How to fix your GTM playbook without starting a revolution with Andrei Zinkevich

Speaker A: Welcome to APAC's M B2B Growth Podcast by X Growth. I'm Shane Hoda and um, on this show we're going to be unpacking trends, busting myths and delivering insights you can put to work today to drive growth in apac. Everyone is bolting AI onto their marketing stack right now. But here's the problem. If your process was broken before AI, AI just produces broken output faster. That's the framing my guest today, Andrey Zinkevich, brings to his whole conversation and it cuts through a lot of the noise that is out there right now. Andre is a B2B go to market strategist and co author of a new book on building marketing motions that leadership actually trusts. We cover why CMO tenure keeps shrinking, how to shift from MQL thinking to revenue accountability, what cross functional GTM looks like when it works and it's done right. And lastly, how to use the pilot operationalization and scale framework to drive real change without blowing up the organization. Let's dive in. Andrej, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

Speaker B: It's always a pleasure chatting with you.

Speaker A: I am looking forward to this conversation. I want to say, last time you were on the podcast it was maybe, maybe three years ago. Think so, yeah, somewhere around there. And a lot has changed since then. And you have a new book. I want to start off with something very interesting that you shared pretty early on. In the book you open with kind of three confronting stats like 30% of CEOs trust their CMO, which is not a very high number. The tenure of The CMO is 16 to 18 months and then the budget slashes. Another, the third one is probably more experienced by a lot of marketers. But those are kind of the three components that you start the book. And my question to you is the first question is are CMOs doing worse than a decade ago or has the job has changed, got harder? What's, what is your take? What is, what is the reason of these stats that we're seeing?

Speaker B: So a couple of factors. It doesn't mean that CMOs are doing worse per se, but what has changed completely is the expectations of leadership. That's the first thing. And the second one, um, the broken go to market playbooks that too many companies were running for years, they become obvious, right? The performance of these playbooks became obvious and it doesn't work. And now the problem is if you are a B2B CMO, right, and your operational model is the old school demand waterfall, you are reporting on MQLs, right? On conversion to SQLs, etc. You simply can't do it anymore. That's the first problem. And um, as a consequence, right, why there is no trust because MQLs are not paying the bills, right? That's the first thing. The second one, why the budgets are slashed. The simple fact is that last year we decided with Vlad, with my co founder to run a research reaching out to P2B CMOs asking about the AI best practices and challenges. So the number one challenge I would try, I think we have this quote in our book that was a good quote from a B2B CMO. Um, she said like there is a pressure from the leadership to bolt on AI on everything without any strategy in place. And the entire philosophy and mindset is do more with less. Right? So you don't need to have more budgets, you have AI now for everything. Content, use AI, design, use AI, right? Campaign optimization, use AI, search engine optimization, use AI. And you know the story. So here we go, right? So these are the consequences. And now the last part when you mentioned that the CMOs are not staying more than 16 to 18 months, right. It's going down. The problem is simple. If the, if the company's operational model is demand waterfall, right? You come and um, then you have two problems. Obviously CFO or anybody will tell you, okay, there is no contribution from marketing to revenue because typically or historically the old school playbook conversion into real sales accepted opportunities is miserable. Right? Normally you understand that this playbook should be changed, right? Now the problem is that too many, let's say marketing leaders, they A either don't have the change management playbook, don't know how to do this right, Or B there is a mindset that we have observed something like okay, I just need to survive this quota and then it will be better. So what's that doing is basically optimizing the broken playbook but at the same time digging the grave. So as simple as that. It's just like rearranging, you know, rearranging the chairs on the Titanic and assuming that it wants it once.

Speaker A: Hinging the chairs on Titanic. Yep, got it, got it. Well, I guess my question is what is the alternative? Like what are you seeing working in the market as an, as an alternative?

Speaker B: I think my answer would be really simple. It's just stop marketing sales, product and client success silos. Creating cross functional teams and working together. The truth is if you are selling, if you are not, let's say if you are not in mass market SaaS, right? If you are selling, if you have long sales cycles. If you have selling enterprise product, then you simply won't be able to grow revenue. In silos, it just requires cross functional collaboration. And in cross functional collaboration you create, you can't really split the revenue credits. Why? Because the attribution, there are so many touch points across multiple channels. Right. That it's impossible to tell that marketing generated that opportunity of sales. That's why we always say it's all bound revenue. Right. So that's, that's a simple answer. The only way to have to develop, let's say the go to market motion that generates long term revenue is setting up cross function collaboration aligned with how B2B buyers are buying. I mean sounds easy in theory, but it's.

Speaker A: But it's not. It's not. So you're saying that we should move away from the model where marketing has certain KPIs and then sales has certain KPIs, CS has certain KPIs and it all has to be kind of one team aiming for one number. Is that what you're kind of saying?

Speaker B: That's correct. And I will give you just maybe just elaborate a little bit on this. So obviously if you have long sales cycle and um, you need to run, especially if we'll just stick to the philosophy of aligning your programs with the buyer journey. Right. A lot of programs, they simply won't generate immediate revenue. Right. But you need to, first of all, you need to report on something and B, you need to know if what you are doing actually works. Right. That means that we put revenue and sales qualified opportunities as our North Star metrics. But at the same time we make a breakdown of other metrics just to see our pipeline creation process. Right. And then depending on your program, just to give you an idea how we typically start thinking about it, we flip the funnel and we start from revenue. What comes first? Right. Sales qualified opportunities. What comes before sales qualified opportunities? Discovery calls with the strategic accounts, not with just anybody. Right. And reporting on the calls how it typically looks like in many companies, but with the strategic or with the ICP accounts. What happens next? Maybe engagement threshold. Right. So it's again not just the broken account scoring where teams, you know, tracking. Okay, you Click this email, 40 points, you opened or you signed up for the webinar, 100 points. So complete nonsense. Right? For me engagement threshold stands for, let's say you define specific awareness criteria. So let's say you have three buying committee members engaged, replying to your sales reps. Right. They signed up for your two recent webinars or uh, field events, right? So you can say there is some level of internal awareness. They are visiting content pages of your website, whatever. There is no rule of thumb. You can define this criteria, right? But then it tells you okay, this is an engaged account. Not just I feel that this is an engaged account. There are uh, tangible criteria that you can apply. What happens before this, right. And you start, start diving deeper. Maybe again maybe there could be early awareness criteria. They're just whatever you can capture, right? So they could be visiting again your website, they could be engaging with your ads on LinkedIn, whatever, right. So the entire point here is flip that, let's say measurement system, start from revenue and then do the decomposition the bottom which tells you how many ICP accounts are engaging with us, uh, with how many strategic accounts that we are targeting. We are creating brand awareness. Because the truth is simple. If they don't know you, realistically you can't sell to them. It's not again we're not talking about like $10 AI product, right? Hey, buy this product for $10 hand will just replace your marketing team, right? So obviously not that story. If you anything above 50k it's impossible that you'll be able to just sell to cold accounts. Right. We are not in the Wolf from the Wall street movie.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. And so, so are you saying that is the like let's say I'm in an organization, we're going through the, the waterfall model and you're saying is the next step to look at putting the team together or there are kind of more gradual steps to kind of get to that, uh North Star.

Speaker B: Absolutely. If you'll immediately come to your leadership or to your team, right. And tell them hey guys, we're working in silos, we're not going to do this anymore. From today we work as a cross functional team and we change the measurement, pretty soon you'll be fired. As simple as that. Why? Because nobody loves revolutions. It's just first of all, it doesn't mean that everybody wants to do the change management in the organization. And if you are not satisfied with the status quo, it doesn't mean that the rest of the organization is not satisfied as well. Right? So what you need to do, you need to do a gradual change management and then uh, like we basically split it into two categories. First of all you need to get the problem buy in. You can't do the change if like nobody in your organization believes that it makes sense to make this change. Right. So that's the first thing and obviously it Takes a lot of conversations with your leadership, with the sales teams, with the client success teams, et cetera and data digging. The truth to be said, in many organizations, I know the data is messy. If you look at CRM, right? It's uh, I just know from practice a lot of marketers are complaining about the data quality. But uh, what you can do is first of all you can start talking to your leadership, right, about their, uh, buying experience. Just saying, hey, whenever you have a spare minute, right, you can just say, hey, I'm just doing this research. I just was wondering, can you please share with me your recent experience of purchasing anything expensive? Might not be necessarily B2B related, ideally B2B, but could be any purchase, right? And then you can ask a couple of questions. Did you buy from the cold call or from cold email? And when was the last time have you bought just receiving, you know, five emails from the same unknown sales rep? So you start the entire point of this conversation is collecting evidence and anecdotes, right? Then the same. Have you, I'm just wondering, have you guys ever bought by downloading PDF and then receiving a bunch of automated emails and then booking the discovery calls? And then typically, okay, you purchase, let's say, a new car. How many times have you heard about this brand? Did you do any comparison and what influenced your decision? And why did you stick to this, for example, vendor or dealer? So you can ask a lot of questions. They serve as an avenue evidence. The second step is talking as well to the sales teams, right? Asking hey guys, like, I'm not such, I know, like we have some problems, which I'm just thinking how we can improve this. Yeah. Please share. What do you think could be done better? Quite often I think the number one response from the sales teams usually is like, we lack brand awareness among our strategic accounts, right. If you guys can help with this, that would be fantastic. Okay, and how does it impact your playbooks? Like, we are sending cold emails, people are not replying, whatever, right? You can start collecting a lot of things and what do you think could be improved? This, this, this and that. And the entire point of this, first of all, you are collecting facts. And the second one, you start looking for the change agents, people who are openly talking about the problems, right? Because if somebody says, okay, just leave me alone, I know my stuff, right? I can do, I can do whatever is necessary. That's one story. You probably won't be able to do anything with these people. But in any organization I know there are people who are not, who are not accepting the status quo, who know that the things should be changed, right? And the goal of this, just to find these people. And then even with the messy data, you don't need to wait for the perfect conditions. You start digging into whatever you have, trying to connect the dots. Okay, we are running the same, we have, let's say, I don't know this gated white papers, right? We are, we are spending money on this and this is our real conversion. What I have seen a lot of marketing leaders, they kind of, uh, don't want to swallow this pill, you know, just feeling okay. It's, I'm doing, I don't know, taking this personally. But it's not that we need to take this personally. It's just like you look at the problem and you say, okay, this is the problem. You call it out loudly, right? And we need to solve it. So the more data you collect, the better. The next step is just bringing this data to leadership and to the sales leaders as well, saying, hey guys, this is what we have uncovered. Which means that what we are doing is like one of the most important things. Connect the dots to the strategic initiatives of your company, whatever it could be. Next funding round, expand into new market, whatever the goal is, you just connect the dots. Here is our strategic initiative or goal, here is our playbook. And next you just present the cost of an action, which means if we uh, won't do anything about this problem, we are going to miss our revenue targets by whatever, 20%, 30%, et cetera. So the first thing you just need, and people need to see that there is something broken backed by data and anecdotes from the team, right? And it costs them money. Uh, so when you have this in place, they say, okay, fine, what we are going to do next, this is basically, you know, that you got the buy in for the problem and the second part is the buy in for the solution. This is the most important part. During the first round of conversation you can find these change agents, people who are willing to do things differently. And with them you start thinking about how can we fix it. Again, nothing revolutionary. You don't need, you know, to come, oh, we need new technology, big budget agencies, all of that stuff. The first step I will do is just I would typically look at the current marketing and sales mix, any scheduled programs, and in a simple way think how to make these programs account based. And if you'll ask me why account based is on the agenda, the answer is very simple. If you are in marketing and you want to prove anything to sales and to leadership. You need to show them that marketing programs are impacting strategic accounts and pipeline creation. As simple as that. If you'll come and say brand awareness, you know, all of that, which is extremely important, but nobody cares about it on their side. That's, that's just the reality. Yeah. But if you can show, okay, these are uh, three strategic accounts. Our sales reps reached out multiple times, never got any reply. And now these people are engaging, visiting our website or whatever, replying to their email, signing up for the events, ideally booking discovery calls with us. This is a huge win. Right? So this is our goal. And the entire point is, right, whenever you identify a uh, potential, let's say copilot partner from sales, you start looking at the account list, right? Just thinking about maybe giving them additional intelligence that they are missing. Because in many organizations that's the problem. Right. Second, like how can we tailor our activities to help you to create awareness and engagement from these accounts, whatever it could be. You have a webinar, right? Why not? Okay, let's look at these accounts, right? What put really resonate with them. M. Not just our generic or pro topic, right. Specifically for these people, what really might be interesting, which kind of means, okay, we need to do a uh, proper account research. Right? We need to uncover the needs of these people. And then basically you start rearranging your program towards these strategic accounts for these sales reps. This is a fantastic help because they say, okay, these guys want, they want to help me to, to create sales opportunities with these accounts.

Speaker A: And, and Andre, I uh, I just want to go back to something you said earlier and, and touch on the attribution piece a little bit more. Right. I mean, I a hundred percent agree with you that a collaborative process is going to get better results. It's going to get, be more cohesive. There are so many elements in it that are going to work together and going to produce a better program. My question maybe the thing that I would love to kind of dive a little bit deeper is how can I have a conversation with my cfo, right? Because sales is a, uh, is a line item on pnl. Marketing is a line item in pnl. Customer success is a line item in pnl. And they're not necessarily the same thing on the P and L, right? Well, not necessarily. They're not the same thing, right? They're, they're considered different departments. Right. So are you suggesting to change how the P and L is structured in order for, for the CMO to have a conversation with the uh, with the cfo, what are, what are you kind of seeing or what are you suggesting in terms of changes there where the CFO is like, well, how am I gonna, how am I gonna assess marketing if marketing is doing the right thing or not?

Speaker B: Love it. So remember we touched part about decomposition of revenue, right? And I mentioned that. Dig a little bit into the data that you have in your CRM. Ideal scenario is a, you start just analyzing the recently closed deals with the strategic accounts and if there is any opportunity, interview these customers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 deals, whatever is possible, right? In the worst case scenario, if there is no way that you can interview them, you can reach out on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I am CMO of this company. Thanks for signing up with us. May I ask you, I just have this for our internal research or whatever. You can customize this message. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, right? The entire idea for this exercise is to prepare CFO quiz, if you will. The point is simple, right? You need just to uncover as many data points as possible about these closed bond deals. Again, interviewing these customers, interviewing SDRs and account executives about all the touch points they had, reviewing all the data across your marketing platforms and um, CRM, right. I know that you won't be able to uncover everything, but that's not the point. You'll be able to uncover a lot of touch points, right? And the next step when you need to bring this data, uh, to your cfo, ideally either prepare, you know, the timeline with the touch points across multiple channels and then ask a couple of questions. Just presenting this and asking. Okay, I wanted, because I was kind of digging into our data and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. So among all these touch points and channels, which channel should get the credit and why then which touch point should be attributed to opportunity creation and why? Right? And then who impacted this deal more marketing and or sales? Because then if you'll see, for example a uh, deal with like you were able to uncover certain touch points, LinkedIn ads, website visits, and then you know that for example they mentioned uh, ah, and we spoke to a couple of your customers. Obviously you can't track this, right? So this will never show up in your analytics. You just simply ask, okay, which of these activities should get the last Basically which of them are more important, right? I would ask, how do you guys think we should report on this? What are suggested solutions? I would love first of all to hear answers from leadership. It's basically at this point you just make them thinking about the problem, about the nonsense of what we're having. Because realistically then all the forecasts based on the previous model were uh, completely inaccurate. Right. And you need to hear the answers. And typically the answer would be okay, what would you suggest? And this is where you can say okay, I don't want, again, I don't want to suggest revolution, that we are um, like going to completely change the measurement system. But what if we'll start just measuring revenue and sales qualified opportunities from strategic accounts as our north start metrics. Right. For marketing and sales, we want to become revenue responsible as well. And then we have the set of leading indicators. Right. Which, which you need to define. I gave a couple of ideas. Right. Depending, depending on the playbook number, you can track account velocity. If you want, you can track account to pipeline ratio. For example, how many accounts that you were targeting per quarter became sales qualified opportunities. Right. So up to you. But the entire point is that you move away from that nonsense and you agree maybe with just one nuance. Because I assume you'll be asking about this. Who is getting the credit. Right. The answer is simple. We always just mark these opportunities as outbound source or whatever, ABM source, I don't know, it doesn't really matter. But the credits are always assigned to account owners. Why? Because let's be absolutely honest. Have you ever seen marketing getting any bonuses for the opportunities created? Right. So that's the hilarious part of our job. So there is no sense to even to open the Pandora box. Right. So the entire point is. Okay, ah, let's keep it simple. All opportunities where we have multiple touch points or you can agree if there are like, let's say above 5 or above 10 touch points, they're attributed to all bound attribution. Right. And the credits are assigned to the account owners. As simple as that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. And by account owner, do you mean like an account owner for an existing customer or an account executive for a net new.

Speaker B: Yeah, account executive. Because they're uh, usually paired to SDRs. Right. So you can easily track this.

Speaker A: Got it, got it, got it. Okay. Under the other question I want to ask you is. Tell me about AI. Where does. That's the question. That's the, that's the thing on everyone's mind. It's like, oh, ah, where does AI come in? You know what, what is that changing? How is that modifying this, uh, this motion. What are you seeing kind of in the market?

Speaker B: So you decided to open the Pandora box?

Speaker A: Of course, of course. There's uh, no way we can uh,

Speaker B: go without It I'll give you just my perspective. AI is just the new advanced automation, which means that if you have robust processes that uh, work perfectly before AI, AI will just help you to produce more of the quality work. If you didn't have robust processes before AI, AI will just accelerate the garbage production. So as simple as that, how does it impact our emotions? I have seen a lot of research recently that the marketing teams are replaced. First of all, the content teams are replaced. Because now of course with a few clicks you have tons of different pieces of content. The problem is the quality, as simple as that. It's just this is kind of the most, the biggest paradox, right? Everybody hates AI produced content, but everybody produces AI content, right?

Speaker A: True, true.

Speaker B: The long story of short, if you'll ask me, right? We have kind of, we think about it in a couple of ways. First of all, uh, you need to treat AI as your employee, right? Which means you need to have quality benchmarks for a specific process. Not just research these companies, but you give a benchmark, uh, how the good research looks like, where to look for a certain data, how this data should be stored in your CRM and in what format, right? How to validate this data. So a bunch of these things. Because truth to be said, I just took this as an example. As for cross functional collaboration in many teams, like everybody says we need to do the account research, but then you ask marketing and different sales reps and you'll see that they are running completely different processes with completely different outputs, right? And then how you expect AI to produce something that would be like organizational weight, except that's the problem. So first of all you need to think, right? What processes could be potentially automated or accelerated, right? Then you run them manually, you create the quality benchmarks and then you start training the AI models first and always go through the same stages. As I was explaining. For the change management, you have pilot operationalization and then scaling, which means you do the pilot, you create the new process manually, you document everything, right? Then operationalization, you start training AI model, whatever it could be, account research signals, capturing, I don't know, maybe capturing the calls and translating them into something, right? Into any asset that marketing or sales could be using. Whatever, you do it with AI just on your own. You don't tell your organization, hey, we have this, right? So you validate it, you start, you just embed human verification until you are satisfied. Then you start sharing this whatever dependent, um, moment how your organization uses AI. Let's say if you have team package, you start asking other colleagues to use the prompt or the skill that you have created or the tool just to see how it works in another environment. Right? Because you'll see a lot of gaps. So the entire point is before you print this to your organization, you need to be sure that it works properly. And then when it comes you have it in place, the next step is doing the team wide training. Because I think this is the most piece, the most missed part. Quite often I see, you know the scenario, let's say marketing leader comes here, I use cloud code, I build this nice dashboard, etc. Etc. Etc. Which looks really good but then like nobody can replicate it or if they try, right. They get completely different output because there are multiple uh, constraints. So and another point is if other people, let's say you created account research prompt, you are giving them to the sales reps. Sales reps run it. See the kind of, not really what they're expecting for what they're going to do, they're going to ignore it. But the same by the way was many years ago with software, right? Like companies, they buy, let's say ABM platform and what they're typically using, maybe they're just looking for some intense signals and that's it, right? So they're using maybe like 2% of the capabilities of that platform. And then you'll ask who is using this? And then they might name just two, three people, but they have 50 licenses. Right? Because the problem is they're expecting that everybody would be using this platform asynchronously. They have never done team wide training, not on the platform. But how the, anything that this platform produces signals or whatever, how it impacts our processes, the same as with AI, no difference, Right. If you want to, to make sure that people will be using this, right. This new narrative about being AI native, you need to make sure that it works. And then doing team wide training and basically helping with the implementation.

Speaker A: It's a very interesting time of what is happening. There is I think a lot of hype in the market. There's a lot of movement in the market. I was reading some research about the fact that how hard it is to make an AI sound like you. Even though like a lot of kind of models are. It's like oh, you know, your, your style or your voice or whatever it is. And at the end of the day it's like Claude sounds this way and Gemini sounds this way and ChatGPT sounds this way. So it's very fascinating uh, to see the space and how it evolves. Uh, but um, but uh, Andre, before we kind of wrap this up, is there anything else that maybe I haven't touched on that you think it's really important, especially with the book that's come out that you think we should touch on, on the po.

Speaker B: Well, you asked me about AI, I mentioned this, right. Uh, already that you, whenever you feel that something is broken, maybe I'll just make a quick summary of everything we have discussed and a couple of principles that. Yeah, that would be helpful for everybody. If you feel and you know that something is broken, it's likely to be broken and you need to change it. That's the first one, the second one, which means you shouldn't start optimizing fade and expecting that it will work at some point.

Speaker A: Point, yes.

Speaker B: Point two, never do any change as a revolution because revolutionists are hated. Right? So you need to do a kind of. You need to do an evolution of your existing processes in a way that you can show the impact on strategic accounts and pipeline creation. Right. Ideally revenue. But let's be realistic again if you have long sales cycles, it won't be possible. Right. So impact on strategic accounts, that's already a huge win that you can report on. Um, next one, collecting evidence and data for problem buy in. Because without problem buy in you won't be able to do any change. Right. And whenever you are doing this you need to connect dots to strategic initiatives and just show the cost of an action. Right. And then the solution buy in for the solution buying. You need to define this small pilot cross functional team. Again as I mentioned, you don't need to stop oppose anything. You don't need to say MQL is broken, whatever, we are not going to run it run it. But you need just to run something in parallel. Something that a small scope that you can present as a better alternative to the current motion. Because people just um, like you asked about CFO's leadership, right. They just buy the numbers. If you don't have any evidence, doesn't matter how big or how nice is your slide deck, nobody is going to buy it. So then AI, right. Don't rely on it as kind of a, ah, silver bullet. Right. Again, if you didn't have robust process before AI, AI will just accelerate the trash that's not well defined processes were producing. And so lastly, one of the best mental models that we try to share with marketing teams is the POS framework, uh, pilot operationalization scaling. And it doesn't matter if you are going to do anything with AI, uh, you are buying new platform or you want to start a new program, not necessarily abm. You want to start a new thought leadership program. You always start with small scope pilot with well defined expectations, with nail down program, right? With clear timeline, clear leading and lagging indicators to measure the success of this program. When it proves success, you start operationalizing it. You create documents, you create the processes, workflows, and then slowly, gradually, you start doing the scaling by implementing it across

Speaker A: your tips Andre, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been amazing.

Speaker B: Thanks a lot for, uh, having me.

Speaker A: We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like APAC's B2B Growth Podcast, please share it with your B2B friends and subscribe for weekly insights on B2B growth across APAC. Sign up for the XG Weekly Newsletter link is in the description and if you'd like to let us know what you think about this episode or in general, the podcast or anything else, you can email us@podcastsgrowth.com we read all those emails. Apex B2B Growth Podcast is produced and edited by Alexander Hipwell, and music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.