Hot takes, rants and best practices on alignment from The Irreverent CMO

Last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk discussion featured "The Irreverent CMO" himself, Mike Yaffe from Prevalent. He shared hot takes and rants on a wide variety of subjects, and a common theme was alignment - across departments, amongst the leadership team, with the board and more.

Below are chat highlights from both sessions with Mike with a heavy focus on alignment thoughts and best practices.

If you are a CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of ~1,700 of your peers, let me know.

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Alignment can sometimes mean CMO does what ever CRO says

Great article: https://kellblog.com/2022/07/20/the-parable-of-the-amicable-cmo-cro-relationship/

The 3 legged stool is wonky and whacky at any given time between sales, marketing and CX

Aligning on ownership, accountability and SLAs across the team and being honest and transparent with the leadership team is key.?I share all OKRs for each sub team across all my leadership so people know what they are supposed to do and others can lean in and help when needed.

OKRs have changed the game for us internally, especially the transparency of them companywide

Easier said, though. I'm finding it very hard to get certain marketing leaders comfortable with that kind of accountability.

Or the CSO that sees marketing is pure (inbound) demand gen.

Patrick Lencioni does a great job of putting Accountability in perspective. First, Trust, then Conflict, next Commitment, then Accountability, and finally, Results. It's from his book The Advantage.

Proactively communicating is key

Best advice I have gotten in my career for business reviews or other high-level meetings, spend 20% of time on what’s gone well, 80% on what failed.?Builds credibility and confidence (assuming you have good lessons learned and mitigation plans, and that it’s not the same failures every time)

Activity, output/results, impact numbers….. know your output/results and impact numbers, not every nit

You have to be trusted enough that you can define how and what to measure and look at deeply. If you are not trusted I think it's a non-starter

This is why accountability can't be interpreted as "when I (sales) say jump, you (marketing) say 'how high'?"

Cross-functional misalignment where most firms fall down, especially as they scale

My new place goes so far as to align all the exec comp. It is truly win as a team lose as a team

This brings be back to our “polishing a turd" discussion in the past.?If there are fundamentally flawed aspects of the business - product, strategy, investment, etc, we just can't make it work no matter how awesome we are.

Helps to establish a culture of experimentation and what is being tested by a given activity; that way if it fails you are ready w/the lesson learned and how to optimize going forward

Absolutely - it's important to experiment in marketing, measure, iterate, etc. If you set expectations that you're running a pilot or a test, establish KPIs, and report back on results and next steps, it usually is well received.

Its so hard to inspire people with soft costs or budget spending avoided.?See national healthcare debate.

My challenge with ROI calcs is that they are either so simple they are not believable, or so complex they are confusing.?It’s tough to find the sweet spot.

Bottom up modelling with the CRO and CCO is the only way to align on goals.?CFO does his own version and then we meet and invariably, we are close enough on that mutually agreed upon fantasy

I tell my team - we all rise or don't together.?If Sales is hitting their numbers, pipeline looks good - it doesn't matter WHO did it.?If Sales isn't hitting their numbers, Marketing saying we're doing GREAT - well no one is happy

Do deal post mortums for won vs lost deals… what did they interact with… marketing and sales touches

I 100% agree with approach of sitting down to see what the business/revenue model and what's required at each sales stage. Grant it, I also own Sales Enablement, and you have to see what is converting along the way.

Goals on ARR and NRR is how you align with CRO/CCO

I said this on a call this week: you are not defined by what you did in the past, you are defined by what you can do in the future. Influencing pipeline is one of those things.

Know your board personas.....

And know your strengths and weaknesses for each persona

Sales is our Partner, not our customer. And giving a client what they NEED is not about giving them exactly what they ask for. Sometimes we need to tell them NO for their own good.

SO annoying when the CEO/cofounders insist on dividing revenue by marketing-sourced versus sales-sourced rather than focusing on revteam plays

We call our joint team the "revenue engine" and look at funnels together every other week.

At this point, “we look at Marketing-source and Sales-source revenue as either/or” is a disqualifier for me in choosing roles. Been there, done that, got the crappy t-shirt.

Agree. Always revteam. Wondering if others have been aligned between CMO + CRO but your board tries to break it? Our new PE board is very MQL > SAL > pipeline attribution focused. they’re a tough group to sway.

I just had a refresh of my sales leadership team and had to re-educate what we do, how the engine works and discuss the funnel and conversion.?It amazes me how many sales leaders have never seen this before coming to my company.

I'm a fan of accountability without blame -- have to re-emphasize that we're all one revenue team

“If we have data, let's look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.” a quote by Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape.??Somehow the CMO's opinion keeps moving to the bottom of the power list, if the data isn't there.

Aligning on GTM first is critical.

We have a joint revenue meeting weekly that's super helpful to get alignment where the Sales, Account Management and Marketing are all on the call together and talking about forecast, pipeline, what needs to happen that week.

I think I love(d) doing marketing at martech companies just because I was both CMO and the voice of the customer, which gave me more "weight" in the room

We did a full day session with our CEO that was an introduction to marketing from end to end. It started with him filling out a form on our Website. We had our BDR team lined up to follow the process and then we walked him through everything that happens post form fill. Walked through content, PR etc. It had a transformational understanding of our CEO on what marketing does, the sophistication and the benefits.

When the MAF is unattainable, it's pretty clear to the team. Hits moral. And risks creating a negative expectation in the team.

At my last company the CRO and I presented together at our Board meetings. We have one Rev Team dashboard we started our section with, then we each had a few specific slides to sales and marketing.

We also jointly ran/co-hosted our annual Revenue Team Summit and also do that for monthly

pipeline and quarterly Rev Team meetings.

If YOU bring the problem to the table, it diffuses a lot .

I usually tell folks what’s wrong with a fix plan but if your CRO is not willing to align, I’ve found some of them use that against you and lean in

Pragmatism wins every time with a board.

Worked at a start-up where one of the leaders as referred to as the "angel of death" because he always saw the negative.?It was actually very helpful.

Good convo. Lesson to my younger self:?get tighter alignment with board early and often (the members that matter esp.)... just like sales alignment, ceo alignment, we need tight board alignment. Understanding the various perspectives, power dynamics, investment thesis and horizons, what's failure-success-smash is for them (usually varies significantly across investors), biggest concerns, their “things”. Also, how we can add broader value TO board members.

One Team, One Goal -> Revenue (New and NRR)

Honesty up front with the board as a joint rev team really helps. They don't like to think you are trying to hide the pea. They are all really smart.

I love failing fast/learning opportunities.?And sharing them vs hiding is a great suggestion (as long as you don’t repeat the mistakes ;-)

The first thing I did when I came in was ask a lot of questions about ICP, competitive differentiation, messaging and I got different answers from pretty much everyone on the leadership team. I was able to start a conversation and facilitate pos’g and messaging work that included everyone's input and out of it, created a 20-page documented pos’g and messaging doc that is now our SSOT. It gave me the space and respect to listen to marketing.

I just read Loved by Martina Lauchengco. THE BEST book about the role of PMM in the org

If your CEO comes from product, justifying product marketing is slightly easier, since “sure. the product is great. With product marketing, we can make it look great to everyone and help sales sell it"

Product marketing shapes and speeds the funnel, it doesn't fill it.

Having weak product marketing is the worst thing. have done DG with bad PMM and it's just a disaster.

We have marketing run w/l on segments, products, etc to look at competitors and trends - sales does it on sellers to see performance

I like assigning PMM rev-focused KPIs: attach rate, win rate, deal size/ASP, etc. Improvements from baseline model for quantifiable contribution

SDRs today need to be more "helpful" to educate, inform, inspire (so, more marketing of a marketing intent) -- less trying to "convert" people to buy.

Reporting into sales the BDR/SDRs all see themselves as jr sales reps planning to get promo'd into a sales job within 6-8 mos.

Handling all leads (aside from key accounts) flowed to MDRs to nurture and develop. SDR was assigned to a salesperson and handled outreach to specific accounts and existing pipeline accounts

You need to make it something that really means something. For COVID at the fintech I was at, we consciously shifted to more messaging about managing your cash (via credit decisions, collections, etc.) which we could help with.

So it was about shifting emphasis vs. making up something new

For us, more seriously, “do more with less and prove the value” resonates in times like this, because nobody's growing their in-house creative teams in a recession.

I think that marketing budget & HC push back is also bigger in companies that think PLG means the product sells itself