How to Streamline GTM Execution with Garrath Robinson and Sebastian Hidalgo

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com and powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman. Joined today by my co-host Mike Rizzo. It's been a long time, Mike.

It has been a long time.

Far too long.

There's not much going on for you, right?

Yeah, no.

How far away is Spring Fling? Spring Fling is like 2 weeks?

As of recording this episode, we're about 3 weeks, a little like right around 3 weeks. It's on the 21st, so yeah, basically 3. Yeah, May.

Yeah. Got it. Got it. Well, joining Mike and me today to talk about how to streamline go-to-market execution is Sebastian Hidalgo and Gareth Robinson. Sebastian is co-founder and head of sales, RevExcel, and a sales trainer and business strategist with Cygnatic. Should have practiced that ahead of time. His previous experience includes working in marketing consulting as a product owner, as well as his current ventures. On top of that, Sebastian has been trained in hostage negotiations and applies those principles to the domain and how he approaches training for sales. Which is, I thought, interesting on its own right. Gareth may be a familiar name to our longtime listeners. Gareth has been a guest before. He is co-founder and head of marketing for RevXL. He has held both in-house consulting and fractional roles in marketing, marketing ops, and leadership. He's also started multiple companies and served in the US Army. Sebastian and Gareth, thank you. And Gareth, thanks for your service again.

Yeah, Michael, thank you. And it's great to be on with you guys again.

So Thank you for having us.

Yeah. And for our listeners, you might now guess that Sebastian is— he's not a— he's not here in the United States. Gareth is joining us from Germany. So I think we figured out before this, we've got, uh, 3 of the 4 US time zones covered, 4 major ones, and then one in Europe. So we're—

That's the beauty of the remote world we all live in now.

We all just get to hang out. Doesn't matter where we're at.

That's pretty cool.

Truly global.

Yeah, exactly.

It is. Yeah. Well, let's get things going here. So Gareth, one of the things you and I discussed is the importance of being able to execute. I would add quickly execute efficiently, whatever. And that it's an under— it's often underrated capability, especially when it comes to being compared to like strategy, which tends to get more attention. So I'm curious, like, I, I'm a big believer that being able to move quickly, um, and learn and adjust is a, is an important one. It's not that I don't discount strategy, but what, what, like, hey, I guess, do you see the same thing kind of thing out there? And why do you think that's the case? I'll leave it— Gareth, why don't you maybe start us and then Sebastian, if you want to add?

Yeah, you know, um, you know, that's a great question. And I think you and I, um, last time we were on together, we We actually ended up spending like quite some time talking about this. And, you know, it kind of boils down to that notion that, like, you know, I think in a lot of organizations, in my experience, the idea that, you know, speed equals like a lack of focus equals a lack of intentionality equals a lack of control. And you and I had had a really great conversation around how speed is something that develops over time. It's not something, you know, we don't just come out of the gates launching campaigns, you know, implementing a CRM or whatever it is, you know, this idea around the speed of execution is something that develops over time. And, you know, what we had kind of talked about was that comes through frontline execution. And, you know, I think when we were talking about this, the conversation was rooted in, you know, as we were kind of developing our services here at RevExcel, we were having conversations, really the root issues kept boiling back down to, you know, yeah, we can build you a great data model, we can set up all the systems in the world, all the automations, the signals and all of that, and that's great. But if that frontline team doesn't have the trust of the executive leadership team, and if they don't have clarity on what they need to execute on a day-to-day basis, that all kind of falls apart. And when we talk about speed, we're not really talking about like 0 to 100 execution, We're really talking about like 0 to 50, and then 50 to 60, and 60 to 70. And as we get used to what should we be executing on a frontline basis, on a day-to-day basis, I think that's where the speed comes from. But really, that's not only like a bottom-up function. I think leadership teams tend to kind of look at that of like, well, you know, we trust you to just go figure it out and go make it happen. And, you know, I think we've all been in those kinds of roles, and it's great for learning. But when we're in a growth stage company, that tends to kind of break down over time. And so when we talk about frontline execution, we're talking about how does marketing— and really all this boils down to is how does marketing become the spearhead for sales? And, you know, kind of one of the issues that I think marketers run into a lot of times is the perception that marketing is a support function or the perception that marketing is lagging behind the sales. And I don't think it's because, you know, marketers are lazy. I don't think it's because you know, marketers don't have the chops to kind of live at the same speed as sales. I think a lot of it comes down to we just don't know how to act on these signals. We don't know how to act on this execution. And I don't have— and having been in this position before— I don't have clarity on what my weekly priorities are, and I don't have clarity on what do I need to be focused on on a day-to-day basis. So that's where this whole conversation really kind of stems from.

And Sebastian, what are your thoughts on all this?

Speed. Speed is a big topic, especially, you know, having worked in tech. I saw everybody talking about the need to be agile. And somehow in those same environments, you talked about speed and everybody stepped back. And at the same time, you talk about strategy, And also everybody stepped back because it's like we have in companies this syndrome where we see strategy and execution being 2 separate things, whereas one thing is dead without the other. And speed in particular matters right now in everything that's go-to-market related, sales related, because the market isn't waiting for anybody. The train has to leave the station and the train has to leave the station applies to to the people we sell to, to the people we market to. They don't have time. They are overwhelmed. They are constantly pitched to. So we cannot afford to not have speed, both at the strategy level and at the front-end level. Because in my opinion, now that AI is upon us, right? And that's undeniable. It's changing how we do business. It's changing How we approach every single single aspect of business. But with AI being upon us, the last two competitive advantages that we truly have, the last two most that we have are connection and speed. And I see marketing as connection and sales as speed. If you have both of those things lined up in your business, then you have a machine that's well oiled. And that can actually allow you, enable you to outcompete somebody else in the market. Because there are companies out there that have connection and speed built into their culture. And you will never beat them at any other game because that is the name of the game now. Everything changes so fast. Connection and speed are the last 2 modes of business.

That's an interesting take. Yeah, it just occurred to me, like one of my all-time favorite books I recommend in a business context is called— the title is Execution, subtitle is The Discipline of Getting Things Done. And it talks about the importance of strategy to a point, but then focus on execution. And that sort of knowing-doing gap is kind of— it's a variation of that, I think. And it's— so it's been around for 15, 20 years. So in the back of my head, that's why I've always thought that, yes, strategy is important.

Yeah.

At the same time, if you can't actually execute on what you say you're going to do and deliver on what you committed to, then it's kind of just words on a piece of paper or words now on a virtual piece of paper. You have something to say, Gareth?

It also goes back to perception.

Yeah, well, last time—

Go, Gareth.

Oh, my apologies. I have a 1-second delay, so I apologize, guys. You know, last time we spoke, I, you know, we had kind of talked about this and where this really kind of formulated for me. And that was, you know, about a year ago, we were working with a commercial real estate company. And in that world, speed to lead is king. The first person to contact has a 90% close rate within the first 60 seconds. And, you know, a lot of times we're talking about deals that are half a million or a million or you know, millions of dollars overall. And at the time when we were working with this company, AI agents and, you know, bots really weren't where they needed to be to kind of lean into that. But through that, you know, we realized, like, I'm working with this company and I'm like, man, this is interesting. Like, I've never been in a sales environment where it's like you have to truly be on top of your game. Like, you have a 60-second window to get in front of that lead. And these are qualified leads. You know, they fill out a form that's like, hey, we're wanting to sell this property, we're shopping this property. And so, you know, a little bit later down the line, you know, we're doing some more deep research. And I think part of this research was something that Mopros had put out. And it was along the lines that, you know, 70% of buyers are basically showing up about anywhere from 70 to 90% of the way through their purchasing or through the buying process now. So they're showing up to the table with the information they need. And I think like we had talked about, it's like at this point in sales, whether you're in SaaS, whether you're in manufacturing, etc., if a prospect is coming to you, they are nailing their— at this point, they're nailing their decision down to maybe 2 or 3 options. They have most of the information that they need. They're just giving you a chance to screw it up at the end of the day. And, you know, so when we kind of talk about that, it's like, okay, This idea that, you know, we're gonna— marketing passes off a lead to sales and we're gonna wait 72 hours or we're gonna wait 96 hours to get in front of that lead. I think those days are gone. Now, when we talk about speed—

Should have been gone a long time ago. Like, yeah, I'm getting like, like my neck is just getting sick. 72 hours, please no.

72-hour SLA, let's go. I just don't think that's going to work in today's environment And maybe it does work for some companies that might have longer sales processes. I don't know. But I think this is where things are really shifting. And I think salespeople are adapting to this a lot better than marketers. This kind of comes back to the conversation of marketers really understanding how can we be the spearhead for sales? How can we get out in front of these signals, whether it's a new lead that filled out a qualified form of like, hey, I'm ready to buy. Or, you know, and then we can kind of get into the conversation of something that never really gets talked about a lot. Having been in companies myself before where marketing, you know, you come in from one company where you see how sales is done the right way, you come into a new company and it's like marketing hands off a lead. They're like, all right, see ya, have fun with that. Let us know how it goes. And we really need to talk about how marketing and sales are oscillating functions. You know, maybe marketing passes that lead off, sales qualifies, and we can't just pretend like we're just going to throw them in a nurture track and then they're going to come back to us because that's not how we build relationships. That's just how we sustain, you know, interaction. That's just how we sustain engagement. But then marketing still needs to be able to come back to the table and find a way to get back in front of those leads and stay relevant, provide content, provide information. And like, for instance, one of the, one of the pieces of feedback we've gotten from 3 or 4 different companies in the last month, these are companies that have long technical sales processes. So we're talking 9 to 18 months, somewhere in that range, very high value, you know, ticket items, $100,000+ deals. And it's this, it's this idea that like, hey, we are our sales guys, like they're great at closing. Like when we actually have a qualified deal come through the pipeline and we get those turned into an opportunity, like we can close those really well. But where we're really struggling now is getting out in front of these leads and truly establishing that trust and establishing a relationship up front. And then again, you know, this kind of not to like beat marketing. I'm speaking as a marketer who's gone through these things and just kind of seen how these things play out in the sense that I think this is where marketers are really struggling right now. It's like, yes, we have all the AI tools now. We have HubSpot, we have Salesforce, we have Amazing tech stacks, but at the end of the day, like that's not going to do the heavy lifting for us. Marketing still has to get out in front of these things. Marketing still has to be attached at the hip of the sales team and being proactive. Hey, what do you guys need from us? And too much of the marketing that gets done almost gets treated as like plug and play. Like well, we've got the nurture tracks, we got this. We just need to roll out some campaigns and we'll be fine. Everything will take care of itself, and it just doesn't work like that anymore.

Yeah, look, I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump in just to add some, I don't know, like additional thoughts, color, maybe spicy takes.

I don't know.

We'll see what happens.

Yeah.

But like, I agree with you. I think that, you know, I come from a B2B SaaS sort of background. Obviously, sales motions vary based on your industry and the types of products you're selling and all that stuff. But Fundamentally, relationships matter, right? People buy from people at the end of the day. More often than not, they buy from people who truly understand their problem and are trying to solve their problem. And what's interesting about the sort of go-to-market motion between that marketing and sales sort of handoff is that marketing As, as we've sort of pictured it, I think, I think if I say the word marketing and sales, 2 different images probably come to my mind. I don't know about you all. Yeah, one is this sort of like, I don't know, when I say marketing, I see this sort of just like this brand. It's just a logo. So the word marketing in and of itself is a logo. It's a brand. It's an entity.

Pretty, pretty pictures.

Right? Like, like, yeah, I think it's like, it's the aspect of the brand itself. When I say sales, I picture a person. More often than not, I picture some young salesperson that is talking to me about their thing, right? I don't think of it as an apartment. I don't think of it as the brand. But what's interesting is there's actually kind of like an intersection and you hit on it, Gareth, right? Where there's actually this like gap. It's not even an intersection.

There's a gap still.

And I'll share the gap in a moment, but you kind of touched on it where you said, hey, our salespeople can close deals and they're really good at that. And I agree, salespeople who are good at closing deals know how to get the right information out, talk to them about their pain points and move the deal structure along because there's an art to that. Critical to a successful organization. And you should hire really good salespeople that can close deals and move that deal along. Their job, while you would consider it to be relationship building, is in pursuit of to close a deal. The ones who are really good at it figure out how to find relevant information and retain and recall back to the conversations that they've had to say, hey, I just saw this thing that I think you might find helpful. Let me know when you're ready to jump back on a call. We can talk through some of this stuff. Maybe it has nothing to do with our product, right? They're doing a good job of relationship building. But their job isn't— yeah, they're storytelling. But their job is in pursuit of closing a deal. I think there's still a gap. The gap is that Someone needs to be there going, who in— and you know, you might be like, oh, that's marketing's job. And it's like, well, maybe, but every marketer that I've ever met, for the most part, is like, I don't want to be the person who's on a video phone call trying to sell our product to somebody. I just want to put the right information out there. My face isn't a part of this. My logo is.

Yeah.

And so I don't feel like I want to go figure out how to Say, oh look, I found like ten you know prospects in our database that have this specific pain point, and I know that they would find this valuable. And so I'm gonna send them an email, right? Like we think we think from the brand's messaging perspective, and the sales rep is supposed to somehow find that information that we found that we created for them, and on the marketing side, and say, oh yeah, here's these ten accounts that I need to like give this to. And really, they're like, well, that deal's not far enough along. I need to go focus on the one that's going to close. And so there's a gap still, like somebody needs to fill the gap of, of like, how do I bring value to these people so that I can have them trust us? And if trust is the currency that everything is sort of built upon, then there's still sort of this thing that's missing. And I think that's the exciting part of what's happening in AI and marketing operations to sort of bring this full circle. Like the speed and efficacy of your ability to go to market today, the great enabler is AI because it allows you at some point when implemented correctly with all the right data and infrastructure and connected ecosystem, you can now as a marketing team teach your sales reps to say, hey, AI bot, whatever, right? AI tool we built. Can you pull up the 10 accounts that this piece of content we just produced would be most relevant for and help me personalize an email to them? Because I know we have at least 5, right? And like, okay, great. Now I can figure out how to bring this stuff to market in a way that builds on relationships. And maybe the sales rep can do it. Maybe it's somebody else. But I still think that Ultimately, like, there's, there's somebody who's responsible for building relationships and it's not the brand necessarily.

Yeah.

I'd be curious to get Sebastian's take on this since he's kind of my— I feel like Sebastian, you're kind of representing the sales viewpoint on all this.

I have a controversial take on all of this, meaning I don't believe I don't believe anymore in separated sales and marketing teams. I hate that distinction. It's one team and it's the revenue team. You either call it the brand team because in the end, there is nothing that impacts your reputation more as a company, especially in B2B, as a good or a bad salesperson. So a salesperson is literally the embodiment of your brand at any given point in the customer journey. So we either call it the revenue team Or the brand team? Probably in B2B, we're going to call it the revenue team.

Good.

Now, what I notice is that the equation is always backwards. There's always marketers and even brand strategists. There's always these 2 figures trying to feed to sales talking points based on research that was produced. I don't know, maybe we hired a market research agency to produce these nice concepts about our ideal customer. Well, guess what? Hiring a market research agency, and I've been there because I tried to hire many when I was working for other companies, is a mess because it takes— there is a sales cycle and then you have to agree on the topics and then they have to do the research and then they have to present the results. That takes 3 to 6 months. Good. The information you got after 6 months is outdated by the time you got it. So you just throw a bunch of money in the trash.

Yeah.

To have talking points that your prospects don't relate to anymore? Why do we waste money on those things when the salesperson is the person that's doing live market research by talking to prospects? So the information loop has to start from sales and go into marketing, marketing, then pushes back into the market, the kind of content, the kind of interaction that attracts an ideal customer. So that's backwards. And another point that I want to bring is, yes, many companies are very good at closing when they get somebody in front of them. Every time I hear that, what I hear is we are very good at closing every time somebody has a strong enough pain that they're just begging for mercy and they want it to stop and now we can close them. What I don't hear is, oh, our sales reps excel at building relationships and they are very good at influencing our prospects. into making them understand that our solution is the best for them because that's sales. Sales is a craft where you build a relationship with the goal of building influence over somebody else so that they trust you with solving their problems. Now, you know, if you solve the problem of every person that's suffering extremely much from what they're going through, yes, you can say we close a bunch of deals and we are good at that. And I'm very skeptical again, because what I hear is our sales reps don't know how to build relationships. So we only close the ones that would close anyway. And so those are my 2 takes. Sales has to feed information to marketing. And most of the teams that think they're good at closing are actually leaving at least 12% or 20% more of deals on the table.

It's interesting that you bring up this point that sales is like the embodiment of the brand out in the, in the In the market, if you will, right? And I've, because I've, I, for a long time, and maybe it's because I was in sales for a little while, like I've thought, and most very often not utilized resource for, like you said, market research is the sales team. And I would like encourage marketers who have not actually been in front of customers either go do that, right? Or sit in on calls or listen to calls or whatever, because what you're going to find is the language that's used May not be on brand, but if it works, who the hell cares?

Yep.

It's like adjust the language to match the the customer's pain. So I want to get back to.

Can I can I touch on the trust piece real quick?

And sure.

I think also when we're talking about trust, it's not just like hey, I'm a nice person. You know, I have a great personal brand, and I I look the part. It's You know, I think the foundational layer of trust is how we talk about it in sales is, can I trust you deliver— to deliver? Can I trust your company to deliver on this promise? And what evidence do you have, both past evidence plus current evidence? What evidence do you have that I can trust you to deliver before we ever talk about pricing, before we ever talk about features and benefits and those things? I think establishing that trust—

I actually don't. I actually think it comes before that. I actually think it comes before that and it comes down to, do I trust that you have my best interests at heart? So like, are you actually trying to help me? If it happens to be that what I provide, my company provides as a service or a product can do that, great. If it can't, are you helping me find that other alternative? And that's, I mean, I think that like, it's a, it's actually deeper than can you deliver on what you say you can deliver? Eventually it might get to that. But there's a lot that happens before that.

Agree.

Also, yeah, sometimes being trust—

sorry, there is like—

sometimes being trustworthy means you recognize that maybe this isn't a good fit for us. And I apologize, I have a 1-second delay. I apologize. But maybe that means, you know, that conversation ends with, hey, you know, yeah, you guys have the budget to go with us, but this isn't a good fit. And, you know, that could take us down the customer success Pipeline there, and then we get to the we get to retention and how bringing on that bad fit customer in the beginning leads to retention issues later on down the line. But yeah, I think you're totally right, Michael.

What were you going to say, Sebastian?

I was going to say that you know the sales method we train people on at RevExcel was built exactly to build that type of trust—the one you mentioned, Michael—the one that. Do you have my best interest in mind? Because there is a thing called commission breath. People can't smell, you know, people's bullshit radar is so fine-tuned to every little tweak in your attitude, in how you speak, in the things you say. People feel the pressure. That's why something I hate that people do in sales is using the word, hey, following up on what we said, following up on our meeting. The moment a prospect reads follow up, Their resistance goes all the way up here. It's like, okay, follow up. He's about to pitch. He wants to pitch. He wants a meeting to pitch. People love buying, but they hate feeling, and this is true for every industry, they hate feeling like you want to get them to buy. And that's why one of the big things I teach in my sales methodology is that before you introduce any solution, Your relationship to a prospect is that of a doctor with a patient. You don't walk to the doctor and say, doc, I have a headache. And the doctor goes, hmm, you need morphine. That's ridiculous. What you do is you go to the doctor, doc, I have a headache. And okay, the doctor starts asking you things to understand what's going wrong in your body. And then they will prescribe something. That's a salesperson. The salesperson prescribes a solution to a problem, but first they have to listen. And first, they have to put the patient first, and the patient is the prospect.

Yep, agreed. So, we were kind of getting into— there's a couple of things that are going in my head here. I'm trying to figure out where to go. But, to get this, there's like, how do you have that happen at scale? and move quickly, right? How do you close those gaps? How do you get teams to change? Part of that is, I like to call it the fallacy of best practices, right? There's this idea that best practices are out there that can be universally used. And actually, then you, to me, you don't stand out at all, right? Because you are just like everybody else. So the things like nurture, like, yeah, okay, fine, do nurture, but don't spend a lot of fucking time on it because— Like no one's waiting for the next nurture email, like virtually, like literally no one.

Yeah.

So like, how can you do those kinds of things and move quickly on the things that are probably not going to be beneficial and those that will and do that at scale? And Sebastian, I'd really like to get your take on like, because it does feel like the best practice and kind of general model in B2B is marketing does one thing, right? Generates leads. There's some sort of handoff process. Sales goes to, is supposed to go research those and close them and move them through the funnel. And it's like, there's not this connection. You mentioned that it should be one team. I tend to agree, even if organizationally it's not like the way that they function should be. But like, how do you do that? How do you get that to happen across those teams and enable them to move quickly in all those kinds of domains?

You're entering one of my favorite topic areas, which is This is a cultural problem in the end. In a company, we're talking about a culture change if you want to implement that transition from having 2 separate teams to having one. Now, there is something that I've consulted companies on in the past, and it's a very niche solution, and it's building what I call a cluster of effective culture. What is a cluster of effective culture? It is a spinoff of your 2 main teams that you're building that from. And you build that with people that are in sales, marketing, and if you have customer success, you include them too. If you don't and you're in a B2B tech company that delivers like custom software, you will need a requirements engineer, which is the other figure that's in touch with the customer at all points. Why do you bring these people together? You bring them together because they need to form a cluster, a cross-functional team. That cross-functional team has to be led either by somebody that has, that has to be led by somebody who is external to them. And that's why sometimes a consultant is needed. Because if you have it led by marketing, sales won't listen. If you have it led by sales, marketing will feel victimized. If you have it led by a tech or a customer success person, everybody will feel like the authority is not in the room. So what you do, you bring an external, you take somebody else from the company that's capable, or you hire them with that purpose and you bring them in and you have a cluster of effective culture. The key is that the person, the person leading them is an enabler, is somebody who's there to just correct the course every once in a while, is somebody that's looking at what happens and helping them distinguish between, okay, this is a new best practice or this actually it's a great idea or this idea sucks. What you have is that over the course of 3 to 6 months, the cluster will have created their own sets of practices, their own habits, and their own microculture. Now you have an example there of how to take this cluster and start reproducing it how cells reproduce. Separate it, build it somewhere else in the company. Eventually you have enough people doing this that this becomes a new reality and you have a new department, even though I don't like the word. And that's one way to solve it. There's no magic bullet. You will not just build a cluster in 3 weeks, you have a new revenue team and you will not just, you know, tell marketers do this and tell salespeople do that and they will magically come together. Too many rivalries. You need to create a process and give them the opportunity to develop new ways of working together, to build culture, to, you know, get used to each other, to appreciate each other. Because, you know, that's the issue. Sometimes marketing doesn't know what it takes to be on the front line, getting rejected, doing, taking calls, making calls. And sales doesn't know what it takes to be in marketing trying to guess what the customer wants and having pressure on you because you think you're going to lose your job. You need to bring them together in a separate context so that they can start appreciating each other and building those best practices together.

I love that. Like, I've done— like, I've used something like that. I would call it like— I've called it like tiger teams, right? But essentially, right, a small cross-functional group who is very focused on a mission of testing a new way of doing things. And learning from it so that you can, you know, the risks are relatively low. So there's a lot of openness to change and trying new things. And, but I think it's interesting that you've got this like outside indirectly overseeing it or directly overseeing it, but not directly in a kind of an organizational structure where their focus Like, I, the one thing I would add is like, they should be there to help, like when things get off track from what that objective is, right? They bring 'em back to, this is the objective for this.

It's a guide. It's not a boss. It's somebody guiding them.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And it's gotta be somebody who's willing to tell people what they maybe don't wanna hear.

That's why an external works so well for that role because they can take all, They can take it all and they can also, they don't care. They have no stakes. They know nobody. They can just tell people, hey, this doesn't work. Everybody will hate that person. Okay. But in 6 months they'll be gone. Doesn't matter.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, kind of having, and I'm sure we've all, everybody on this call has experienced that when you're the new hire and maybe, and Michael, we talked about this a lot, you know, I was really fortunate to be on 3 go-to-market teams that executed at a really high level. And when you see it done a certain way, and you know, it works a certain way, and then you try to come into a new culture where maybe it's very top-down in the sense that, hey, you just worry about what you need to do. And, you know, you let the executives kind of determine and like the way that played out in my career, you know, going, going to a high-growth, you know, hardware IT company, Where the marketing, you know, the CMO and the marketing director were like, hey, listen, as the marketing ops person, we want you attached at the hip with the sales team and we want you out in front supporting them any way that they need. And then you go to another culture where, you know, I think we talked about this last time, like 2 weeks in, I set up a weekly meeting with 2 of our sales guys. And I immediately got an email that was like, why are you setting up meetings with the sales team? It's like, well, this is like, this is kind of just how it's done. Like, I'm the new marketing ops guy. Don't you want me like attached to their agency?

Red flag number one, right?

Yo, it was a red flag. That was just the first one.

But so, you know, terrifying.

It is, man, because it kind of goes back to like, once you see it done a certain way, and actually, let me kind of provide some context. I went to this company. And it was the complete opposite culture-wise and execution-wise from the company I was at before. The interesting part is I stayed at that company the longest I stayed at any company, and it made me miserable. It damn near made me depressed. But what I didn't notice at the time was I actually needed that context in my career because I had never truly been in a dysfunctional— like, I worked on a huge enterprise project with Microsoft and Kroger. But Microsoft, it is so easy to work with Microsoft because they are so razor sharp in execution that like I, up to that point in my career, had I dealt with some like headwinds trying to push things through? Yeah, but most of the time we were able to go make those happen. But this was a culture where it was like, oh my God, we are doing everything the wrong way. We're still trying to run this like 2005 playbook and it's 2022, it's 2023 and nothing— we're 6 months into this go-to-market motion and nothing's working. And at the time, I didn't realize why I needed that context in my career. But what that experience showed me was just, this is how things truly break down when there is no organizational alignment, when there is no clear leadership, when you have leadership that on Monday says, we're going to do it this way. And then by Friday, that plan has totally changed. And then you see how that matriculates throughout the organization, how it erodes trust across the team. And then ultimately, it just completely erodes morale because everybody gets to a point where it's just like nothing I'm doing is working, and I have no idea what they want me to execute on. And and a large part of that is because I don't feel like I actually have ownership of what I'm working on. I'm just being told to basically sit down, shut up, and just do what you're told, right? And just seeing how that completely eviscerated a culture within twelve months, and. Next thing you know, you see people leaving left and right. It's like this all could have been prevented had we— and granted, now this was a European company versus an American company, so totally operated in a different way. But you just kind of see, and I needed that context to understand why does it need to be done this way versus this way. And I think that's why we feel so convicted about, you know, that front— you hear me talk so much about frontline alignment and frontline execution now. Because that was kind of like my big light bulb of like, we could build you the best data model ever. We could do winning by design, we could do all these different data models. But if you guys don't know how to really act on that, if there's not that ownership, that accountability, and that trust built within your culture between marketing, sales, and customer success, nothing we do for you is going to work regardless. It might work for a few months, but then—

I mean, the people and the culture is huge.

Yeah, exactly.

So you brought this up, like when you work with your clients, I think you told me, Garrett, that you have something that you guys have, I guess, a methodology or framework that you call Strike, I think, that is to help streamline, I was gonna say marketing teams, but it sounds like to Sebastian's point, right? revenue teams to seamlessly, like, to actually execute more seamlessly and better. Maybe between the two of you, if you can maybe walk us through, like, what is that and what's kind of, what are some typical results?

Yeah, so, you know, the way that we think about our frameworks, our methodologies are, you know, these aren't like rigid frameworks where it's like, you need to do it this way. It's more of a mental model And it's more of a tactical execution framework for how do I actually get out in front of these signals? How do I get out in front of these leads? How, you know, to Sebastian's point, how do we follow up with these leads, reengage stale deals? Like, who owns what? How does marketing, you know, kind of get the conversation rolling? Hey, we've got 10 deals in our pipeline that we've carried for 3 quarters that we just cannot get any kind of answer out of. Like, how do we get those reengaged? How does marketing and sales work together to reengage those prospects and just get a final answer? Even if it's a no, at least we can get it out of the pipeline and we have a more accurate forecast. We know what we— that's one less thing that we're wasting our time trying to execute on. That's one less thing that we're wasting our time worrying about. And really, I think at the end of the day, when you boil it all down, we're really trying to simplify what do you need to be doing on a day-to-day basis as a marketing ops person or as a go-to-market manager? And what do you need to be doing on a day-to-day basis as a sales leader or a sales manager And then how do we get you to oscillate and work together to where, again, it's not like there's 3 separate teams here? And I think this is an area that like you guys highlighted, and Sebastian and I view it as like, I don't really— we might say marketing and sales and customer success. I don't view it as 3 separate teams. And the goal of Strike and the goal of SWAT is to get these teams to act as one team. Versus thinking, well, that is customer success's fault, right? Because customer success is always thrown in a cubicle in the corner with zero resources, and they're asked to basically be an extension of sales. Yet you go into so many organizations and CS has literally no idea what's going on and what's being prioritized. And by the way, we also need you to be customer support, not just customer success. So, you know, our goal with this is to get teams to work together as one individual team. Think of it like a football team or a basketball team. You got offense, defense, and special teams. All right. But when we talk about, you know, hey, the reason the Bengals lost this game, you're the coach, just doesn't just say, well, it was offense's fault, or it was the defense's fault, or it was, you know, special teams' fault. It's like, hey, we lost this as a team, we won it as a team. And the teams that excel at a really high level are the ones that understand the people that are executing at the front lines. I know what my role is, I know what my job is. And I know I'm given the ability to execute on that at high level without these restraints, where I feel like if I go beyond what my scope of work is, am I stepping on somebody's toes? Am I going to get reprimanded for trying to go a little bit above and beyond maybe what my job description is? And so we really try to boil all of that down into a simplified methodology for here's how we execute as one team, one motion, one mission.

Sebastian, any additional thoughts on that?

I would say that's something I've noticed. And one of the reasons why, you know, Strike is Gareth's baby, SWOT is my baby. And one of the reasons why I created SWOT is because I've noticed something. It is companies consistently fail at strategy because they all understand strategy as goal setting. Now, why am I bringing this up? I am bringing this up because if most companies fail a strategy, which means they fail at positioning, which means they failed at understanding their customers, it means the sales and marketing teams in 90 or 98% of cases don't have the tools to succeed at what they do. Because if you don't have a proper positioning in your company, you have a lot of guessing, a lot of chaos, and a lot of conflict and a lot of trouble at the management level. Now, that is not something you can solve if you're a salesperson or a marketer, but you still need to do your job. You still need to deliver on these KPIs. You still need to have to close. You still need to generate leads. So Fixing also positioning and strategy for companies requires a mindset shift. And it is a sales cycle I've been through that takes 6 to 12 months. That's a lot of time for a company and for a revenue team. Now, SWOT comes in place for the sales team to basically make up for the fact that the company, that 98% of companies have no clear positioning and no clear strategy. So that means that my sales framework, my sales method is probably the only sales method that will allow you as a salesperson to get to know exactly what you need from the prospect or prospects in a multi-stakeholder type of deal to build rapport, but also to influence them and to make them trust you, make them say, okay, you guys care about me. So SWOT is a safeguard when everything at management levels fails. If even marketing were to fail, you still get a system that works one-to-one and one-to-many in sales context. Now, if you combine that with Stripe, you have, as a salesperson, you are equipped with beforehand all the tools you need to even, to have even better chances of closing Or pushing forward the deal in front of you. And that's what these 2 frameworks do. They make up for the fact that there is a massive misunderstanding at the top of what it means to be in this market today. And we make up for that at the execution level, at the day-to-day. You know what to say, how to say it, you know which process to take them through in order to earn their trust. That's what we do.

Yeah. I mean, what I, what I'm hearing through both of these is that, you know, what you're providing is a way for people to really focus on what they, what's controllable, where they have agency, right? Yeah. There may be all this chaos happening within the organization, but I can control what I do today, this next 5 minutes, next 30 minutes, whatever. And I think that's probably a good, good to To recognize, no matter what the context.

Sure. One thing there, Gareth. You know, we hear so much about the COVID-era tactics and everything. But if you think back, let's think back to like 2010, we didn't really have marketing ops, we didn't have sales ops, we didn't have go-to-market ops, we didn't have any of this. And when I first started out, I was doing Salesforce consulting for banks and credit unions. And we were basically just calling it the customer journey, which, you know, a lot of people still use that to this day. But it was never— over time, over my, you know, 12-year, 13-year career now, we started siloing these specific functions into marketing ops or sales ops or whatever. And now we have these 5 different groups. And I think the intention behind all of this was we were trying to simplify what maybe was becoming a little bit more complex. But through that, we created the very silos that we seeked to destroy. We created the very silos ourselves that we were trying to get rid of. We were trying to create these functions as a means to get people to individually focus on their area of operations. But through that, over time, really all we've done is created these silos where nobody speaks to each other and nobody takes accountability. Now we're at a point where in a lot of companies, Maybe not so much as an enterprise, but in smaller companies, it's like, why, you know, you have 75 employees and 8 of those employees are RevOps. Like, that doesn't make sense. Like, we're trying to force these functions to be a part of the business that maybe don't even fit into the business. So I just wanted to add that as a little bit of a side note.

Yeah, makes sense. Well, guys, I would love to continue the conversation, but we're gonna have to cut it there. So first off, thank you guys for the insights. It's been really interesting. I wish we could go longer. Go one at a time. If people want to connect with you or learn more about either of these things or what you're doing, what's the best way to do it? Gareth, you first.

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Gareth, G-A-R-R-A-T-H, Gareth Robinson, or you can check out our website at www.go. Revexcel.com, Revexcel.com. You can find me on LinkedIn mainly, Sebastian D.P.

Hidalgo. I—that's my main platform. I'm also on Twitter. Don't look me up there. I'm also on Threads. Don't look me up there. Go to the website, as Garrett say, and spelled pretty well. LinkedIn is the main platform. You want to send me a message, talk more about SWOT, talk about sales, and just you know get to know each other. I'm always open to answering.

Terrific. All right. And Gareth, I mean, Sebastian, when we talked before we started, if you find your way to Dallas, let me know.

I will.

All right.

Thanks for having us on, guys. Mike, thank you. Yeah, appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you guys coming on. I love your insights and what you're talking about. These are important conversations for everybody.

So we appreciate you taking the time.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, as always, thank you, uh, to everyone here, and then thank you to our listeners and our audience continuing to support us. If you have suggestions for topics or guests or want to be a guest, reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we'd be happy to talk to you about that. Till next time, bye everybody.

Yep, see you guys. Thank you.