Culture Over Quota: Your Revenue Problem Might Actually Be an Alignment Problem EPISODE 001 | THE CULTURE OVER QUOTA SERIES

Speaker A: Good evening, Ro. We're gonna do something a little different here. You're gonna hear me in real time, kind of think through something that I've wanted to do for a long time. Something that, if I'm being honest with you, I felt it's probably the definition of who I am. I believe I'm more of this than I am a founder, than I am a CEO, that I am a pure rev leader, that I am a pure HR leader, than I am a pure consultant. I could go down the list, right? Like, I'm such a weird conundrum of all of them and what I finally started to be able to admit and comprehend even and communicate. More importantly, I'm a cultural over quota guy. And I know that sounds so cheesy and so corny. You're like, what is this guy talking about? I thought he was going to give himself a better title than culture over quota, but that's really who I am. I'm a guy that really looks at culture from a, uh, completely different lens and really looks at making money from a completely different lens. I understand so much of both sides at a practitioner level, at a research level, at a technology level, at a behavioral level, at a common sense level, that I think I have a shot of doing something that could be the next wave of how we look at leadership. So at a macro level, everyone's probably thinking, okay, what is this, right? Like, what is culture over quota? Well, culture over quote, if you want me to be more direct. It's like a. It's like a chief alignment officer. So what I mean by a chief alignment officer is what if you could have someone fractionally, just to start out, someone fractionally sit with your revenue functions, with your sales functions, with your product functions, with your marketing functions, with the HR teams. And what if you were focusing on a couple things like quota from like a lagging perspective, right? If you see a dip in revenue, what if that was your indicator to pay close attention to some human behavior, some shift. Right. Some lagging indicator? What if there was a moment where you saw three or four of your main partners end the relationship with the business? And instead of hr, ah, being so fragmented and instead of that problem just remaining and being within maybe the product and marketing scenes, but mainly the. The rev teams and the partnerships teams and the executive teams. I want HR to be involved in that conversation because clearly something again went wrong from a human being perspective and a relationship management perspective. Now many will say, well, listen, the chief alignment officer role sounds cute. Uh, those two examples were not really? That are you talking about? Let me explain that. The model fractional cross functional operating role with significant decision making, influence, ability. Not, uh, going to lie to you, I'm aware of that. Now the primary executive partner that I want to work with personally is going to be a chief revenue officer. In this example right now, the core partners that I personally believe would make the most sense to collaborate here, it would be a cpo, a cmo, uh, a people leader, definitely my managers, my mid level folks, leading teams of 3, 7, 9, 12 individual contributors. Of course. Now I'm gonna speak very slowly when I explain the scope. Listen up. Scope one, let's focus on sales. Let's make sure we're optimizing dollars coming into the business. Scope two, let's actually reverse engineer the product but by going internal and understanding and creating systems to listen a little bit more intently and we'll get to that in a minute. Step three, Scope three, marketing. Let's get involved with some brand voice. Let's get involved in understanding the ecosystem a bit. People, of course, customer intelligence and change management execution. Now this is a fractional role. I do not believe if an organization is taking the very first step towards this direction that this should be a major expense. I see this being a $60,000 to $100,000 a year test for the first 12 to 18 months with very, very, very, very, very critical inputs on a monthly basis that are the most critical activities for 30 hours a month. Now I believe the primary outcome is to go faster, make cleaner decisions and improve the revenue execution model. And I think really it's probably even finding and improving the talent that we have and the structure that we have and the alignment that we have, which again connects to faster decisions and cleaner decisions. But I think it does connect to innovation. And the inputs for innovation is often not understood. Now why does this role exist? I'll, uh, explain it from a different angle than you probably would expect. First and foremost, product changes do not consistently achieve active deals. Let me say that again. Product changes, branding changes, communication changes what the product is meant for. That information does not consistently reach active deals, potential customers as consistently. Hmm, that's a communication gap. Let's keep going. Marketing, um, messages drift away when buyers actually stay. Hmm. Marketing messages drift away from what the buyers actually say. So now we're talking about fragmentation. Sales hears, marketing signals that never reach product or marketing. Okay, now we're talking about internal communications. Sales plus marketing plus product equals teams having, but still having different set of priorities. I said that a little weird. Let me Slow that down. Sales plus marketing plus product. These teams have meetings. We know this weekly, daily, right? Quarterly. These teams meet but still have different priorities, have different goals. Leaders disagree, disagree. Without a clear decision making process connected to each one of those categories, I can keep going down the list and get even more operational and clear sales. Product and marketing may agree on the company goal, but interpret the customer problem, the margin profile of the customer, the urgency that is connected to the output and the dollars that we're going to spend, that's going to be connected to our margin profiles because it's going to connect it to the timing of when we run an ad or when we conduct a placement and when we do a channel partnership and where the market's going, all of this information can cause so much friction. And so if product does not communicate actively with marketing, if marketing is not communicating consistently with the, the, the sales team, if the sales team doesn't have enough psychological say, like all these little buzzwords are real. I gave a great example today. Let me give you a very simple example of where culture over quota shows up immediately. Let me take a sip of water first. You have an organization today. Let's say this organization activates a brand new channel partnership motion. And this motion creates $5 million in net new revenue in 30 days. Everyone's freaking out. This has happened before. Now obviously we're talking about big technology scale growth, right? Massive. So you're freaking out as a founder, you're freaking out as a leader, you're freaking out as a team. You all say we're going to quadruple down on this. You go out, you find some external consultants, you go out and you hire 40, 50, 60 people and you build yourself a team within 90 days to be able to focus all of the energy outside of your, let's call it 20% of the business, which is your bread and butter on this new initiative because you feel like you just have a little tiny piece of the market. You spend thousands of dollars on market research. You spend thousands of hours of time thinking through how you're going to navigate things. You build this roadmap that is robust, that is, that is meaningful to tackle the market now for the next 12 months, things are going well. Now throughout that time, there's never, throughout that time, there's never a consistent moment where leaders are coming down to grab data. And when I say grab data, I mean grab data in a soft, gentle, thoughtful, not a reporting out of like, let's just call it what it is. When we have our monthly business reviews and we have our QBRs. We all know that when executives are in the room, we're reading out our stats, hoping that we don't get cooked on the call. Can we just call it what it is? Can I just be a little bit more blunt here and just kind of talk to you? We all know that when sales hears a market signal that never reaches product or marketing, we all know what inevitably that means, right? We all know that the conversion rates on the sales team will drop. We all know that the engagement of the salesperson will stop. We all know that there will start to be fragmentation and arguing. We all know that salespeople are going to start to communicate things that are opposite of the product. We all know that customers are going to buy a product or sign an enterprise level contract thinking one thing and getting another. We all know that this can cause churn. We all know this can cause bad reputation in the market. We all know this can cause layoffs. We all know. And yet what do we do? That's the question that we actually have. And this is what we actually have to figure out and own. Number one, we have to diagnose where the priorities, initiatives, capacity and decision rights have caused a conflict. Period. End of discussion. Number two, collect customer, employee product, campaign and pipeline signals and feedback raw go everywhere. Number three, turn a frontline learning into a clear recommendation for leaders. Number four, translate major challenges and changes and micro actions for teams and what they can do to make an impact to make a slight change in the most productive ways within the next 24 hours. Because going immediately into action and translating the major challenges that you're faced with into micro little small wins to start driving towards alignment sounds like a really good idea when it's typically in the most vital parts of your business. Because the mistakes, when you make mistakes in these teams they cost you thousands in very small periods of time. Number four or five or six, I don't even know which one I'm one. I'm freaking out here. Coach selected individual contributors and managers through Life Work. That's what I don't know if you all understand what I mean. Let me say it again. Coach selected individual contributors and managers through Life Work. What I mean by life work, Certain people that are individual contributors, certain people that are leaders and managers, they have life, they have lives and they have work. And while a lot of change is going to start to erupt, you're going to need a couple people that you feel like are your day to day champions, bread and butter. And if you can do anything to give Them advice on life in general. It doesn't have to be something that I think you all are probably jumping to the gun to and getting too personal. No, this can be something around building a nice relationship with said individual contributor, said manager. If that means venting, if that means giving them a framework, whatever that means, you just know you have your ride or dies. You need a stable roster of people that you can rely on and count on while you drive some of this change and some of this alignment growth. Now I think facilitating cross functional decisions and conversations between the cfo, between the CRO, between the cpo, between the cmo, in ways where you can jump literally deeply into how they all see it and not miss a beat is what this role needs and what these companies need. Listen, I'm going to call what it is the problem that we have when it comes to, in um, my opinion these three teams is there's no one that can really hold them accountable, look them dead in their eyes and meet them step for step when it comes to not only the tactics of the job, but their strategic ambition and strategy of that thing too. And it's not an ego thing, it's more of a respect thing. It's not a, it's not a who's better thing, it's more of a how can we move as a team by inspiring and embedding and scaling this mindset and growth and so much knowledge and so much capability and so much wisdom is locked in these teams and HR can't jump into those teams and unlock it at the level that it's needed to be unlocked because unfortunately there are so many of those CRO, CPO, CMOs that don't have enough, I don't want to call it respect, but deeper relationship with said leader to even go there. And I think what people don't understand and what people are not really understanding is this is a real granular thing. Like for example, from a product lens, helping teams clearly state the user problem is a good use of time. Helping teams separate observed evidence from customers from internal assumptions and delineation of that and how to work through that is a good idea. Creating clarity around sales and marketing and what they need to know and how they need to know and where they need to know this product is going and the things that are going to be happening and how much percentage of their perspective should involve the product decision as a good idea and a good best practice. It's not easy. Facilitating conversations about dependencies and trade offs like come on, this is what I'm talking About. I'm talking about. I'm talking about an hr, uh, business partner on steroids. I'm talking about an HR business partner that understands product, that understands brand, that understands building brand, that understands building revenue, that understands channel partnerships, that understands the mechanisms. I'm talking about someone that can build an internal communications packet for a marketing team and how they should communicate with the rev team around major positioning, audiences, campaigns, website changes, et cetera. I'm talking about how to make people essentially get along better so we can move faster towards making things look better, feel better, be better. I think this is a role that's needed. I think, I think the cadence of this role is a weekly, a monthly and a quarterly scope. I think there are so many different people that this person interacts with and I think within 90 days you see a difference. I genuinely do. And I think when you look at the allocation of the efforts, I think you'll see this person weekly is spending five to six hours with executive team members, five to six hours with functional leaders. I think this person is spending five to six hours within CRM, market, consumer product, uh, and people. People, ah, data. I think this person is spending three to four hours a week, clearly coming up with and thinking through frameworks, expectations, restructuring, decision making, models pivoting based off of what the market is saying and how the, how the consumers are reacting versus how that changes how we go about onboarding or how we go about knowledge systems. You need someone thinking about this in these three departments so these three department leaders can think about what they do best, which is marketing, which is sales, which is product. Makes so much sense to me. So these, uh, are thoughts. I am extremely appreciative and this is definitely the first episode of Cultural Vakoda. Thank you so much.