5 Goals to Help You Think Like a Chief Growth Officer in 2021 with ANNUITAS CRO, Lauren Goldstein

Thanks everyone for joining. I love discussions like this that are hopefully a little bit less of a me just presenting to you and really more of a conversation and dialogue. But thank you so much for having me here. As Alex said, the goal today is to think like a chief growth officer. A little bit of background on myself. I'm a 25 year B2B sales and marketing veteran and have had the opportunity to work across really hundreds of organizations everywhere from 5 million in ARR on up to 50 billion and more. I mean really the gamut in my career. I think some of the biggest lessons learned along the way. Listen, we'll have an opportunity to talk about people, process, content, technology, but really setting a set of goals and a mindset and helping drive change within an organization is something that I think is the common denominator amongst every organization that I've had an opportunity to work with. I'm currently the chief revenue officer at a business growth organization called Annuitus and I am also the co founder of a great nonprofit called Women in Revenue. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end and am joined today by one of my most treasured partners in crime, Anna Claire Hayden. And I'll let her just take a moment to introduce herself.

Yeah, thanks Lauren. Hi everyone. Like Lauren said, my name is Anna Claire. I work with Lauren at Annuitus. I lead all of our demand marketing efforts. So I have been in the marketing world, demand generation, demand marketing, especially for about seven, almost eight years now. So I have a lot of experience, experience implementing programs, creating content repository, establishing voices. But I've also had a pretty big focus on growth and how leads can become actual revenue opportunities which is not always something that you see in a marketing leader. So I have a lot of experience there as well and I'm happy to add my voice from a marketing perspective to today's discussion. Great.

I figured as a sales leader, as a growth leader I'd have a lot more credibility by having my demand marketing leader sitting at my side. She can keep me honest as we jump into this. So I wanted to start with a little bit of tongue in cheek because Hope is not a 2021 growth strategy. I'm not sure if anyone was like putting that down on the books as their number one goal for 2021, but it's not going to work for you. And so I did license this marketoonist. I think they are amazing at kind of, you know, hitting on some of the weaknesses and challenges in our industry of B2B. You know, of course in this case, they're hoping that there's a dream that's going to send their sales through the roof. But. But the fact is it's hard work and there's a lot of planning and orchestration that we as growth leaders need to be thinking about. One of the other caveats that I'll share is that when I talk about growth marketing, it's really a mindset of an organization. It's not about what a salesperson does or what a marketing person does, or what a CEO dictates. It's really about a mindset of growth in an organization. And I love this quote that I came across from Bill Gates. Well, first of all, I think he's just a genius. But it's so true today more than ever that success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent. And if we think about the businesses that are going to come out of 2020 in a better place, whether their top line growth or their bottom line growth is in a different place, or whether they are just orchestrating and building a foundation to scale in the future, the organizations and the leaders that are acting and living this are the ones that are going to be successful. And as Alex said in the beginning, feel free to throw in questions along the way and we'll definitely try to keep this as interactive as possible. So as I was thinking about this presentation and where we could really be focused for 2021, I wanted to just kind of like take a step back now that I've told you what we need to be successful in 2021 and say 2020 has of course been the year of the pivot, right? Like, if there's like a flag that we're making to kind of mark what we've been through, it's the year of the pivot. And we've had to reinvent how we engage with prospects and customers. Right? Like events are out the window. Like, we totally had to reinvent how we did that. We had to change our new logo, sales motion. We couldn't be face to face with our customers whiteboarding. We couldn't be having an intimate conversation over dinner to really get to the heart of a customer's challenge or talk to a prospect about how we can be game changing for them. We've had to step away from all of that. Of all of the companies, I've spoken to every single one of them, the headline is that we had to double down on customer success. We couldn't just hope that all of the Net new pipeline opportunities were going to be there like they had been in the past. I mean, there was months where things were awfully quiet and so we really had to be resourceful and figure out how do we double down on customer success. I love whoever highlighted that. Thank you. And then of course, we had to like reforecast and reforecast and then reforecast again and the list goes on. As we get into some of the breakout sessions, I actually think that it would be interesting to dive into some of this a little bit more and to hear some of the things that organizations have done. Anna Claire, are you giving me those awesome highlights? I love it.

Not me, but I wish I could take credit.

Thank you. This is awesome teamwork, whoever's doing that. And in the breakout sessions that we'll do in about 20 minutes, again, I think it would be really helpful to hear some of people's individual successes and their organization successes. So I will give a caveat and say there are a lot of things that we need to be thinking about to support 2021 growth and we'll talk more about those specific in your organizations in the breakouts. But these are five goals that are really top of mind for me as I think about the growth of our organization as a sales leader and also the work that we're doing on behalf of our clients that are at all stages of maturity. So I'm going to just jump right in the first one. As I said, growth is a mindset. This is not like a thing that sellers do or a thing that marketers do or a thing that the CEO dictates. It is a mindset. And it really starts by shifting away from, I think, well intended but often random acts of marketing where an organization has a new feature they want to talk about or a new launch they want to be in front of, or a new piece of content they want to promote. And so at that moment in time, from an inside out perspective, they are blasting off these communications. It's a webinar, it's a press release. And the problem with that type of approach to going out to market is it's disruptive, it's not helpful. It may be checking a lot of boxes you have as an organization, but it's not really solving problems for your customer or for your prospect. So the first thing that needs to really be a focus and a goal for organizational growth is to be thinking about how we can be really addressing the needs of the customer, how we can really be shifting to more of a problem solving, helpful mode than Pushing out random communications. It's definitely switching to more of an outside in mindset than an inside out. And Anna Claire, as I'm going through these, I definitely love the yin and yang of hearing. If there's anything I've missed that the marketer on the call should be thinking about.

Yeah, I was going to jump in and say this shifting to a growth mindset from a marketing position can be hard. And it really depends on your overall organization, the mindset of your leaders, your sales team, of whomever you're working closely with. And I say that because a lot of time, what we. A lot of times what we see is that marketers kind of get. You get pulled in a lot of directions, right? Especially if you're a smaller team or you have a lot of initiatives that you're trying to overcome in the next year is you start to get pulled in a lot of directions and you tend to be in a highly visible role where people are asking you, why aren't we promoting this new product feature or this release or, you know, we need to talk about this topic. And in those cases, that's where this shift to the mindset really becomes not only important, but a guidepost. Because when you have said, at the start of the year, everyone, we are thinking about growth and you're able to use that kind of like an anchor throughout the year and point back and you could ask the question and say, does this contribute to our goals that will support growth or does it not? And not only will that help you succeed in your own job, but it helps the organization stay focused on really delivering against whatever goals you set.

Awesome. Thank you. All right, so there's a lot here. I'm going to kind of boil it down. At the end of the day, the organizations that will be successful in 20 and 21 and beyond are those where there is alignment, organizational alignment, around KPIs and around goals. I sat in on a session earlier today with the chief Revenue officer from Demand Base, and she was fantastic. And of course, I asked the question as she was talking about sales and growth, and I said, so who owns the number? And I completely agree with her response. Everybody owns the number. Everybody in the organization, whether your role is head of sales or chief revenue officer, whether your goal is head of demand marketing or whether your role is in product or another important function within the organization. Number one is that there needs to be a clear set of goals defined and aligned on across the entire organization. So in a recent survey that our organization conducted of B2B marketers well, shouldn't say B2B marketers of B2B leaders across a lot of different industries, 72% of the business leaders said that their chief marketing officer was actually measured against the wrong goal. And I find that a little bit shocking. But I also find it to be a good reminder that as sales leaders or as executives with an organization, as you're setting out what success looks like for the business, every single role within the organization needs to be laddered back to that. So not to put Anna Claire on the spot, but you know, as we do our, we're in the middle of doing our, you know, finalizing our 2021 budgets and sales goals and growth goals and Anna Claire, how do you hook into those?

Anna Claire is here to support revenue growth. So my goals tend to align to the earlier stages of leads that become opportunities that become closed one deals. So everything like Lauren said that I'm working towards ladders up to that same end goal. I have co responsibility over a certain stage opportunity that our sales team does. We both have a number to hit there. So everything that I do that's my goal is to help set the stage so that we can have more opportunities and more closed ones and achieve a higher level of growth.

So I think that we can definitely spend time either in the breakout or later talking about some of the KPIs that we tend to focus on within our organization. Things like the lift that demand marketing can bring or of course things like what our conversion rate is from top of funnel through the funnel and things like engage to close one velocity. So there's a lot of kind of devil in the detail here, but I think the headline is that everybody in the organization is aligned around this core set of goals. And when one person misses their number, it's really everybody that are aligned to that number that need to figure out how to retool it.

And I'll just add one more point of clarification because I see a couple questions in the chat around how marketing is measured or how this works in the real world. I'll give you some real world examples. So for us, one of my most important numbers is the number of qualified leads. And we set a definition around what a qualified lead is. So that's a whole separate conversation. But it is a definition that both marketing and sales agree upon. So I'm not saying they're qualified and then sales says no they're not. We've agreed upon it together. That is a number that I own. I'm expected to generate a certain number of Qualified leads per month, per quarter, per year, however you want to break it down. That's just one example of one of those leading indicators that I was talking about that we then can show. You know, with so many qualified leads, I mean, you all know how funnel math works. We can expect to see so many opportunities. So that's just an example of real world. How is marketing measured on this? How does it actually work? Great.

All right, I'm going to keep us moving along. So incorporate ABX is the third goal that I think growth leaders should be looking at as we go into 2021. And what we mean by ABX is that we need to have an account based mindset across all demand, marketing and sales. And ABM has I think been like the flavor of the year or maybe of the last couple of years. This is where I get to go into the way back machine and say, like I remember 20 years ago it was actually a thing and it was really a basic kind of economic principle. You know, that started with the 8020 rule. And there was a great economist who said like, what if, you know, 80% of our revenue came from 20% of our customers and perhaps we should be spending more time and energy focusing on them. So I don't want to oversimplify the notion of account based, but you know, what we mean by ABX is that account based marketing isn't buying a tool. Account based marketing isn't, you know, it's not a tactic, it's a mindset. I think a lot of these things, it's a mindset, it's saying that there will be a group of people that fall into our icp, our ideal customer profile. We will care about them more. We will focus to the best of our ability on targeting them. We will make sure that our content speed, we will personalize our content to the best of our ability so that they're getting what they need when they need it and the right channels. And so it really ties in. Having an account based mindset should be one of those pervasive things that really ties into all of the marketing that you're doing. I had a conversation with a company about a week or two ago and they said, you know what our problem is that we do not have enough leads in the top of our funnel. We don't have enough leads. And we dove in deeper with them and we realized that in order for them to make enough sales, they would have had to like quadruple the number of leads at the top of the funnel. Well, there weren't even that many like prospects in their universe that they could target. Like, it was an impossible equation. And so we turned it around a little bit and we said, what if you just targeted better? What if you put a little bit more effort towards the people that you really want to bring in as customers? Like, what if you did that and instead of having a funnel that looks like a really big martini or margarita glass, what if instead your funnel looked a little bit more like a pint glass? And so I think this notion of really embracing your icp, embracing your key accounts with better content, with better targeting will end up giving you better results in the year ahead. It'll be a lot more efficient and ultimately will generate the kind of throughput through your pipeline that you're looking for. I think Anna Claire could share case in point. And actually, I think I need to speed up a little bit. I'm being mindful of time. Okay, I'm going to keep going. We'll talk more about some of these things in the breakouts. Customer success is a priority number four. I had the opportunity over the summer months to participate salesforce.com or Salesforce put on a CRO roundtable and about a dozen of us were invited to participate in it. And it was an awesome opportunity to talk with other sales leaders, including like Jocelyn Brown and Al Acadia, who I just adore about what was working for them and not working for them in 2020 and what they were going to really double down on. As I shared in my introduction, customer success, really figuring out how to empower your customers and using tools like mutual action plans to create true win wins. And we can talk a little bit more about mutual action plans, both with prospects and customers in the breakout sessions. It's something that I'll definitely want to talk a little bit about in our breakout sessions. And then the last but not least piece that we wanted to highlight in terms of goals for growth leaders in 2021 is this notion of really orchestrating around the buyer journey. This is kind of like core to how every organization who wants to deliver great customer experience should be focused everything you do. And Anna Claire actually did a great job of highlighting this related to the shift from tactical to strategic demand. We really need to be thinking first and foremost about what does that customer experience need to be, what do they want to hear about, what decisions do we need to help inform? How can we be helpful? And so we, when we really orchestrate everything we do around the buyer journey, our content starts to be created through a lens that's gonna be helpful. We start to think about our lead management processes, what their experience is on the web, what their experience is as they're being nurtured, how we decide when to hand them off to sales. That's all focused around the buyer journey. And we ultimately end up thinking about what are the SLAs, what are the team requirements to make that experience great. And then last but not least, we're thinking about, well, what technology do we need to enable that orchestration? And really thinking about everything we do around that buyer journey. So I'm going to try to get us into a breakout session where we can, I think, dive more into these questions. But when we look at what the 2021 growth considerations are and what a growth leader will lead with, it's again shifting to the growth mindset, defining and aligning goals, incorporating an account based approach, making customer success a priority, and really orchestrating around people, process content and technology. I think with that, Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, but we're going to break everybody out into two groups to kind of dive a little bit deeper into some of these topics.