Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab podcast. I'm here today with Ross Graber from Forrester. Ross, hey.

Ross Graber: Hey. Thanks for having me.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Awesome to have you. My cohost, Philipp, is sick, unfortunately, today, but we'll go into really interesting episode because you actually did a study on alignment, and alignment is a topic that comes up a lot in RevOps. Obviously, RevOps works with all the different key stakeholders throughout the go to market organization and then often including finance. And alignment is one of the biggest challenges that they are facing often throughout their day to day work. So I'm really interested to dive into your study. But maybe before we dive in, who are you, what do you do at Forrester, and yeah, maybe tell us a bit more about yourself.

Ross Graber: Awesome, happy to. So my name's Ross Graber, I'm a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, and I work within our revenue operations service. Now within that service, I focus my research primarily around performance measurement, but as you can imagine, being focused on RevOps, I've got to focus a significant portion of my research on the alignment that RevOps drives, because we see alignment as one of the primary purposes of RevOps within b to b go to market organizations.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Beautiful. That sounds awesome. And so you wrote an entire survey about alignment. Right? Like, maybe tell us a bit more about, you know, like, about the survey and the purpose about it.

Ross Graber: Absolutely. So one of the things that we consistently hear from clients is that alignment across functions is a pain point for their organizations. And we balance that with the fact that we know better aligned organizations perform better, they grow faster, they have happier customers. So one of the things that we wanted to do specifically with this C suite alignment study that we did, is we wanted to get perspective from C level leaders of marketing, of sales, of customer organizations, to see if we could suss out how they're feeling about the levels of alignment in their organization and get them to break down how they consider alignment in ways that are strategic, operational, and also interpersonal. So that's what we were aimed at getting back from these C level leaders. And the study itself got feedback from, it was about one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty C suite leaders across those functions.

Janis Zech: Awesome. I mean, excited to dive in. So maybe let my first question, in your experience, what are the benefits of alignment based on the survey and what were some of the findings?

Ross Graber: Alright. So in a very broad way, we know that better aligned organizations perform better. But when we asked these C level leaders how they viewed the benefits of being well aligned, one of the things that really stood out for me is they were very aware of the customer impacts of alignment. I was anticipating more internal impacts coming back. Like I would have expected the top items to come back as saying, oh, we grew faster, or we saw greater profitability, but that's actually not the case. The top things that we saw coming back were things like our customers receive more value and customer satisfaction has improved. So when you think about alignment within your organization, know that your customers are seeing it and feeling it. They're also seeing and feeling the lack of alignment. So if your go to market operations are working in ways that are bumpy, don't expect that not to be noticed by your customers, it will be.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think that's so paramount. Right? Like, typically, if your customers receive more value, they are more satisfied and have a better experience. Ultimately, should result in better growth and profitability.

Ross Graber: Yeah. So I think you hit this on the head. So this is a chain of events. If we're going to grow, our customers have to be feeling value. Our ability to have well constructed, well performing operations doesn't directly drive growth, it drives customer value, which drives growth. And I thought it was very insightful that most of the leaders in our study felt that way. They understood the distinction, the cause and the effect. Strong operations, happy customers, growing business.

Janis Zech: And it makes a ton of sense. I mean, we had Daphne Costa Lopez on the podcast. She is a director of customer success at HubSpot. And she talks a lot about, you know, like, how do you create value for customers, right, moving away from just a C stat or, you know, an NPS, but really measuring the impact of the software. And I think this was a really good episode. So just for anyone listening, go check it out. Because I think creating value for your customers will make sure that they retain, they expand, they renew. Right? So like it's essentially directly related to your top line numbers.

Ross Graber: Absolutely. And there's positive and negatives on the operations side. So I think a lot of times we focus on it from the negative side, which isn't a bad thing, but if our processes internally become bumpy, that's where we start to sap or depreciate the value that our customers get from us. So for example, if your customers start to see that your processes are intrusive, so for example, if you're always trying to sell them something because you have a lead routing scheme that is saying, hey, they expressed interest, go and call and try and push the next product. They feel that. Your operations need to work in such a way that customers feel like you're working on their behalf, as opposed to just creating more and more friction points in the ways that they work with you.

Janis Zech: Makes a lot of sense. My second question, what were the top challenges, you know, that are really preventing organizations from reaching kind of their desired level of alignment?

Ross Graber: Yeah. There were two categories that really came out for me. There were strategic obstacles, and then there were what I'm going to refer to as cultural obstacles. And it was a little bit odd because we are getting this perspective coming down from C suite leaders who in theory have a whole lot of influence over both of them. However, the number one single thing that caused or forced misalignment was corporate strategy. Either corporate strategy not being well formed, or constantly changing. And it was very difficult, and they understood that it was difficult for their teams to work and build process and build execution around strategies that are constantly shifting or shifting too fast. So that was one whole bucket of obstacle. But then I also heard cultural obstacles like, our leadership doesn't prioritize it, or we don't have great conflict resolution, or our functional leaders are too concerned with their own patch, their own area to go and make sure that they're working well with others. And it was like, all right, so we know it's important, but sometimes, and this is what I read into the data, sometimes when push comes to shove, we decide it's more important for me to get my job done or to check this next box than it is to make sure that we're building an organization and a system that is just purely focused on doing what is right for our customers and our internal stakeholders, and really driving that balance.

Janis Zech: Yeah. It's so interesting. I mean, I think the conflict between, for example, a CMO and a CRO or a CRO and a CPO, right, I think are very common. Right? Like, sales blames product, marketing blames sales. And I mean, I think we hosted a bunch of recordings on annual planning and basically how hard it is to get to an annual plan, especially at a scale company. And then the other challenge that then comes after you have the annual plan, how do you operationalize your annual plan? Do you feel like the planning cycles are just too long that people are then undermined and just go out and there's the plan, but then everybody goes out and just does basically their functional things or they are misaligned in terms of the strategies there. What's your thoughts on that?

Ross Graber: Yeah, it is. One of my colleagues often quotes the boxer Mike Tyson when he talks about annual planning, because his expression is everybody's got a solid plan until they get punched in the face. And it's one of these things where we know what we intend to do, and if we don't have really adaptive planning structures, what happens once we're hit by changes in the market or a competitor or something that was unanticipated, we're not really sure what to do. And it ties back to what I sometimes see as competing incentives, and those incentives can be financial, but they can also be social or emotional in terms of, hey, wait a second, if I cede this power or authority to sales or to finance or to customer, am I going to have enough resource available to me or is my status going to have changed? So you start to see these conflicts emerge. Now, bringing it back to the study, one of the really interesting things that I didn't expect again, was when we asked marketing and sales leaders about their level of alignment with one another, they felt pretty good about it. They respected each other. They felt like they had strong working relationships. They valued each other's contribution and we're like, that's wonderful. They feel so great about this, but wait a second. We've all worked in environments where somehow that starts to splinter when it gets down to their teams. And I think sometimes what we start to see is that the reality of the way the work gets done starts to create conflict, and that conflict may be things like we have a different understanding of what segments are important to us, or we have a different understanding of how much resource it takes to do certain jobs. And it starts to, we start to see a burst at the seams, and for organizations that have really good conflict resolving muscles, like they're able to go and investigate the data that says here's what's actually happening and have productive review cycles and conversations. They do a better job working through it than other organizations where it almost becomes Lord of the Flies. Everybody figures it out and whoever's got more power wins and that can create a lot of friction.

Janis Zech: Yeah. No. I think I mean, I think everybody knows the situation where, like, kind of sales and marketing on the operational level is misaligned. And do you think incentives have something to do with that as well?

Ross Graber: I think it does. And I think often one of the things that I've researched extensively is how marketing goals get set. And what I'll typically see is that you'll have marketing organizations who have objectives which are geared toward finding new people. Just find new people for sales to go and work with. And then you have sellers who, and this is an age old story, are saying, well, wait a second, you might be hitting your volume targets, but the stuff you're giving me is wasting my time. This isn't useful demand that I'm getting here. So marketing's chasing one type of incentive, which might be based around a concept that we refer to as sourcing. So finding new people to sell to, that's what they're credited for. Where sales, sales doesn't get any credit for sourcing. Sourcing doesn't matter, it doesn't show up on your bookings report. So you start to have these different things that they care about. And instead of shifting, the right thing to do would be to reassess those incentives and say, what do we really want this relationship between marketing, sales, and our buyer to look like? How do we want marketing and sales to work together and making sure that the objectives that we're giving them, whether or not there's a financial component, but most people I've ever worked with, they want to do a good job. You give them objectives, they want to hit it, they want to be recognized for doing what they're doing, but let's make sure these objectives that we've become accustomed to actually match what we want to happen, because otherwise we just insert this friction back into the process.

Janis Zech: No, I think it's great because I mean, I think it's actually really surprising to hear that the C suite, CMO, CSO, CRO saying they are actually really aligned, but then I think everyone in RevOps, everyone in go to market knows the operational teams are often being fairly misaligned. And I do think that the incentive piece is paramount here because to your point, right, you want to do a good job. So you hit your numbers, but the numbers are not aligned. The goals are not aligned. And hence, you end up in a situation where, yeah, it's great if the C level is often very much aligned in terms of comp based on revenue they need to hit. So they basically are aligned on the annual plan. And so they feel very aligned, but then the operational teams are misaligned because of different incentive systems. And I think that's obviously a big lever for RevOps to dive into. We had Ryan on the show last week from Equalpath actually talking about compensation and how you can use compensation as a strategic lever to improve the general go to market system. And I think this speaks rightly to it. Now we're closing the loop here with alignment. So I think these things are really, really important because when you go back to the initial finding you had in the survey, you know, okay, it creates better customer value, better customer experience. Right? Like, obviously, these things really matter.

Ross Graber: They do. And you made such an important point about how at the C level, everybody knows the business' objectives. They know how much revenue needs to be created, and they know how much profitability is necessary to keep the business running. It's that translation to those next couple of levels of the organization to say, okay, let's start breaking that down into who's doing what part of this and what looks good. Because sales and marketing, I think, have a little bit of a difference in how they work. You can give a field rep a quota and there's a revenue target that they have. But if you've taken the marketing job and you've broken it down between what your field team is doing and what your brand team is doing and what your portfolio team is doing, you have to be really thoughtful about how you start to break down their objectives. If you just say to each of them, give me this much money, they start doing very different jobs than the business probably needs them to do. So sometimes when I'm working with clients, you'll hear it's like, okay, the alignment with sales and marketing overall, that's heading or trending in the right direction, but some of the intra functional, like how do we get these different arms of a somewhat complex organization all pulling in the same direction, that can be really tough too.

Janis Zech: Yeah. No. I think we've all been there, done that, seen that, and it's painful, and it's painful from a revenue perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. Curious, you know, like, your findings about, you know, like, kind of the ripple effects of missing alignment. Right? Like, what happens if teams are misaligned? What have the folks in the survey said about that?

Ross Graber: And I think we have to break this into, like, the internal versus the external impacts. Earlier on, I was talking about your customers will see it. Your customers will be less happy. Your customers may choose to work with others. So I think we've covered that ground. But when we talk about the internal side of things, what that starts to create is, or what that continues to drive, is this cultural breakdown where your teams trust each other less, where your teams might be turning over faster than you can accept, to where just the work environment is not as rewarding because it feels like instead of our job being to pull in the same direction to do right by the company and the customer, we are battling, the internal teams are battling for turf and that can make for a really unpleasant work environment. And I would guess many of us have experienced that at different points in our career. And I don't know about you, but I've worked to very quickly get out of those situations if I could not change them.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I know for sure. I mean, I think it's those aspects where you should be one team, one goal, and at the same time, it doesn't feel like it. And it feels like it over time again and again that, right, like, you're fighting for resources. You're fighting for recognition. You're fighting with each other, and it's really, really painful. Right? And I think especially in RevOps, right, like, you then often, right, like, when you have a C suite here, C suite there, teams fighting with each other, not going into one direction, you're often then supposed to be neutral. You're supposed to be Swiss neutral, but then people start pulling you into certain directions. And so it basically has negative ripple effects on you as well because, right, like, how do you deal with that?

Ross Graber: So isn't that the opportunity for RevOps, though, is to figure out, and not that it's easy, I'm not wearing rose colored glasses here. But the opportunity is how do we figure out what it is that everybody needs to see to make them comfortable with a certain approach? And often that starts with coming to the table with truth and facts, like what does the data say? What do we know? What don't we know that is still knowable to try and build out that story which can help feed people who want the right outcomes and want to have strong working relationships with one another, but might not be seeing things the same way. I think that's a place where RevOps leaders can continue to lean in, and really embrace the part of being Switzerland in this. We want, we're sitting at the center of it. We want the right thing for our business and for our customers. Let us figure out how to see what's needed to go and make smart choices. Hey, I'm sorry, I want to circle back to one thing because I left out what I think is a really big negative implication of misalignment. When our objectives and our actions are misaligned, it also has a negative impact on resources. So if we start investing in things, so for example, let's say sales is putting all of its energy into one territory and marketing's putting all its energy into another territory and they're not the same territory, not only have we not gotten the amplification that we're looking for, we're probably not getting any of the traction we need in either of those territories. So you're going to see instead of like one plus one equals three, it's like one plus one equals a half. So that is the sort of thing that we wanna watch out for because misapplication of resources is a killer.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's such a good point. I mean, you know, I think of the revenue factory very much as a balancing act. You need marketing, outbound, partnerships to come together, to drive pipeline, to then have sales pick it up, hand it over to then expand. And all of that has basically capacity models laying behind it. And so if you basically run into different directions, the conclusion can be that economically none of those make sense. So you might sit there as an executive and look at the data and also as a RevOps leader and look at the data and you're like, oh, outbound doesn't work. But maybe you didn't do it in the right focused way. So yes, it might have created the results, but because of the AEs then taking over, being maybe not the right ones or in the right territories, you draw the wrong conclusion. So I think the revenue factory is a balancing act, and it's very, very important to be super aligned.

Ross Graber: I think that's an extremely important point you're making there. And the thing that I hate seeing, and I'll give us a negative because I know that many of the folks listening are gonna do the positive on the other side of this. I see a lot of organizations that will go and say, you know what, because we can't, and this wasn't part of the study, but just our research beyond that, where they'll say, you know what, we're gonna push marketing towards this segment and let them do their things, so they can stay out of the way of sales, and then sales, you know, they're gonna be independent, and they'll do their own cold calling, and really what we're doing is we're just taking all of our resources and spreading them way too thin, and putting ourselves in a place where we can't possibly be successful. So this isn't something where you, at least in complex b to b selling, can avoid it, you've got to lean into it and figure out how to make it work. And that means coming to some agreement, sometimes hard ones, about what we're gonna focus on doing and also what we're not gonna do.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, we basically, right, like, I run a company called Weflow. And I think what we consistently see is that folks know us for a year or two. They might listen to this podcast. And then they see us on LinkedIn. They see some ads of us. They might go to our website, they get retargeted. And then at some point they just book a demo. And it's a long journey of awareness, consideration, at some point, really in market and they're really interested in checking out the solution. And so I think in our modern world where a lot of things are a lot more complicated than they used to be, like if you don't have marketing and sales working together of basically creating those very long buyer journeys, you might fail. And you might have a conclusion that certain things don't work. Marketing doesn't work without maybe then people calling into the leads, but vice versa. Just calling cold without any signals or insights or brand recognition is equally hard. Right? So I think that's exactly the balancing act I think a lot about, and I think it's really, really important to think about.

Ross Graber: Yeah. I love the way that you put it back to the context of what your buyers are doing, because I think sometimes we lose that. And what I mean by we lose that is we think about buying as if it happens like when somebody first shows up on our website or first makes a call to us. And all of our research tells us that by the time buyers actually reveal themselves to you, they've put a lot of consideration into this. And the more each organization can do to understand what their buyers are going through and what they're likely to do, the better positioned you are to set up process for marketing and sales to participate in, that's going to help those buyers get through. Because that's really the secret to success here. I think so much of in recent years, and it's getting better, but so much of our processes have been geared toward trying to force our buyers or customers through a process that we think is gonna be efficient for us as sellers. And we know buyers don't like that. They're going, why don't they pick up the phone? Why don't they pick up the phone or answer our emails? Well, a lot of the times because they are not ready or aren't interested in getting what they're afraid is gonna be on the other side of that. Instead, like you say, when we think about what their process is, it starts to put us in a much better position to satisfy it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Here's a little tip for everybody listening. Go and download a white paper from your own website, from the company where you work, get that cold call, then book a demo, then get that second call, and then do the first discovery call. Just go through the entire journey. Try to go through it and see where things break and then go back to your executives and tell them, look, we should change this. It's just such a quick win and easy win. Ross, I think this was fantastic. I very much appreciate. Anything else you would add before we dash off to the weekend, at least for me?

Ross Graber: What I'd probably focus on here is the fact that we, as RevOps, are in a really great position to go and ensure that our people, our teams and our customers are aligned. We have unique perspective because we see processes closer to the ground with more detail than many people in the organization have the ability to see. And we can do it in ways that are fed by data, that are fed by insights, and we have the ability to roll that back up to others in ways that can be influential. And if we want to make real change in our organization, I think it starts with being able to use the truth, real data, to go and influence others to do what's right, because my experience is that most of the people we're working with want to do what's right. They just need a little bit of a nudge to see what that looks like and to get the facts to support it. So that's what I'd focus on.

Janis Zech: I love it. I love it. That's a great closing statement for everybody out there. You know, keep on operating. Wish you a great weekend. Thank you so much, Ross.

Ross Graber: Thank you.