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Foreign. You're listening to gtm live, a podcast by passetto. Hey everyone. Welcome back to GTM Live. Today we are covering stage three of the five stages of revenue transformation in this five part series. And this stage today is what we call the model collapse. AKA where most leaders reach their either their breaking point or really their turning point. And I want to kick this show off by asking you something to just see if it resonates with you. And if it does, I would say this is a good episode for you to tune into. So have you ever reached a point, maybe it's now maybe you feel like you're sort of getting there in your career as a revenue leader where you just became like so exhausted of defending your work and you genuinely felt like, man, I just gotta throw in the towel, like, enough is enough. And it's not just like a bad day, not just a tough quarter, but that moment where you sort of think to yourself, I just like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I can't keep fighting this battle. And if you're nodding right now, I wanna say you're not alone. You're actually in really good company, unfortunately. And, and more importantly, I think you're closer to transformation than maybe we even realize. And so here's what's different about this show today is that we're not just talking about anecdotes or even my personal anecdotes, although I do throw a few of them in there. But we're gonna walk through specific frameworks that explain why you're stuck and what the path forward actually looks like. And these are frameworks that I think you need to memorize because they're gonna become the language for transformation. If you've been following the series, you know we've already covered stage one, the panic response. This is where most leaders scramble to do more when pipeline slips. More experiments, more tactics, more tools. Because we've been conditioned to believe that doing more is always the answer. Then we covered stage two, the QBR fire drill. It's that soul crushing moment when leadership asks you a simple question and then you realize, I can't answer that. Not because you're not working hard enough, but because you just cannot get those answers in the data. And that data that you need simply doesn't exist in the format that you need it. Maybe it's there somewhere, but it's not in the format for what you need it for. You know, your investors and your board. And now we're at stage three. This is where things get really Real. This is where the frustration typically reaches a boiling point. This is where you stop, eventually stop blaming yourself, stop blaming your tactics, and you start just questioning the one thing that you haven't even maybe questioned yet, which is the foundation itself, the data model. The entire way that you have been measuring, reporting and making decisions all along. Stage three is when you realize the system is broken. And no amount of hard work is going to fix a broken system. And not everybody reaches this realization, unfortunately. There are a lot of CMOs and revenue leaders out there who have yet to come to this realization. In many ways, maybe, maybe they're getting lucky. Like maybe they don't need to question the system because the results have been there. But this all breaks down when the results stop coming in and you don't have a good way to understand why. I will say that this is a stage where most people either break through or they break down. And so I want to talk about what that looks like. So let's talk a little bit about what, you know, what things feel like when you're in stage three. Typically you're under a lot of scrutiny at this point, right? Like everything you're doing as a marketing leader, as a revenue leader starts to get questioned. Every investment is challenged, every campaign is met with. But what did that campaign generate? You're likely in back to back meetings, spending a lot of time defending your work versus actually doing more or really understanding what's working and what's not, justifying your budget, explaining why pipeline isn't where it needs to be. Sometimes that results in some finger pointing even though you know, marketing is contributing. Okay, it's one thing to, to feel like it and to know in your gut, but it's another thing to be able to prove it in dollars and cents in the way that leadership wants to see it. Simple, straightforward, clear cut, not all of that underbelly, you know, nuanced stuff, jargon that you're using internally with your team. And what's exhausting here is being seen as a cost center. When you can see and feel the impact of your programs, you can see accounts engaging, you can see the deals accelerating, you can see, you know, your top of funnel efforts working. But when it comes time to tie your activity to actual outcomes, the data is not there. And here's the worst part, is that your team likely feels it too, right? They're probably working their tails off, launching campaigns, operating with a high level of urgency, which is not a great mindset place to be in running programs, generating activity. And it looks like they're doing nothing because you cannot measure what really matters to your C suite and to your leadership. And then there's also the finger pointing, right? We see this a lot. Not always. We do see a lot of times that marketing and sales are aligned, but a lot of times what we do see is sales blames marketing, market marketing blames sales. Everybody's operating with a different story, a different set of numbers, a different version of what they think is the truth. When what you need is for everybody to operate like a relay race, passing the baton seamlessly from one stage to the next. But instead, you're operating like separate teams running separate races and wondering why you're not winning. And shout out to one of our really amazing clients for giving me the that analogy. I did not come up with that. But they have transformed their gtm. Org and this is the way they're operating now. And so that's really awesome to see. So if this sounds familiar, you are in stage three. And I want you to know something. I was there. I have lived this. I've lived this myself, and I have come out the other side. And this is also the stage where most leaders start to initiate a conversation with us at Pesetto because they have some level of awareness already on where they are, but are sort of stuck at, okay, now what do I do with it? And when they do come to us, I can literally feel the emotions that person is feeling, the exhaustion, the frustration, and almost like a level of desperation because they're carrying this huge weight of constantly defending themselves and their team and knowing deep down they're making an impact. And they're just so desperate to be able to prove it because they know so much is on the line, Their career is on the line, their sanity is on the line. And here's what I want you to know, is that this stage, as brutal as it is, is actually the most important stage in your transformation journey. Because this is where you stop accepting the status quo, and this is where you stop believing that working harder is the answer. This is where you start fundamentally asking a different question. Not what tactic do I need to try next? Or, you know, what is the next big strategy that I need to deploy in my organization? Not how do I get better data out of my current system. Maybe that's partially a question, but you're asking what exactly needs to change in the way I collect my data and report on my team performance to get me where I need to go and how do I go build that? Right? So there's a certain level of Acceptance at this point that the way you have been operating is not going to get you where you need to go. And so I want to talk a little bit about my breaking point. Whether it's a breaking point or sort of a turning point, but about the moment when I hit stage three. I can remember it so vividly. We had just launched at this point a new ABM motion. And it was targeted at very specific regions across the US and, and so we had an account list. We had just launched a very like, solid integrated program that leveraged paid media, virtual events, content, email, dedicated BDR outreach. Like we had everything covered. And it was solid, like it was a solid campaign. And within days of launching it, maybe not even I got a call or, you know, a slack message from my CEO who I reported into. How many leads did that campaign generate? Where are we at with my leads? It's just like so quintessential scenario of what happens at this point, right? It's like putting a dollar in a slot machine, pulling the lever and assuming that you're going to get a return almost immediately. And this was just so frustrating to me because I was just tired of sort of like dancing around the answer and coming up with excuses around what? Why we don't have pipeline immediately generated from that campaign. Because as any marketer knows, moving people from awareness to truly like in market or engaged, which is typically like the 2 to 3% of people that you're targeting, that takes time. We can't just snap our fingers and generate qualified pipeline immediately. Right? These people typically go through a journey. But the biggest problem in terms of GTM is that we can't track that. Right? We can track our TAM or, you know, like our target accounts and we can track potentially outcomes out the other side. Did a deal get created or, you know, did one of those leads in the account become an mql? But we can't measure or quantify that big ginormous gray area with actual numbers, at least not the way our systems were set up. So I could not, at the time, I could not measure any of those things, all of those things that I needed to measure, right? How many activities were being deployed in the market? How many of our accounts, target accounts, were actually being penetrated? How many accounts were still sitting in that attempting stage versus oh, we've connected with them, oh, we've got a meeting booked. What signals did those accounts have with marketing along the way? What content did they engage in? What events did they attend or register for? What was the actual trigger that maybe led to A conversation happening. All of that that I just said was that journey between account we're targeting and the outcome. And for some companies, you know, that could be a 100 day process, it could be a 300 day process, it could be a 75 day process, doesn't matter. It's different for every company. The length of time that you, you spend engaging an account, prospecting to an account, all of these things that must be true before an opportunity is ever created. And for me at the time, and for most companies, all of that was invisible. I knew we were doing the outreach, I knew our ads were being served to these accounts, but I could not track all of those interactions along the way and eventually could not track the perfect sequence or patterns of things that happened that either led to an opportunity or did not. And so unless that account became an opportunity that same week, it looked like we were doing absolutely nothing. And maybe we were doing nothing right, But I had in terms of results, but we had no way to actually measure at the time what was effective so that we could optimize it or scale it, and what was ineffective, right? Maybe that ad campaign that we were running was doing nothing right. And so I did what everybody does at this stage. I remember just like racking my brain trying to pull it all together into this ginormous, messy, duct tape together report. That man. Probably took me days trying to track all of these things that I mentioned. But it was manual and it was exhausting. And to be honest, it was never quite right or delivered in a way that could clearly tell the story to our leadership. Required a lot of explanation, which is never good. I remember actually at this time I was on a flight from Ontario, where I live, to Southern California for a President's club trip with my husband. And I spent that whole trip trying to get this right, answering questions. I mean, that's on me, obviously, for not establishing those boundaries. But you can just tell the stress that this left me in because I knew I needed to solve it, so much of that depended on it. And so at some point, I did reach my breaking point or my turning point. I was personally ready to rip my hair out with my current reporting and just how much stress it was putting on me and my team. I was tired of getting fingers pointed at marketing when I knew I had the data to tell the story. I just needed a simpler way to go and get it. And I was also tired of marketing being seen as a cost center when I could see and feel the impact, not just, you know, at the top of the Funnel, but mostly with deal acceleration too, which I think was heavily, heavily overlooked for our organization, but also is heavily overlooked for a lot of people, enterprise organizations, especially true in low volume, higher ACV businesses where deals are multi threaded, things like that, where marketing plays a significant influence on pipeline velocity. I was so tired too of the way our team was operating at the time. There's a lot of folks being pitted against each other, everyone with a different story or a different set of data. When I knew at the time in order to win we have to operate like this relay race, not as separate teams. And honestly, I genuinely considered leaving my job because I was just so tired of being under constant scrutiny and constantly having to defend everything I was doing. And I wasn't able at the end of the day to tie all of our activities to outcomes. And then something shifted for me. So at that time, instead of quitting, I got obsessed. Not with tactics, not with campaigns, not with what are other companies doing. I got obsessed with the data model itself and really at a very intimate level, understanding why something needed to change because the current model wasn't working for us. So I started asking why is the current model broken and what does a new model need to look like? And so I started really learning from people like Chris Walker and Refine Labs and others who were talking about a fundamentally different way to think about marketing measurement. Right? That was an attribution. It wasn't first touch, last touch nonsense, but actual, like what was the actual high impact journey and leveraging things like, you know, signals or hero pipeline and all these other terms that we see thrown around and really understanding revenue influence and not just lead gen, Right? Because at the time our organization was very much built around marketing goes to get the leads, sales is going to take those leads and close them. And so the more I learned, the more I realized this wasn't a me problem. Right? For so long I carried that, I carried the weight of maybe I am not a good leader, but I had realized, hey, this is not me, this isn't my team isn't executing well enough. This is a systems problem. The data model that we were using was built for an entirely different era. It was built for Legion and MQL volume and funnel stages that don't actually reflect how B2B buyers buy today. I've said that so many times now, and I'm sure many of you listening to this already have a level of recognition for that. But no amount of hard work was going to fix a broken model, like straight like, if anything it was actually going to probably further hinder my role in the company and my success. And so here's what I recognized then. At that point, I truly was part of that 5%, maybe 10% of marketing leaders that could actually see why that model doesn't work. And I started to consider that my advantage, my unique advantage to be there at that moment of realization. Because the way leadership understands performance isn't through all of the complicated marketing jargon and all of the underbelly of what we're doing. They understand it in dollars and cents. That's it. They understand it in pipeline and revenue and maybe things like how cost of acquisition, CAC, payback, some other terms like that, and KPIs like that. And if I could rebuild a data model that spoke their language, that showed marketing's contribution in terms that they actually cared about, everything would change. I just needed to get there. I needed to rebuild a foundation that would allow that. I needed to change not just what I was measuring, but how I was measuring it, how I was telling that story. And I needed a data model that could track account level engagement across the full journey. Right? I'm not just talking about the early stage in lead gen, showing marketing influence at every stage, not just opportunity creation, connecting activities to outcomes in a way that leadership could actually understand. Give my team visibility into what's working so we could optimize it in real time, not just like after the fact with lagging indicators. And here's what I realized. If I could go build that, then everything would change. Not just my reporting, not just my QBRs, but my actual credibility and my team's morale more than anything. And our actual ability to really drive revenue instead of just generating activity and sort of like hoping and praying that it was going to have sort of like a down funnel impact. And that was the moment for me that I moved out of stage three and onto stage four. Before I share what happened next, let's talk about why most folks get stuck here. And I want to tell you something really, really critical. If you are stuck in what feels like this stage right now, there is literally no way out. Okay? There's really two ways here other than to change jobs, change companies, or cause you're fighting inertia in some way or be the person that is going to champion changing the model full stop. Okay? Unless you get lucky, you will fail when or the business will fail. And I know that sounds dramatic, but it is the absolute truth. Something needs to change. And for unless you, like I said, unless you are one of like less than 1% who might get a stroke of luck. It's likely going to come to a point when it all breaks. And here's why. So I want to talk about the, the reason why most people get stuck here. So I have a visual framework for this, but I'm just going to paint you a picture. So picture a triangle. So you can literally draw this out right now if you want to. The triangle represents here why the broken GTM model is so deeply entrenched. Not only is it just an antiquated model, it is just so deeply entrenched in our culture, in our decision making, in leadership. And I want to explain why it continues to also perpetuate itself. So think of the left side of the triangle. The way the current GTM model is built is built to reward activity full stop. We are literally rewarded around the wrong business metrics right now because those are the metrics we have, right? But more calls does not equal more results. More MQLs and leads does not mean more pipeline. More campaigns does not mean more results. It's all smoke and mirrors. And here's the kicker. All of these things are expensive as hell and lead to CAC inflation and it's guesswork at best. So we're spending more, we're working harder, we're generating more activity and we can't prove any of it is actually moving the needle. But we keep doing it because that's what we're measured on, that's what we're rewarded for. Activities, not outcomes. And also here's the fact, here's the other fact is that we have control over activity, right? We can initiate a campaign today and execute and launch it tomorrow and we have something to show for it, right? But that's not outcome driven. So that's the left side of the triangle at the bottom of the triangle. Let's talk about the fallacy here that you need to overhaul everything, that changing the model is too risky, too complicated, that you'll be fighting bureaucracy at every turn. Yes, there is risk, yes, you might fight some bureaucracy, but it does not need to be complicated and it does not need to be an overhaul either. But this belief, the belief that transformation is too hard, too risky, too much keeps people stuck, right? They'd rather stay in a broken system and just keep battling, then faced face the perceived complexity of actually changing it. Okay? So another reason that keeps people stuck here and at the right side of the triangle is that here everybody is operating with a high level of urgency. And this is not just a condition of the model. This is Also a condition of a company culture. For many pieces or for many companies, people want changes now. And that's why our automatic default is activity, because we can control it fast. We can launch, like I said, we can launch a campaign tomorrow. We can send more emails today, we can make more calls this week. We can, you know, maybe not sleep tonight and do more work. So people are very quick to act with urgency and do something that they control, whether or not it's going to generate a positive outcome. And people are also very quick to hire and fire at scale. They are very quick to decide to buy an AI tool that promises to solve their problems. They're quick to jump on the next tactic like Geo. I'm seeing that everywhere now. The next experiment, the next shiny thing that promises to solve the problem without actually these are, these are like band aids on the, the real problem, right? They're medications. They're not actually speaking to the root cause. Right? And here's the other problem. Every GTM leader is also tackling like this level of urgency in their own way, in their own little silo. And marketing is over here trying to, you know, do something different. In marketing, sales is over there trying to, you know, make more dials or do whatever they're doing. Rev ops is trying to stitch it all together and nobody's actually fixing the system or doing this in like a systematic rhythm together, collaboratively. And here's why this is so broken, is that most companies measure GTM performance only once pipeline is created and then they try and isolate a single thing or function or you know, reason that that opportunity got created in the first place. Whether, you know, that's the first touch or wherever the, you know, the lead originated or it's the last touch. Whatever model is being used, it is one dimensional, okay? It's a one dimensional data field that does not tell you at all what to fix or why something is or not working. It will tell you pipeline generated from this thing is either up or down. It's not enough, it's too little. It's working, it's not. But everything in between. Target account identified or lead identified or prospect identified and then opportunity is qualified or not is this ginormous black box. We cannot understand the dynamics, we cannot see the journey that it took to becoming qualified or the level of effort and cost that it took us to generate that or who's disqualifying out and why. We just see, did a lead become an op? Yes or no, that's it. And it pits teams against each other. Was it Marketing giving us shitty leads, Was it sales not doing their job? We know it's rarely though just one or the other, right? In a relay race or in a systematic collaborative GTM organization. It's a combination of both marketing and sales, full stop. And we need to measure both of those things separately, but in parallel, right? To understand systematically what are both functions doing to generate pipeline together cohesively. And the current model gives you a one dimensional story and it ignores so many dynamics of pipeline creation that we need to measure to understand marketing influence across the entire journey in conjunction with sales and understand where our weak areas are in the journey so that we can go actually fix them. All three of these things, activity based rewards, perceived risk of change and the culture of urgency combined with this like one dimensional black box measurement approach is the reason that GTM misalignment is being perpetuated and the reason that marketers are still on the MQL hamster wheel. And here's the thing, is that being stuck here is fucking hard. But you're not, you're not stuck personally. You are stuck in a broken system like I have said. And frankly, one of the biggest things that have made these conditions normal for a lot of organization and is extractive capital. You'll hear hear Chris Walker talking about that a lot because wealth is being gained by exploiting employees rather than creating actual value. Companies are squeezing more productivity out of fewer people, demanding more results with less resources and wondering why everybody's burned out and nothing's working. This is not a you problem, this is a systems problem. And when you reach this stage, you have a decision to make around what you are going to do. Are you going to stay stuck? Are you going to find another job? Or are you going to be part of that change? Many leaders at this stage self select out of the transformation at this point out of fear or risk. I have seen it so many times and I'm happy to share an anecdote on that in a second. And that's fine. I'm not here to judge anyone for that decision. That is your decision, that is your journey. But I'm going to keep you, walking you through the transformation journey and what that looks like in an effort to help you at literally the culminating moment where you either self select out or you move through the stage and the subsequent ones. Because if you're still with me, if you're ready to question the foundation and rebuild it, then stage four is where we're going next. But first let me show you what's on the other side of it, because it's not just theory. It's real and it's working for the highest performing teams right now. That is why I exist. That is why Pesetto exists. We have seen it. We have seen the results. We have done it dozens of times now. But for a little anecdote of people getting stuck at this, we had an audit. One of the most memorable customers of 2025 that we worked with, our champion customer was a CMO. We worked with Revops, we worked with marketing ops, Demand Gen, a number of folks within that organization. It was a pretty big company, I think a $300 million ARR company. And when we did our Sprint, we were very quick to learn that basically their ROI on pipeline against marketing spend was wildly out of range. They were paying an insane amount per one, basically a unit back in pipeline. And we could also see that their highest spend areas were things like third party lead gen, a lot of like, booth sponsorships, things like that, which we could see that clearly those things were not showing up in pipeline and revenue when we track it back, hey, you're spending a lot of money on this stuff, which might be generating new names, but none of those names are actually showing up later in your journey. And so the biggest thing that recommendation that we had said was your, the pressure that this is putting on the financial performance of the company is unacceptable at this point. You're spending a lot of money on things that don't do anything. And we had immediately said, just shave 10% off your program budget, which amounted to, I think like 800 to, you know, a million per year. Just stop spending it on those low ROI programs. Third party lead gen, cut back some of your event spend and not even reallocate it. Right. We had also made recommendations for some reallocations, but we had also said, just shave off some spend over the entire marketing budget. It was 4% a year, so not a lot. Okay, but. And probably not even enough to really make a difference. But we had said, listen, this is irresponsible to keep spending this money. And at that point the CMO said to us, I'm not doing that. Like, that is not a decision I am willing to entertain. I have fought so hard to get this budget. I'm not doing that, so tell me where to spend the money. Okay? And so that unfortunately, is a reality for some leaders that don't understand this concept. Maybe they're not there yet, maybe they have not reached stage three yet. But I will say this person is no longer in that role. And I just learned that recently. And so to my point is that to be a responsible leader, you have to do something different. Riding this track is eventually going to reach an endpoint. And so let's shift now. What does high performance actually look like? Here's the contrast. The teams that are stuck in stage three, they are operating with self fulfilling metrics. Sales measures sales success. Marketing measures marketing success. Everyone is defending their own function, everyone's got their own stories. But the teams that are excelling, they've removed the teams and functions from the equation entirely. They're not asking, did marketing do their job. They're not asking did sales do their job. They are looking at first of all the customer and their full journey. It's about the customer now. They're looking at all of the different patterns of things that either result or don't result in pipeline. And they're doing more of the things and the work that have positive results and they are fixing the things in real time that that don't. And what they're not doing is finger pointing. They're saying that motion clearly does not work for our business. We should stop doing it or figure out what's wrong with it. Here's an example. Let's say you're considering launching a PLG motion or offering free product trials as like a core offer for your inbounds. It might sound like a good idea. If you are a product company, you incentivize your marketing team to drive free trial signups. Everyone's excited you think it's a great idea. But what if that motion is the thing that's costing you the most and generating the least? Okay, Every GTM has a unique set of GTM motions that either work or do not work for their business. Okay. Some work for some organizations, some don't. PLG might be an incredible path for one company in a complete waste or disaster for another. And the only way to know that is to measure it. Not, not with anecdotes, not with best practices from other companies, but with your data, your patterns, your results. And it's not just to say PLG contributed 20% to overall revenue this year. Okay, great. That might actually seem okay. On paper, I would think that we would want it higher. But how many free trials did you need to generate to get that right? If your conversion from free trial to pipeline generated is like 2%, that's really suboptimal. Okay, and then how much did you actually spend on conversion channels to get those in the first place? And so it's about looking sort of like back from revenue creation and understanding the path to see the way that we are doing that is really inefficient. We should go fix it because there might be another pattern that leads to revenue that is contributing a smaller amount. But maybe it's an untapped, you know, point of leverage for your team to go get more of those. And maybe it's a lot easier than spending a shitload of money on paid search to result in free trials that go nowhere and that win at like 2%. So the highest performing teams have stopped applying the typical marketing playbook and have started figuring out what is the most efficient and effective way to get revenue ready pipeline for our organization as a whole. And here's the key. Through both sales and marketing, not one or the other, not establishing arbitrary targets that are based on anecdotes, but actually measuring what's working across the entire journey and optimizing it according accordingly. They have shifted from reaction to practice. They're not scrambling every quarter. They have a system, they have a repeatable process, or at least they're working towards that. They have moved from fragmented metrics across different functions to one stitched together view. Everybody's looking at the same data, the same story, the same truth. And random acts of GTM are becoming a pipeline, are moving to more of a systematic pipeline factory. They know what inputs lead to outputs, they can predict that, they can scale that. This is what's possible when you actually rebuild the foundation or start looking at GTM using a new model. And you can't get there by staying in an old one. You can't get there by defending your function or measuring success in isolation. You have to be willing to step into the next stage and actually take the risk of what is involved in changing the system. But first, let's make sure you recognize if you're in stage three right now. So let me ask you a few questions or at least give you a few signs. One, you're exhausted by constantly defending every meeting feels like you're justifying your existing existence as a function. Every campaign is met well with what did that generate? And you're tired of being questioned. When you know you're driving impact, you just can't prove it the way leadership needs to see it. Number two, you can see the impact, but you can't measure it. So very similar. You can see the engagement, you can see deals accelerating, you can see the funnel working. But when it's time to actually tie that to outcomes, the data doesn't exist in the format that you Need. And so what do you do? Number three, you start duct taping reports together manually. You're pulling data from, you know, a bunch of different systems. You're trying to piece together a story somewhere. I don't know, maybe you're doing in a PowerPoint presentation or in a spreadsheet, hoping it tells a coherent story. It's exhausting. It's never quite right. Like I had said, it requires a lot of explanation, even over explanation, which I would not recommend. Your team might be stuck still in separate silos. Sales has their numbers, marketing has their. Their numbers. Revops got something different. None of it matches. Everybody's operating with a different version of the truth. And you know, you gotta operate like a relay race because the found and you can't get there because the foundation isn't there. And then you start to question the foundation itself. You're not asking anymore, what tactics should I try. Your focus is on what needs to change in my data and reporting to get me where I need to go. If you are nodding to any of that, you are likely here at stage three. And here's what you need to know. This is the most critical stage in the entire transformation journey, because this is where you stop accepting the broken system. This is where you stop believing that working harder is the answer. But. And this is where you start questioning the foundation. And this is where transformation begins, which I think for many is a beautiful thing, especially going into a new year, because a new year for many signals a new start. And so at stage three, you're asking two questions that are going to define everything that comes next. Question number one, what exactly needs to change in my data and in my reporting to get me where I need to go? And question two is, okay, how. How do I go build that? Who do I need to talk to? What do I need to do now to make this possible? Okay, but let me remind you of one thing, and I talked about this in another show. Transformation does not happen in your comfort zone or in the status quo. I just want to remind you of that if you look at the most successful revenue leaders that at least I've had the privilege of working with, they are the ones who are willing to do the unknown. It's uncomfortable. The ones who are consistently challenging the status quo, even when it was hard, even when people push back, and even when it felt risky, that was me. I memorized exactly why the current model was broken. And I was prepared to consistently educate my team and my leadership on the shift. Because I believed it. I. I knew it. It was now my DNA as a revenue leader and I refused to go back to the default. And the moment people decide that they're going to do something differently, it's typically when they're uncomfortable, right? It's when they're. They're not where they want to be right now. They haven't hit their targets or they have bigger ones. They don't know how they're going to hit them or they're exhausted. They've reached this point, the breaking point. They don't want to do the status quo anymore. Maybe they now have fully full recognition that that way is not a successful path forward. And in order to get to the crux of the matter, they need to be okay with the unknown of what comes next. Not to say that it's. It's bad. A lot of companies and leaders have had great successes out of doing the work. But what's different is that they are not afraid to be uncomfortable. They're not afraid to have hard conversations because they know that it's a requirement of getting them to the next chapter in their growth of the company and in their career. So what I want you to understand, stage three is not the end. It's the beginning. If you want it to be. This is the stage where you can stop blaming yourself. I'm giving you permission to do that. You can stop blaming your tactics and you can maybe even blaming your team guys and stop accepting that this is how it's going to be. Okay? This is the stage where you realize this system is broken. I am going to be the hero and I have the power to fix it. Not going to work harder. Maybe you have to in some ways, but you're not going to work harder by doing more. You're going to work harder by rebuilding or helping to rebuild the foundation. And when you make that decision, when you commit to building a new data model that actually gives you the answer you need, everything is going to change. You're not going to have that panic response anymore. Your QBRs are not going to feel like fire drills. They're going to be the start of strategic conversations. And your team stops feeling like they need to shout into the void. And people naturally start to see the impact of their work because it's easy to explain. And then your leadership stops questioning every investment and starts trusting your recommendations. And you, let's talk about you for a sec. You stop defending your existence and you start driving real revenue. That's what's waiting for you on the other side of this stage. So here's my challenge. For you right now. Stop duct taping, stop defending. Maybe you still gotta do that for a short period of time. And stop accepting the status quo. Ask yourself what needs to change? And write it down. Get specific. What questions do you need to be able to answer to your board that you can't today? What visibility do you need that you don't have? What would a data model that actually works for you look like? Write it down. Because once you can articulate what you need to change, you're halfway there and then you go ask, how can I build that? Who do you need to bring along, what resources you need? What's the first step? You don't have to have all of the answers right now, but you do need to make that commitment to asking the right ones. Because this is the stage where everything changes. This is where you stop being reactive and you start being strategic. And this is where you stop defending and start driving. And this is stage three. It's the most important stage in your entire transformation journey. And I hope that this episode at least empowers you or helps you on your path to the next stage. Okay, two things before you go. If you're at stage three and you want to get direction on where you go next, then if you don't know, I want to quickly tell you about Passetto's 14 day pipeline growth sprint. It is the perfect offer for CMOs and revenue leaders who want clarity into what's actually driving pipeline and revenue or not. Right now, it's just 14 days. We audit your current data model and tell you exactly the data gaps that are keeping you stuck and what you should go do to fix them. And we map out exactly what you need to measure to get visibility into your new revenue journey. And we also tell you what's working and what's not. We have this magic ability to take all of your messy data, stitch it together, and give you answers that most of our customers tell them we would never be able to do this on our own, at least not without months of work. So it's very focused. It's designed to get you unstuck fast and give you the confidence to move forward. And so here's what I can tell you about this. 100% of customers that do this come out of that Sprint with a completely new level of clarity and the baseline to build a business case for any work required to support your team for better measurement. Okay, that's something that's interesting to you. I'm going to drop the link to book a call below in the show notes and to wrap it all up, next time, we're going to dive into stage four, where you actually start building the new foundation, where you figure out what the new data model needs to be and how to get buy in to make it happen. But for now, I want you to sit with this. You're not stuck because you're not working hard enough. You are stuck because the system is broken. The moment you realize that, everything changes. Thanks for listening. See you guys on the next show. Sam.