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Foreign. You're listening to gtm live, a podcast by passetto. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the GTM Live podcast. This is part two of a five part series we just started. If you haven't listened to part one, definitely go back and take a listen to that. I think it's really important to listen to these episodes in the right sequence. But in this series, I'm walking you through the five stages every revenue leader goes through on their path from shifting from the status quo to an elite executive in today's GTM environment. Now, these aren't just stages that shaped my own journey, but they're also the predictable path that I'm seeing many other executives in the industry take. And I feel that with some education around these stages, we can actually expedite the process and also just help leaders navigate this path better. The truth is that the old model of measuring and operating GTM is no longer effective, nor is it responsible in the environment that we're in today. And so another thing that I'm just going to tease up front is that I'm also going to share my personal journey through this stage, specifically how I had to develop the confidence, the, the voice and the self trust to challenge the status quo. And I'm also gonna talk about Chris Walker's influence in helping me shape those skills because they were critical to breaking through some of these things. Before we dive in though, I just wanna say how appreciative I am to all of you listening. I really, really love and it just inspires me so much when you folks reach out and mention that this content is helpful or, you know, beneficial to helping you navigate some of these challenges that you're facing. That's why I'm here. That's my mission with Passetto, is not just to challenge the status quo, but to bring more folks on board with the new way. That's something I'm just really passionate about and so I'm very, very appreciative of that. So stage one was the panic response. That's that moment when pipeline drops and you're scrambling to launch a bunch of tactics even though they're not rooted in data. Today we're going to talk about stage two, facing the QBR fire drill. What happens after you've done all that work and you're struggling to tie any of it to impact? Stages three through five, we're going to tackle that in upcoming episodes. So if you're in stage two, you might recognize these phrases. One, I can't clearly understand what impact my marketing activities have on pipeline and revenue, or I don't know what new investments to make or what to stop doing, or I'm tired of wrestling my team to pull the data I need. And maybe finance is pressuring me for data that demonstrates ROI of the things that we're doing, or maybe it's the most damning one. I spend hours, if not multiple days trying to cobble together data for my board meetings. If any of that sounds familiar, I'm going to say one thing. Firstly, you are not alone. But what moves you from stage one into stage two? Because by this point you've obviously done a lot of work, you've panicked, you've come up with a plan, you've launched a bunch of new tactics. But now you're likely feeling the frustration of doing a lot of work and struggling to tie that to impact. Typically, leadership might be saying, okay, you spent this money, now can you show me what that generated for us in terms of pipeline and revenue? And that's where stage two really begins. It's all about showing impact and realizing that it is not an easy feat to be able to do that. Let me paint a picture of what a typical QBR fire drill week might look like in practice. It involves a lot of chasing your team. If you've got, you know, a 10 to 15 person team, for example, everybody is responsible for some component of feeding you the data that you need. Constant reminding, chasing, educating them on what you might need. But here's the thing, is that most of these teams have a lot of non revenue oriented people who serve you data that isn't tied to revenue impact. That was definitely my experience. And so as a VP or as a CMO or whatever role you're in, you have to figure that out yourself, which means you're shouldering a ton of stress on behalf of your team on top of everything else you're already doing. And then this is usually where like, you know, two weeks before a qbr, the teams just stop doing all of their work and focus on coming up with the data. Maybe they don't even believe in that data or they can't even replicate it. So what often happens is that you might find your team feeding you data and you're thinking, is this true? Where did that number come from? I don't really understand this, but I guess I gotta run with it. And it typically results in like a very low degree of confidence in terms of the data that you're actually getting. The consequences though of staying stuck here are absolutely serious and detrimental. First, well, there's the obvious one of burnout, right? Like you're doing a lot of work, you can't prove the impact. It's stressful, it's anxiety inducing. But besides that, your credibility at this point is also at risk because people are starting to poke holes in the investments that you've made, right? And naturally, it's like you want to get on the defense, right, and defend what you've been working on. And the problem is that marketing is perpetually seen as a cost center. So when you're giving leadership data that doesn't show the true story, you're contributing to that narrative. Like we've set that narrative up for ourselves. And we are at such a disadvantage because inherently, like marketing, teams don't have great data to justify or to tell that story. And so your budget gets questioned, your team gets questioned. You might even be asked to let people go. They're not delivering. You can't prove the results of what they're doing. We got to kill that function. Events is often one of those targets. Content, you know, your content team might be another one or your, you know, your creative team. But here's the business impact is that when you don't fix this problem, this can mean millions of in lost pipeline and revenue. That's especially true for companies where, you know, performance is declining, pipeline is going down, or, you know, where your conversion from MQL to opportunity is low, where win rates are low, where growth rate is decelerating. I have indeed seen many people lose their job over this. Usually they're smart people, but they haven't recognized yet that the data model is the, the crux of their problem. This is now where rubber meets the road, right? It's the recognition of the underlying problem to all of this. So when you're facing, you know, the QBR fire drill, because we call it that a lot, why can't you get the data that you need? That's the question that every CEO is going to ask. You have dozens of different tools potentially. You have HubSpot, maybe you have Pardot Marketo. You know, for your marketing automation, you might have a bunch of different ad platforms. You've got your web analytics, you've got your campaign responses, your events, your webinars. Those might live in multiple different tools, right? And it's not producing like a single unified story around what is happening. And so again, it's not very common that we would see that those tools are actually tied together in a uniform way. And this is sometimes why you see leaders, like taking it to a spreadsheet or figuring out something manual or maybe trying to run a pivot table like in a PowerPoint deck, which I would not recommend. But here's where it gets messy, right? Because marketing leader comes up with the reports in a spreadsheet. You know, the sales leader might come up with their own reporting that's in Salesforce Finance has their own version. And suddenly it's a debate about whose data is actually right. It's not formulaic. This is not repeatable. It's messy as fuck. It's confusing and it doesn't give you the answers that you actually need. This is the tipping point here because now as a leader, your credibility is at risk, right? Like this is not a comfortable feeling by any stretch of the imagination. It's a super shitty feeling. So this results and you know when we typically see like the multiple page board decks that skirt around the real story or you know, like having a QBR filled with metrics that your board doesn't understand or even like much less care about, you're giving them a runaround. It's an indirect story around your impact. You can't truly say this thing that we did this quarter drove this much pipeline, this program has resulted in this much revenue. It's very hard to boil up your activities into like simplified outcomes. And it's the thing that probably is keeping you up at night did for me, right? Because your personal credibility is on the line. Nobody wants to lose their job, Nobody wants to have their skills under question or their leadership. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. Like I had said. Here's the thing that might actually surprise you though. It sometimes sounds like a problem that only immature organizations would have. Right? The truth is that I see this same problem across all types of organizations. Even the ones that are like 500 million or more in ARR. In fact, sometimes some of the larger companies is where this problem gets so much worse. Why? You might have technical debt, more layers of management, which makes it actually harder to make changes in your systems or things like that. Legacy thinking the company is hardwired to an old data model, right? You might not have a strategic leader who knows what needs to be done or be changed. And I've even heard some CMOs from larger companies who don't even know what their pipeline trend is or what their win rate is. Think about that, right? And so sometimes the larger the company, the the more like these problems just are like, are compounded so much more. I actually remember one CRO I worked with, we hired him as a CRO, but like in many situations, he was kind of like a glorified salesperson. Never looked at the salesforce data. And speaking of qbrs fire drills, two days before a board meeting, I remember he was scrambling and he's asking like his team, oh, send me this report, send me that report. He had actually no clue how much pipeline was actually generated that quarter. He didn't know how under target the team was. So in my opinion, that's table stakes, right? Like, every CRO should know that. It should be the first thing that they look at, you know, every morning. And I was thinking, how does the CRO not know this? And I'm telling this story because my client stories are very much the same, right? Like, I've analyzed a lot of board decks over the last two years at Passetto or like QBR reports and things like that. And the thing I always see or think to myself is like, wow, this is what you're putting in front of the board. And I say that from even the most seasoned skills, reputable executives and CMOs. I'm shocked when I see what they're presenting. And I'm shocked not that they get away with it, but that it's just considered acceptable, that it's very little data and a lot of anecdotes around strategy and what's being done. So the questions that you're trying to answer but usually can't at this stage is which campaigns actually resulted in deals being created? Why did pipeline drop in Q2? Why did our win rate drop? What's the plan to fix that? What's our real CAC by each segment? These are core questions that the old or the archaic legacy data model just cannot give you good answers to. The wrong solution, though I would say at this stage is to go buy another tool that supposedly unifies everything or hiring ops people to clean up the mess. I have been there and usually what I see here is that a lot of organizations might think they need to hire an OPS person at this stage, like sales ops, rev ops, whatever. And a lot of times those OPS people are not necessarily strategic. So they come in, right? They inherit a mess and what they're stuck doing is just like perpetually cleaning up the data, not fixing the root issue, right? And so most OPS people too haven't used a modern framework. So they might go set up the four funnel model reporting, which is perpetuating the problem. And in my opinion, and I say this from experience, is that this person likely isn't seeing like the fundamental problem, or maybe they understand it, but they've never actually gone through the process of fixing it. So it's like they recognize it needs to be fixed, but they don't have a proven methodology or framework for how and when they are going to do it quickly. And so usually it's not a fast track. It's kind of like a slow burn. The root cause is that typically you don't have the right data architecture to measure impact. Right. It all comes down at this point. This stage is illuminating the real problem to this symptom of the QBR fire drill, which is the data architecture architecture. Your marketing data is likely not uniformly connected to pipeline and revenue reporting. Here's one example. Okay, I'm going to leave you with sort of like a quick takeaway because I see this a lot and I think this is a really easy fix for a lot of companies. But it's that contacts aren't tied to deals or opportunities in CRM, right? So the biggest problem we often see is like, I can't understand what I'm doing in marketing and this the impact on pipeline and revenue. So when we think about marketing, contacts engage with marketing, leads engage with marketing people is what I'm saying. But that is what interacts with your programs, campaigns, website and content. People do, right? Not accounts. So yes, we can measure people on accounts and look at sort of like how we're nurturing accounts, but if you can't connect those people at those accounts to opportunities, boom, you're cutting yourself off at the knees. You cannot tie your impact at the person level to a revenue outcome. That's one of the biggest challenges. This can be done manually, but it can also be automated. So if you're using, you know, things like GONG or outreach and you know you're syncing those activities back to your CRM, there are definitely workflow automations that can automatically create contact records for people logged in those activities who don't have a contact record, or maybe they have a contact record, but they're not on the opportunity. But the biggest thing I would say is that the people, the people that you market to are part of that essential thread that stitches the whole story together from everything that they're doing as you're engaging them and creating awareness through to outcome, pipeline and revenue. And so I say that anecdote just because it seems so simple, but it is something I see a lot. Sort of like the biggest blocker that is preventing organizations from really measuring the impact that they're having in marketing and understanding the journey that a prospect takes. And so as soon as you Fix that. The immediate impact is that you have like a much greater aperture or larger data sample to look at and that you're actually able to tie your GTM efforts to more people, not just one or none. Right? Because the reality is that today, you know, like most organizations do have multi threaded deals that involve more people, more than one person, and likely all of those people are interacting with the things that you're doing in marketing or maybe they're not, but we need to know that and measure it. And that's like a really easy win for everybody listening. But I digress. So what's the key insight that moves you out of stage two and like further down this transformation? Typically it's realizing that you cannot go another QBR cycle doing it this way. The shift that needs to happen here is the acceptance that your current reporting is limiting you. It's limiting your aperture into understanding what's working and what's not. It's impacting your credibility to tell your story around impact. And it typically clicks for people mostly when they realize performance can be better, but they don't have a clean story. It also clicks when marketing tells a totally different story from sales. Right? And now you're like having GTM misalignment happening and also just realizing that looking backwards after a quarter is done, like lagging indicators does not make you a smart strategic leader. If you want to be forward looking, you need dashboards, you need to be living and breathing those metrics every day, not just once a quarter. That was an eye opener for me anyways, in my experience. And usually this manual work where every team is working independently and arriving at different answers, it's just simply not smart for a business. I'm sure that if you're listening to this, you probably already recognize that it's not smart for you as a leader. But most importantly, it's not productive for the business. Again, much like what we had seen in stage one, that episode that I recorded before this is that there is an uncomfortable action required to transcend this stage. Step one is admitting to your leadership, you know, your CRO CEO, whoever you report to, with simplicity. I don't have the data I need to be a smart, responsible leader and, and I cannot figure this out on my own. It's not my discipline. And here's why. The talk track here is absolutely essential because you need to clearly articulate why you can't easily get this data. I've been in that trap before. You know where I've had a CEO that says, why can't you get this data, everything's in CRM, you should be able to go get it. We've got a billion, just different tools, like why is it so complicated? The reality is that yes, some of it lives in CRM, but there are multiple factors potentially that are preventing you from pulling that data together into a unified, stitched together view. And so you need to be able to say, we don't have the data architecture to measure it properly and I need help to go build it. Being able to actually quantify this problem is critical. How many hours are you spending on this? What is the impact on you and your team's performance, on the overall organization's performance? And why can't you come up with the answers you need from what you have? Right. The path forward here starts with understanding the flaw with the current data model. You need to clearly articulate why that model is archaic. You need to be able to recite that inside and out, why the company is using that archaic data model and then why that's preventing you from getting the data you need. So I want to say that we have a great workshop on this. It's not publicly available. If you want it, email me at carolinapassetto.com, i'll link my email in the show notes, I'll send you the recording. Like I said, it's not on YouTube or anything like that, but it is a great workshop to help you understand this problem around the data model and why it's the problem. Because I think at this point you need to be able to basically memorize why that model is broken and be able to recite it basically like in your sleep with your eyes closed to anybody. Because you're probably going to be able to need to make that pitch over and over and over again, probably like a hundred times. So that's step one. But one of the best things that you can also do at this stage is also audit your current data foundation. So one thing that we do, we have a free one hour workshop where we'll sit down with you and your key stakeholders on your team. Where we will do exactly in one hour will take you through our revenue visibility rubric. It's an objective scorecard that tells you how mature your data architecture is and points out exactly what is preventing you from measuring what you need to measure and what that basically that data gap is. This is a great asset to help you build the business case for making this a priority. We've done this a billion times and it is always a great way to align leadership on look, we have A major blind spot right here. This is what we need to go fix to give us the visibility that we need to get the data that we need. And so people, when they do this workshop, they walk away with a quantifiable number to rate their problem. Basically, usually most companies score around 50 out of 100. And it's very eye opening that all, all of these little holes or little data gaps throughout your foundation of different tools and, you know, like in your CRM are contributing to your problem. And immediately when you can actually surface this and, you know, give this to your leadership, it creates momentum to actually want to understand how they can go fix it and why it's important. And so an objective score for some companies might not always reveal that, you know, you're doing things glaringly wrong, but a bunch of little things that might not be tracked basically leave them with a gaping hole of visibility into measuring what they need to measure. And sometimes on the other side of the coin, we might see one specific stage of the process is not tracked at all, which again, leaves a big gaping hole in the system and the ability to measure what you want to measure. So if that sounds interesting to you, I'm going to drop the link to book that in the show notes. It's one hour and just heads up. We definitely need multiple members of your team, specifically your ops team on this call. And so I would say this is definitely for folks who are serious about getting answers and, you know, moving forward in this process, and also for folks who are already familiar with the framework of full funnel visibility and also just understand why it matters. But before you buck, here's some homework. Solicit your internal team, see if there's appetite in assessing this problem. Sometimes what I see here is that like Revops or Sales Ops usually feels very protective of their systems. And so be prepared for that. They might think I got this, Usually they don't. Or they might already acknowledge that there's a problem, but they've got a plan to fix it. And so marketing Ops, sales ops, revops, those are folks that definitely need to be a part of that conversation because they own so much internal knowledge on this type of thing. And then again, leadership, whoever owns revenue and pipeline creation. And so I've seen this be an incredibly powerful tool for helping leaders break out of this stage two and start initiating and tracking change inside their own organizations. All right, so I promised you a story. I want to get real with you for a minute because this stage here, so there's two things at play, right? We're thinking about just general revenue leadership at this stage. But this stage also really forced me to confront some really hard truths about myself as a person. And the biggest one was owning my role of being responsible versus seeking validation for my work. I think a lot of leaders are hardwired to go into a QBR and want to show off the great work that they're doing and get validation and praise for that. Okay. So I, at this point, had to hold and maintain a concrete opinion that how we were doing things was just not right. And that meant ruffling feathers. It meant disrupting the status quo. Okay. So that's not a comfortable thing to have to navigate. There's a lot of unknowns with that. But here's what I learned, is that hindsight's always 20 20. Right. I could have gone through this process faster and come out the other side much sooner if I recognized that earlier. So I felt myself at this time, like, when I reflect back, like, avoiding hard conversations or there was conversations where I would get pushback from colleagues who really anchored to the status quo from, like, years of experience doing it that way. Like, we're talking about, like, sales leaders who have been doing it this way for, like, 20 years, right? And sometimes what I felt myself doing is giving them too much leeway. Even though I knew that this was so stupid and wrong for the business. I remember listening to somebody tell me, like, we do it this way because. And thinking to myself, you're wrong. This is not smart. And feeling almost like a fear of just speaking up. Right? And so I found myself a lot struggling to find the confidence to challenge it, even though, like, I know in hindsight, oh, I should have, but would have been better for everybody if I was just unafraid to tell it like it is. And so this is where like, the personal side of this comes into play, because these are skills I really had to hone. And to be honest, Chris Walker has been an instrumental part in this shift for me through his coaching. Really knowing that I do have the truth and the answers that I seek inside of me and leaning more into that trust and self confidence. And I've honed that muscle even more being a principal consultant now at Passetto. Right. My responsibility is to say to our customers who pay us, that is wrong, and that is not going to lead you to success. Right. It's not always easy to tell people that they're wrong or their strategy is wrong or anything like that, but it's important. It's important in my role now. And it's important in your role as a revenue leader to call it like it is. There's a lot of work to be done here. And so I would encourage anybody going through this process to try and strengthen that muscle, too. Right? There's the muscle of GTM knowledge, understanding data architecture, but then there is also the personal muscle of leaning into challenge. Right? It's not easy. It's uncomfortable. And that is going to require a different kind of strength. Because I think if you're listening to this, the truth is that you probably already know what needs to change. You probably already recognize that the current way might not be working for you or, you know, your organization. The question is, do you have the confidence to say it out loud and to do something about it? That's the real work of stage two, to be honest. It's not just about the data. It's not just about finding your voice. It's about really leaning into that and getting the courage and the strength to sort of, like, see yourself through to the next stage. So if any of this resonates with you, if you're in this stage right now, please know that you're not alone and that there is a way forward. And that data architecture audit I mentioned, that's your first step. Get that objective score, build your case, and start strengthening that muscle of confidence and conviction. And the reality, too, is that once you actually have data, that's where you can really start to strengthen that muscle because you actually have something to anchor to. And on the other side of this, you get to become the kind of leader who doesn't just react to pipeline drops. You predict them, you prevent them, and you scale with confidence. And that's what we're building towards. All right, thanks, y'. All. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you, and thanks for listening to the show, and I will see you on the next one. One.