be shared here, right? I mentioned the 17page sales and marketing alignment report that we have. You can get that through the QR code. I believe our our marketing director is looking at me like, that's good. You can get it. So yes, uh, you can get it through there. Uh we're we're a little early. So if anybody's has any questions or anything they wanted to touch on or or ask we'd be happy to take some questions. Hi there. I love the presentation. I'm curious.

in one of our last people your business and you want to focus on how do you Yeah. So so well the beauty with us is we target only the contacts we want to target, right? So so you know should be $20 under your chair for for uh walking right into that. But so so for us like all of the contacts we're getting engagement with are the contacts that are a good fit for us. But I'm always going to optimize on the fit, right? And it's it's hard because like you don't want to ignore the low fit, but you have

to have emotion for that. But like you know your the way I look at it is AES are expensive and your best AES are like the best AES are hard to find. And you think they have a finite amount of time that they can spend talking to customers. Who do you want them to spend that time with or prospects? Right? I want them to spend the time with the people that are the best fit for us. Right? Because we talked about, you know, 52% of of your revenue is going to come from your customers. Well, the way to feed that is to get new logos and and the new logos being a good fit is what's going to drive your NR, right? Poor fit customers, it's like that's that's it's the worst case scenario possible, right? So, so really the motion to talking to those poor fit customers or prospects is is probably trying to disqualify them. So, like do you want your best AES disqualifying business or do you have a different motion for that? So really it's it's like everything within your engine is focused on best fit a and everything else is just noise. And I and I would go back to why you've defined them as poor fit because I think you'll

find your answer, right? If you if you've defined them as poor fit, they probably churn at a super high rate. You know, they're, you know, payback periods 18 months and they're probably going to stay for 12. Um that that's you're probably going to come to the answer, right? Got it. Anything else? Any other questions? As an ops person, I think I've seen every possible version of it. I'm curious to know what you really have the entire pipeline. They just advancing part of it. product leaders also tied to a revenue target in addition to the revenue leader. Have you seen the perfect model? Yes and no. I mean the per perfect model what's right is what works in a way. I think you just have to have get away

from vanity metrics being the way that you define winning, right? Like vanity metrics being there and leading indicators being there. It's fine, right? If we if we have this many site visits, we get this many leads. If we get this many leads, we get this many opportunities. if we get this many opportunities, we get this much revenue. The problem is, you know, those metrics can be gamed, right? Like if you if you're optimizing around o open rates, then you create clickbait and you get open rates, right? But that that math doesn't math, right? So, I think it's like down to its core is what does it mean to win? And does everybody have a unified definition of what it means to win? So, we're all eating from the same table. And and you know, of course, I'm going to say that everybody should be measured on revenue. I don't think you'll get a CRO here to say uh to to disagree with that, but yes, I think I think it boils down to pipeline of revenue. Like how do we how do we focus on that? But it also is like what are we optimizing for and every business is a little different, right? Like do we need do we need to improve our conversion rates uh within our open opportunities? If so, like everybody should be focused on that. Not just it's not just a sales problem, it's a marketing problem, it's a product problem, right? So it's it's

what are we solving for? And every company's a little different. You know, some companies do really well in new logo, but they struggle on re renewal. Some companies do really well on renewal, but they struggle with new logo. So, it's like how what are we pointing our engine at to optimize to and how does everybody uh optimize for that? And I think one of the things that's kind of ruined it is the the single attribution, right? We were talking about that earlier of this came from marketing or this came from a BDR, it doesn't matter, right? Like it it got in the funnel. That that's the goal. So I think to Joe's point, alignment on revenue and pipeline and then really from that standpoint, whether it's paid ads or BDR, they're all just ways that customers are finding you, right? If you put a dollar in, where do you get four or five dollars back? Because that's where you want to invest, right? And I think, you know, if you go down the path of marketing has to contribute this much pipeline and the SDR team has to contribute this much pipeline, you kind of already lost, right? you're you're already kind of creating this divisive situation where they're going to fight over every lead that comes in which

creates misalignment and then you're kind of back to square one again trying to create trust again among amongst the team which we didn't talk a lot about that today but the mistrust right if if you gave a survey to the sales team and you gave a survey to the marketing team about how much they trusted each other maybe it'd be great my my guess is a lot of companies it would be pretty low um just from the standpoint of there's usually friction when they're when they're involved with each other I I hope I'm wrong, but my guess would be it it would be low. I think companies can get away from this controversial pipeline. I'm wondering what you guys see as you talk to who owns the pipeline. I don't care. I want the funnel that are qualified. I don't care. I'm not a small company. I own sales

market. Yeah, I think they both need to own pipeline personally because I think you know Mike said it. If you add SDRs, your inbound leads go up. If you if you execute great brand and marketing programs, your prospecting conversion rates go up, right? So, I think they're they're intertwined. And if they both aren't accountable for pipeline, then that's where those those, you know, issues come up, right? And if you have if you have marketing, this is just my belief, but if you have marketing that's focused on brand and strategy, like how do you measure that in a tangible way? And what are they accountable to? you know, if you're below on pipeline, is it is it just the CRO that's that's not executing, right? So for me, I think they both need to be accountable to pipeline. It doesn't matter how they get there. And I think so at at my or I own pipeline. The CMO doesn't report to me, but at the end of the day, it's my responsibility to get pipeline in and

get revenue in. Um we have a monthly KPI call, talk about all where we can get all all the leads are coming from and what's what's working and what's not. And then we have a mid-month check-in. It's a 30-minute check-in. Are we behind? Are we ahead? What's working? What's not? Do we need to adjust? Um, but ultimately, at least at our org, I I run that meeting and the marketing team's obviously a part of it. But it's really to get everyone's input, but at the end of the day, if we don't get the pipeline in, I don't hit my revenue numbers and I'm I'm probably looking for a new job, right? Yeah. It's a good question. Yep. I think they need to be similar. They need you need to be very aligned and that comes down to that ICP and persona matrix like you need to build out what is your value prop and what is your value messaging to each of those personas because reality if you're looking at building synergy within your

programs like they have to be cohesive they have to be connected. If if an SDR is reaching out to someone and they're seeing ads for marketing or they're seeing content for marketing, they should be saying the same thing or else those two those two things aren't building on each other. I agree. And then if they don't if they're not, you know, think about it, right? SDR reaches out with a message that you think is the right message. They get a meeting, right? Then they go to the website and they check out the website and it just looks not congruent. You've already created mistrust at the beginning of the buyer's journey, right? So, you know, they want to see X, you've told them you do X, you better show them X. Otherwise, they're gonna they're going to pull a rip cord pretty early on in the sales cycle. It's a good point, though. Last one. I wanted to

How do you get the first time? Yeah, I think that that's that's the biggest challenge right now with misalignment. You know, I gave the example from from site improve about marketing and their leads and and really like you know the challenge was back then we were an outbound company when they hired the CMO that their the way they measured the CMO is how much marketing influence revenue can you bring in. So like that in itself is just breaking alignment from the start. So I think you know my advice is is the commercial leaders need to get together and they they need to align and then they need to manage up and present it up of like hey we don't like the way that that this is being managed and here's the problems it's causing for how we do our business and they need to present that up to the executive team because everybody wants the same thing. Got it. All right. Thank you. Thanks. [Music]