Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Stacking Growth Live. I'm Kayleigh Edinson, joined as always by my lovely co-host Sydney. Hello, everyone.
We are so excited to have you guys here today. Thanks for joining us. Happy new year to everybody that's listening. Today, we're really excited to really go back to the basics.
It's super easy as a marketer and a revenue professional to really get lost in the shuffle in the new year. Reset is a nice time to really start off fresh by setting intentions and some resolutions for the year ahead, probably for yourself personally, but definitely professionally as well. So I feel like it's pretty affirming for work. I think that in my personal life, I always set a word of the year and feel like it's easy to overlook doing that for work as well, but work is such a big part of our lives that it's a nice time to reset at the beginning of the year.
So today we're going to chat through this couple of actionable things that we think that you can do to help refocus and reset some of your priorities for the year ahead. Let's get into it. Oh, Sydney, I'll tee this one up for you because I think this has your name on it, not literally, but practically thinking through a way to centralize a structure for all of the priorities that revenue teams and revenue leaders have to shuffle through on a daily basis. What are your thoughts or reactions to that?
I love a good goal setting framework. I'm a big fan of that. It also allows a lot of people to come together and say, yes, to things, no to things, a line, which I think everybody's been doing in December and hopefully have near finished it or doing kickoffs or finalizing it in the beginning of January. So I personally like the OKR framework objectives and key results.
I used to actually work for an OKR company, software company. So I'm very well versed, but slightly biased, probably a little bit towards OKRs, but there's a little there's many goal setting frameworks out there. But really with objectives and key results, it's great to start. It's the strategy level.
Like, what is the company strategy for the next year? So typically, at the annual level and then you're going to break that into, OK, what are annual objectives that we want to we want to complete and we want to achieve in order to meet the strategic vision of the company? And it's best, obviously, if you could do this from the whole company wide, but if for some reason you're limited, even like department or revenue team wide is better than nothing. So I would do that annually and then also break that down quarterly by function.
This also allows you just to keep focus on top things, top things that you, your team, your counterparts, other functions in the business have to achieve. Like no matter what, you have to achieve this. Objectives and key results or a lot of goal setting frameworks is not to do list. It's not like an asanalist or a day.com list.
But if you were successful in your function, here's what you would achieve this quarter in this year. And that's what we're going through internally right now. And we're saying yes to things or not right now to things and having those tradeoff conversations. So I think that's the value that you get in that.
And again, great if you could do it as a large organization. But if for some reason that's not the world, the reality that you live in in your current company, at least stood at a team level and say is a minimum structure, kind of your team or yourself or counterparts that way. And this also allows you to see like, how does the annual objectives or annual key results cascade into quarterly? Like when you need to achieve this big homie myth goal and how does that break into quarterly?
And then you can start seeing overlaps, redundancies and also cross functional dependencies. So I'll give you a quick example is Kaylee and I work very closely together. She's VP of revenue and D, I'm SVP of growth. So I focus on a little bit more long term strategic things.
Kaylee's executing on revenue engineering and demand gen. So we are very tied together and she is dependent on a lot of my objectives and key results that fuel her key results that she's working on. So that's like an example of how this framework can, you know, say like, hey, Kaylee could say, yeah, I'd love to do that when this is completed or when I get this from Sydney or that's just a real life example. We were chatting around the other day.
Well, that's, I don't know, that's like the go to for me. Yeah. No, I actually I have worked at several companies that leverage an OKR format or even a V2M format. They're all pretty similar.
And I think the ones that work the best are obviously the more buy-in the better because it does allow for those really clean and clear trade off conversations that help keep us all accountable at the end of the day. But I also think that like repetition is really key. So I'm sure that the global recommendation is quarterly, but in other instances where I've been at really small startups, like quarters are pretty large chunk of work for us. And we actually have a lot of stuff we need to get done in the next 30 days.
So we would even go one step further and break it down. And I think that one of the things that's helped really well is a kickoff meeting every 30 days or whatever your cycle is, if your cycle is quarterly, to meet with your leader, your manager, whoever and have a nice recap call on how to go. Right. This is what we set out to do.
Did we need it or not meet it? If it was not met, why? But there's no like gray area in between either. Yes, we achieved it or no, we didn't.
And then that also helps you clarify set expectations, reset intentions for whatever your next cycle is. I feel like if you don't have some type of meeting touchpoint or something that actually holds you accountable to marking it as net, net, et cetera, it's a document that just lives in Google Drive, right? 100%. And then it's like, oh, at the end of the quarter of the week before the end of the party, like, let me pull this document up and oh, crap.
Yeah. The OKR framework is you should be checking in on this weekly, but, you know, like said, any cadence can be checked in and discussed. But I think those regular check-ins are the power in those meetings is identifying quickly, hey, does that risk? Hey, I'm not going to my deliverables at risk.
I'm going to be late and that's going to affect X or, hey, you know, startup world. You know, this was a priority a month ago, but guess what? It's no longer a business priority. So we are going to defer that objective or put that on the back burner.
And instead, we're going to be a little bit more agile. I know that's, you know, if you're really rigid with your goal setting framework it's going to be tough. So I would definitely recommend whatever framework it used to have some agile opponent and some person who's the like decider of, yep, you know, for us as kind of our CEO, but some decider of like, yes, this is going to get moved. No, this is not going to get moved.
We need to do XYZ. So yeah, that's, you know, I love a good framework. So that's me. Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think that's such a good place to start and a good grounding place for resetting priorities for the year. Another thing that I thought of when we were working through this topic is content funnels. I haven't to, I posted about it yesterday as well, but I think that it feels like my entire career. I've learned and learned and learned a lot of new concepts and a lot of new frameworks that have really helped, but unlearning, there's also like a real beauty and unlearning things that maybe made sense or you thought made sense at the time, but don't really have a place in your new strategy, your new structure, the way that buyers, you know, go to market today.
And I think one of those things is content funnels. So anybody that's listening or implementing tofu, mofu, bofu initiatives today, I'd like commend and a reset on focusing on basically buyers are either in market or they're not in market. So I think that internally there's a lot of semantics between content leaders and revenue leaders around, is this piece of content, tofu, mofu, bofu, and how does it fit into our overall content strategy? That's really not necessary.
If you think about it, buyers are either in market or not in market and your content should have a place to move them from one side of that statement to the other, regardless of where you think that they are in their journey. Like at the end of the day, I think that we spend a lot of time, a lot of wasted time trying to assume where our buyers are in their discovery or their journey of us instead of just producing valuable, helpful content. But with love of like a reaction or a hot take to that, I love this. I see teams spending way too much time on, and this is the problem, it's very internally focused, like, oh, I'm creating this piece of content and this is what I intended to do for the reader or the audience.
Like this is my intention when I create it. Okay, great. So you should have an intention and you should be trying to think about how the content is going to be consumed and what you want people to learn and absorb from the content, of course, but we're kind of where I see it goes wrong is, okay, well, now I need to build this hierarchy and build this funnel. Like, you know, organic paid doesn't matter.
I need to like build this system in this journey so that then I know what piece of content and what type of content works at what time. And then I can go back and report internally to all of my team members to know what's working and what's not. And I think the buyer's journey is not linear. Like this is not revolutionary things that we are saying here, but maybe some people are maybe, but hopefully not.
The buyer's journey is not linear. And so to me, it's like an internal issue and internal problem of why you're doing that. Like if you step back and actually ask, why am I doing this? If I'm never asked, if I never asked to report on how did that one piece of content to perform or how did how do case studies do at the stage of the funnel?
If I never asked that question, I probably wouldn't set up what I'm setting up, for example. So I think it's how you look at content in general, which really feeds the action of how marketers structure this type of stuff, but it's just, it's over complicated. You're spending way too much time and the impact to time that you're spending is like, it's not really impacting your buyer anymore. Right.
It's really not. It's like off. It's really not. It's helping you internally make sense of what you're producing and where you think you should best spend your time.
But I think that if you're producing content well, that's helping tell a story for who you need to go after, what the pain point is and how you solve it in every aspect of the educational content that you're producing or the helpful content that you're producing, it's actually like more holistic than trying to break up top of funnel educational only content versus whoever's identified what most content actually should be versus like retargeting or get a demo CTA's for both food content. But I think that's all like arbitrary. It made sense internally. It's not perceived that way to like the buyer in their feed.
And if you think around the whole like the brands that you like or the content that you engage with the most are you're like, hmm, this is a great middle of funnel piece. I mean, I bounce around a lot. I'm like, oh, that was a really fun entertaining piece. Wow.
I actually learned something about their product and that piece. That's cool. That's interesting. Oh my gosh.
This was hilarious or that was a spicy take. I'm interested in this and like this struck a nerve and I want to engage with this and you're learning different ways. So just think about that, I would say. Well said we'll end on that.
Okay. I'll pass the baton to you. I think the next thoughts are you. Okay.
Okay. Topic number, like the third thing that we're kind of talking about while we were preparing for this switch, to be honest, was like right before this call, just let everybody know. But the one thing I think you could do is do a reset cleanse. Everybody loves a good cleanse.
I like a good cleanse, but not too much, which is essentially to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall, kind of reset. So what do we mean by that? A good start, stop, continue exercise and a good audit of, you know, table stakes. Hopefully you're doing that frequently.
But I think doing that individually, what should I individually start, stop, continue? What should we be doing as a function or as a department, start, stop and continue? But also looking at it like from a business perspective, I think this is what elevate you as a revenue leader is if we start looking at our entire business, all of our pipeline sources, not just the sales source or not just, you know, events or whatever function you're in, but you look at it more holistically and you're like, all right, this year, we need to focus on effective net revenue, which could be growth, could be retention, could be expansion, could be a bunch of different things. So now we look at holistically what we're doing and like what makes the most sense from a business perspective as well.
And what from a business perspective should we start, stop and continue? You can go top down or bottoms up. I would kind of recommend to go top down in my experience of like, what's looking at a business perspective. Okay, like this over here performing not so good.
It's not really my department, but I'm going to dig into that more. Okay. Now let's go to a department functional level. Okay.
What's what am I responsible for or at least pretty involved in that we should start stopping, continue and then personally or at a team perspective, what should I start, stop doing? You know, and the reason I say kind of do the top down is because we don't have the wider business perspective, your start, stop, continue of what your personally going to do may change. Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, I think that your take around all revenue programs and revenue streams is a really actionable one.
I think that it's really easy to start, stop continue in a silo and, you know, get caught up in like what your own priorities and objectives should be without looking at a broader lens. Like in reality, if we're wearing a revenue hat, it's going to be more common than not, but there are revenue programs, you know, and somebody else is like camp per se that maybe we should start or maybe we should double down on, but you would never know because they're starts to continue in their own silo and you're in yours. So I think breaking down some of those departmental walls could be really helpful for this exercise. Well, that sorry, I'm catching up on the chat too.
I want to say too that if anybody on the call is also implementing any good resets, cleanses, best practices or initiatives for, yeah, intentions for your year ahead, like please share them. I'd love to riff on them at the end of that. The next kind of topic we were chatting through is in the same vein as reset is resetting with your cross functional peers and leaders. So a lot of the things that we've been talking about, you know, kind of relate to like a team or a wider company, you kind of thing that you can look at.
But I think this is a great exercise to do specifically, you know, this time of year and honestly ongoing to like retuck in with your peers. But I know, you have kind of this like five question framework that you like to go through. I know you put me through it a little bit when you are disbursed onboarding and getting ramped up here. So I would love to kind of get your take on how do you either reset with your cross functional teams?
Yeah, no, I think it's so helpful, right? And especially if you are following an OKR structure or following a V2 mom structure or something like that, this is actually a nice like byproduct or like follow up action for after those OKRs are set to meet with those cross functional peers or leaders. Maybe you already have like some kind of regular meeting cadence with them or quite actually maybe you don't, right? Like maybe you don't actually normally meet with this cross functional leader, but very well should.
This serves as like a nice jumping off point to schedule a quick, you know, 30 minute or less call with them, have at least five questions. Feel free like add your own, whatever makes the most sense for you and your business to repeat with all of them so that you get a good understanding of cues and trends across the, you know, your peers or your leaders. But a couple of questions. So simple things.
What are your priorities for the year? What are you focused on? Where are you spending your time and get a good lay of the land for what that is very well might be different than what they were focused on or what they were doing last year or last quarter, even how can I best partner with you? So even if it's like a non natural partnership, I think that we did this in my time at ChiliPiper and it was one of the first times I'd ever met with a chief customer officer and we learned so much to get, I as a marketing leader have never had a recurring relationship with a CS leader until I worked at ChiliPiper and it was one of these meetings with our leader at the time there that opened my eyes to, oh my gosh, why do we never talk?
Why don't we partner on any of these projects? A lot of our goals are actually pretty similar and at the end of the day, we're all here to drive revenue and retain revenue. But neither of us were like partnering or helping each other. So what are your priorities and how can I best partner with you?
Or like your two opening lines? Like what's the number one thing that you'd need or want from me and my team, et cetera? And what are your biggest challenges? I think those are three of the media questions to start off the call with and it'll probably open up some really good back and forth dialogue between you and whichever that cross functional peer is.
From the other two things that I would say are like must haves or required to make sure you cover in those initial cross functional calls are biggest opportunities you see in the business. It's no secret that everybody thinks they're a marketer, but sometimes they really actually have great ideas that you yourself can't see or can't visualize. Because you're in the day to day of, these are my OKRs and these are all my priorities. And I already feel like I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall.
So like there's no way I could take on anything else. But it is really nice to just offer that as an open question to understand what their opportunities are. They might be something in your, you know, your side of the house or they very well might be something that's outside of your normal day today that you feel really passionate about collaborating with to help solve for the business. So either way, it would definitely be beneficial to find out and then just getting an alignment on their vision for their department, whether that's for the year or for the quarter or if you're super small for the next 30 days, whatever your time frame is, like what's your department vision?
It'll only help get your department tighter with their so that you can better understand like how to work together across functionally. I also feel like I learned the most or more in like from other leaders in the business from more informal conversations like this, like kind of hey, let's just meet kind of have a more informal chat. I don't know. Maybe that's just my style and a little bit more informal than formal personally.
But I feel like you can break down a barrier, especially if you're not like in a group like oh my gosh, this is a goal setting meeting. This is having people in here like I don't know. I just feel like I learned so much more from those one to one conversations or even like a two to one like a three person like a small group. I think those are super helpful.
And I mean, there's a lot of outcomes that from those kind of like five questions framework that you kind of just leaned out. You can then understand like what's the outcome of doing that outcome is you can understand, okay, how frequently should we meet? Right? Like where you're a CS leader, maybe you should meet more frequently than you ever were or maybe it's like, hey, we should check in every now and then, but we don't need to be meeting all the time.
We can handle things, async, we know what we're working on together. You can really structure like what does your cadence look like and then also understand that the working style that you guys want to work together. Is someone more async is someone more like in person and loves to talk out loud? You know, I love a good voice note on Slack.
That's the person some people love or hate voice notes on Slack. I know Kaylee loves a good surprise huddle sometimes. I love a good cold huddle. Sorry for everybody that hates that.
Yeah, you know, I appreciate a cold huddle of some sort of in a meeting, but limit. I think that those are some of the outcomes to your point of like feeling more comfortable in a one to one or a smaller group setting. I think that it quite honestly, especially if it's truly like a cross functional meeting and you're, this is not your area of expertise. It also allows for like a more of a safe space for dumb questions where it's like, I know there are no dumb questions, but it's still hard at the end of the day to ask questions that maybe people think you should know the answer to, but you've never heard of this concept or, you know, heaven forbid, yes, also has their own book of acronyms that you've never heard of or used.
It helps bring down some of those walls too, so that you are really one team and aligning each other and building together instead of, you know, when it's always presented in a very public forum, it's not always as easy to ask like entry level or basic questions. We have a couple of statements or like good things in the trap. I think we could call out, but one thing here, I think it's Kari, Kerry, I'm saying that correctly. Marketing and CS partnership is going to be key in 2023 to ensure retention and LTV are in a good place.
100%. What's your hot take on this, Kayley? 100%. Like I said, like I said, I had never been exposed as a marketing leader to a CS leader ever.
Like I've always worked in B to be Sasser's always been a CS leader. Nobody had ever made it clear to me or obvious that we should actually meet partners in almost everything we do until two years ago. And it truly was revolutionary. Like my eyes had never been more open than they were after that 30 minute pow wow with our CS leader where she's talking about all of her KPIs and what she's held accountable for in her priorities.
And I'm looking at my OKR list and they are almost one for one different verbiage on a couple of the things because we all love our own verbiage. But at the end of the day, the results were almost the same. Yeah, we had weekly meetings after that. So I feel like 100%.
Like I agree that especially in the economy that we're in today and all the other factors that we're up against, we should, if you're not meeting with your CS leader, I would definitely say, please go do that like right after this call. It'll be huge for your business. Number one actionable tip, go meet with your CS leader or CS team. I mean, I learned so much.
We had a couple of people leading and helping with them, kind of what we have customer success. We've got our lab customer success and we have product customer success now. And having both of those people at the table with our entire team discussing things, it really allows me to look like long term of like, if our customers are running into these problems and challenges, how could that fuel new products we design or things that we do or content that we would produce, how can we support them better, which normally will fuel your growth engine. If you're really focused on making your customer successful, I think you'll learn so much and I definitely do all the time, which I'm like, I should do this with a product and not that, or we should take a different viewpoint or different look on things.
So it's also a way to kind of, you know, build that, you know, customer research, customer insight muscle a little bit if you're not as like comfortable doing that. Absolutely. And I think like Donna had a great point too. She said that there are so many like great insights and great stuff coming from a CS function or a CS leader, but they're often not invited to the larger or broader meetings and don't have a seat at the table, which I would totally head not to.
But I feel though, as though there has been some type of like realization in the last two ish years about how important a CS leader is. And this CCO role to customer officer has really become a booming role. I feel like every, every company that's like on the leading edge of innovation is now looking for or has recently hired a CCO. And so I think that down to your point, like 100% people, companies brands didn't understand their value, but I hope that this is like a real trend that's starting to get louder and louder and catch on more volume over time because they are like really, really critical for the business.
Yeah. David brought up a good point earlier about, you know, a lot of the insights can drive ICP either re confirmation or adjustments and that's been coming up a lot for him in his conversations. So yeah, I literally just had a conversation today about messaging and positioning with Cassidy and you know, we were kind of just, it was more, you know, one to one or you know, there's two other people on the call that it was the same, like, Hey, how is this hitting? He had feedback and I'm like, Hey, what is this?
What are we saying right now with our buyers? Okay. How should we adjust things? What does this look more like long term?
Like what are we missing in our positioning, right? Maybe right now, but also long term. So that meeting was very specific to messaging, but I think you could pull out things from your sales leaders or CS leaders. You can aggregate a lot of those insights just by some basic questions when you meet with them or ask them that can allow you to help refine those types of things.
So love that. Love that tip. Anyone else doing any like fun cleansing things? What are you stop not doing starting?
Anyone do a good start, stop, continue. That's my honestly, I think that's my favorite exercise of all of that. Everything we've talked about. Yeah, I honestly love it starts up continuing.
I think they're really helpful. Oh, yeah. David had a great point as well. Yes.
Yes. Can share a lot of insights around where and when your all moments are, which can really help you in all of your good market messaging and positioning. And I think sitting to your point too, it's, I feel like it's common to talk about messaging and positioning now versus like building blocks, like what we need today versus what building blocks do we actually need to think about and deploy on some type of time cycle from now to get us to where we want to be, right? I think that companies as we're like developing products are building products for the future.
And so we're trying to create messaging for the future without thinking of how we're going to actually bring our prospects and customers along that journey instead of just like them waking up one day. And now we are talking totally differently and looking totally differently. It's like more of a building blocks process. So I love that you're chatting with Cassidy regularly about how we can actually build an evolution instead of like just a massive step change.
Yes. And yeah, you know, I think you should be reevaluating your messaging. Obviously we talked a lot about that. Like our brand talked a lot about that of reevaluating your products and services and your messaging like mid year last year.
And like if you're not doing that, that's a huge miss, but I mean, the world has changed even from the past three to four months. So I think you should continue to kind of take this as a good, you know, start stop, continue with your messaging. Okay, what should we continue? Which would be maybe stop, maybe we should be evaluate with our messaging and positioning it too.
Cause I've, I've seen a lot of good stories actually shared on LinkedIn as like there was this company that they've had the record November and December. And one of the main things that they did as a marketing team was really leaning and changing their messaging and evolved that and that drove a lot of, a lot of success for them. So just a LinkedIn example. Love that.
I'm sure you can go on it quickly. I read an article recently from someone who says that he fake fires himself at the end of every year so that he can reapproach his role with fresh eyes and without legacy beliefs or limitations. So she's trying that. That's really interesting actually.
Yeah. She dropped the link in the chat. I'm going to go check it out for sure. Yeah.
Fake fires themselves. I think that also like you kind of do a self evaluation and then also like, you know, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? What's priority for you and your career and your drive for that particular role?
I mean, you realize when you fake by yourself, this role is like good for now, but like I actually want to achieve something like, you know, I want to achieve something else that is maybe outside of that role or I want to achieve a different role or go into a different function or at least get experience with a different thing outside of your role too. Yeah. And that's so I'm opening that and bookmarking it so I can go back and read it later. I think it's a really interesting concept that honestly, when I read it the first time, I assumed maybe he fake fires himself because he's the CEO, but now that I'm reading through it, I'm like, actually, I think he's an contributor.
So it's a really cool concept. I kind of like that to open with fresh eyes for the new year. It's different than like a performance review. You're like, okay, I got to like judge myself, stack, rate myself on the scale and put my top strengths where top accomplishments and top challenges and all that.
It's a different perspective and a different take, which is super powerful. Yeah. We got some people. Yeah.
I'm pretty like nuts about my inbox already, but so I didn't have a ton, but I went out clear and I just like categorized it at least zero in the inbox. I got other to do things. So that's like a personal thing. But I love that people have like personal things and then company kind of back to basics more work life back to basics that they're doing.
Yeah. I love that too. Well, sitting unless you have closing remarks, I think we have one final one final remark. I think I think you just I think you just hit him with it.
I think you do it. Okay. So for everybody that's live listening on the call or anybody that's listening to this after when we posted on the podcast, we are coming back Tuesday with the first episode of a revenue vitals live. So you heard it here first.
Revenue vitals live Tuesday at noon this week. We will be sending out a registration link for everybody so that you can hop on, put it on your calendar, register, bookmark, all the things. So stay tuned for that. Chris obviously will be.
Yeah. Yeah. Let me get to the meet. Chris Walker will be with us co-hosting and myself.
So every Tuesday at noon, we'd love to see you. Chris, I know you said this is your lunch time. We'd love to see you for lunch. We'll send out announcements in your email later this week.
So stay tuned for that. Um, we're super excited to have everybody back on some weekly lives with Chris. Yes. Yeah.
We'll send out a bunch more information and then this one you will, you know, kind of this stacking with live at this time, that's biweekly. We're going to pause so we can delete it off of your calendar. We won't be continuing it for now and we will see everyone at revenue vitals live. I know I'll be there listening.
I'm excited about it. Yeah. Thank you for all the nice questions. Chat too.
We're excited to have everybody there. So yeah, stay tuned on email. But other than that, thank you guys so much for joining us today. We appreciate you being here.
Happy New Year to everybody. We'll see you soon. Bye.