Colin (00:02.358)

Welcome to today's episode of The Growth System, the podcast that looks at the world of B2B growth through a systems thinking lens. I'm Colin Shakespeare.

Chris (00:11.82)

I'm Chris Bayless.

Colin (00:13.654)

And today we're going to do something a little bit different. So we were recently asked to talk at the B2B Sales Innovation Expo in London. And a few people have suggested that it would be great to talk through some of the concepts that Chris talked about on stage on the podcast. So that's what we're going to do today. Now, the talk was really about sales and marketing alignment, which is a topic that regular listeners will be aware that we've covered before.

Chris, your talk had a bit of a different take on things, so why don't you tell us a bit about it?

Chris (00:50.67)

Yeah, sure thing. So, as you say, we talk a lot about alignment on the podcast. It is very much top of the growth system, bingo card. But the talk I did at BTB Expo specifically focused on how to leverage the principle of sort of self-organization in systems, self-organization in teams to drive alignment within sales and marketing.

And specifically, it talked about the role of goal setting in achieving this. And I think it's fair to say that it actually got a really great response from the audience. You never quite know when you're talking about some of these slightly left field systems concepts, how they're going to go down with the general audience. But it got a fantastic reception. So excited to kind of share some of those as we go through the pod today.

Colin (01:43.222)

Yeah, now one of the things I remember you sort of kicking off with, where I think people started to really pay attention, was you kind of told a bit of a story that I guess was really useful because it defined what alignment is and is not. And I guess your moment of realization, sort of when the penny dropped for you around alignment. So it'd be great if you could kind of go into that.

Chris (02:12.602)

Yeah, sure. I mean, this was absolutely a true story. And we had a client, kind of tech professional services client, fantastic customer. They were with us for years and years and years until they got acquired. And this was actually one of the first times I'd met them in person. It was, I don't know, five years ago, and

we've turned up at this sort of sales and marketing sink is something that traditionally we used to do on teams, but we all met in London. And just the difference of seeing people around a table, you know, it was that sort of classic Monday morning, staggering in there with a, you know, with a hot coffee, having had, you know, from in my particular case, four hours of travel to get there for a, for a 9am as I live in the back of beyond in the Welsh borders. And

We sort of sat there and there are, five or six people, slightly adversarial sales on one side, marketing on the other. But everyone's chatting, everyone's super friendly, everyone's talking about their weekends. And I'm like, yeah, amazing. Like what a great team. But as soon as things got down to business, it all kind of changed a little bit. So

you know, we go around the table and everyone's doing their update and the head of marketing is talking about how many leads have been created in the last week, how many ebook downloads, webinars, signups, contact forms, you know, all the usual stuff where they're sourced from. And it was clear that clearly there's a lot of great stuff going on. But I was looking at the sales team and in a way that you just can't see on a screen share, people would just

getting bored, know, hands were going to phones, laptop screens are coming back up, people are fidgeting in their chairs. And this, this was just this moment for me where I was just wondering like, why, you know, why is this boring? Surely having lots of MQLs to chase down to close, you know, to cash some commissions in on. Clearly that's what you want, isn't it? Why don't they care? That was my kind of like dawning realization and

Chris (04:32.006)

If I'm honest, went to quite a lot of meetings like that subsequently before the penny really did drop for me, which is that all of those great results, supposedly the great results, I think I should say, weren't really anything of the sort, because the sales team didn't care.

about ebook downloads, because the sales team wasn't going to get what they needed to get from an ebook download. They had targets to hit. They had targets to hit this month. Webinar attendees, ebook downloads, people that engage with the content weren't going to get them there. And it just dawned on me that this visually outwardly really well aligned team that gets together, you know, every Monday, the talks all week

that really does genuinely get on well isn't actually aligned at all. They're just playing lip service to each other, going back to their day-to-day roles and getting on with achieving their own goals and targets. it just put a light bulb on in my brain that this was so common.

people probably didn't even see it for what it was, which is superficial alignment, you know, a regular meeting where everyone gets along, but nothing meaningful actually happens that propels the growth team in one unified direction. and that for me was almost, I guess, bit of an, like I say, a bit of a light bulb moment, because it made me realize that there was a problem to be fixed here that

probably most people weren't seeing. And the size of the prize for getting it right, as I subsequently discovered, was pretty substantial.

Colin (06:23.434)

Yeah, indeed. And just before we go on to the size of the prize, which is pretty substantial, I mean, this really chimes with my experience as well. And being on the sales side where, I mean, something that might have missed in those early meetings isn't the reason that salespeople didn't care about the ebook downloads wasn't just because that's probably not going to help us get a target. We actually don't believe that they're real anyway. It's just a number.

And we're quite happy for our nice friend in marketing that we share stories about at the weekend with to get paid their bonus or meet their KPI or whatever it is that they need to do as long as we are not on the hook for actually exposing the fiction by trying to contact the alleged person who allegedly downloaded the ebook. And I could tell you stories where I've tried to contact someone and

who allegedly downloaded an ebook two months ago and in fact, they'd been dead for two years and there's not an isolated incident. the misalignment is actually perhaps even deeper than that. But yeah, the size of the prize, I think was part of what was in the title of your talk at Expo and I think it was part of the reason that it was such a draw. So why don't we go into that a bit.

Chris (07:28.975)

Yeah.

Chris (07:43.918)

Yes, yeah, absolutely. As always, we say there are a lot of studies out there, and there are a lot of stats, but in this particular case, they are actually all pretty well aligned. And it suggests that to kind of chime with the point that you just made,

Only 12 % of sellers think that MQLs are actually valuable. The data is just 73 % and never followed up on at all. And funny enough, 79 % don't convert. And I think that's a really scary set of numbers when you think that is the cornerstone of most companies' marketing efforts.

And actually the point I'm making here isn't actually that MQL is a rubbish and we shouldn't be doing ebooks. It's actually more a point about communication and collective responsibility to organisational goals. mean, ultimately this is one of the sort of root issues we get with a lack of sales and marketing alignment or superficial sales and marketing alignment. And if we can unravel that problem,

I genuinely believe that getting this right is the biggest opportunity almost every business has to boost their growth rate. And everyone listening to this podcast, it's probably the biggest opportunity you've got to effectively get some free growth that doesn't come from spending more money or doing more things or doing different things in terms of your campaign strategy. you know, what

I talked about really in terms of that sort of size of the prize when we were doing the talk is reflecting particularly into a study by LinkedIn and serious insights. As you alluded to, it was sort of the title of the of the talk that you know, this study suggested that in the US alone, the cost of misaligned sales and marketing teams is a trillion dollars every year. And

Chris (09:49.582)

I initially looked at that trillion dollars, I just thought, you know, what a stupid number, how the hell do you come up with a lovely round trillion dollars? You know, it just seemed not in any way credible.

Colin (10:02.028)

think we wrote, one of us wrote next to it in the notes from the previous episode, like really in brackets.

Chris (10:09.018)

Yes, it was, you're right. It was in a previous episode, wasn't it? And I think that was really actually the sort of linchpin for going and looking at it I'm a sad individual. thought, let's go and look at what's behind that number. And that was sort of one of the starting thought processes actually for writing that talk for B2B Expo. And the digging was interesting on that one because

When you actually try and put that trillion dollars into some context, first up, it actually equates to less than 5 % of the annual reported revenues for Fortune 500 companies combined. So 500 companies in the US, trillion dollars is less than 5 % of their revenue, which I just think is wild. And in a way, actually, something that maybe is even more out there is that

It's actually less than 2.8 % of the contribution to the US economy, to US GDP of private companies, which tells you two things actually, which is that how big the Fortune 500 are as a percentage of the total number of organizations in the US. But also it tells you that fundamentally trillion dollars actually didn't have much money, you know, when set in that context. And when you kind of look at the study and you start picking into like, how did they get to that calculation?

Again, there are lots of sources, there are lots of studies and there isn't a huge degree of alignment here, but you look at some of the ones that they use and you can triangulate them against other well kind of well respected studies. The figure that they've used is that well aligned sales and marketing teams generate 208 % more revenue from marketing source leads. So that

you know, that is a significant driver of that number. They get stuff from their marketing, you know, 2X plus, they're 67 % better at closing and generate 10 % more revenue overall. So you look at the figures and you look at the trillion dollar figure and you realize that actually that trillion dollars is probably quite conservative. The prize, as we talked about, is probably bigger. It's probably double that.

Chris (12:33.146)

that's in the US, you you extrapolate that over a mere, you know, shrink that down into a market like the UK to sort of right size it for, for, you know, the total economic output. It's massive. You know, it's, it's a properly massive number. I mean, if we just pick one figure out of that, and say 10 % more revenue overall, like

just by nailing sales and marketing alignment, I sort of paused on that figure for a second, you could increase your revenue by 10%. Now, if you're a seed phase startup, 10 % maybe doesn't sound very exciting, but this study was based on mature organizations, large scale organizations, 10 % is huge. In a scrappy startup, mean, it's probably, you probably add a zero to that.

just because they don't know what they're doing to start with, because no one does when they're in that first stage of trying to prove value and trying to build processes and trying to scale them. So, you use it as heuristic, but I think that the data suggests that the opportunity is huge, whatever number you put on that. And that's only counting the financial cost, you know, the financial gain. Misaligned teams hurt customer experience.

They hurt retention rates. They hurt employee experience. You know, they hurt customer lifetime value. When marketing and sales aren't joined up and you know, they're handing over half baked stuff to sales, sales isn't following it up. know, information isn't being transferred. All the same questions are being answered again by the prospect. Like that is a rubbish experience. And, and that is obviously what is driving these numbers, right?

67 % better at closing, well, we're actually just delivering a better, more joined up experience where we're understanding the value being sought by the prospect better, by having a better understanding of the total journey. It stands to reason that you're going to close better if you do that. If you actually follow up on the leads that are being sent from marketing because they actually have some value because you've connected on what they're supposed to be in the first place to Xing the revenue you're getting from marketing source leads.

Chris (14:55.074)

again, seems probably pretty conservative. You can see where the numbers come from. And I think that's quite exciting. And it was why I wanted to kind of lean into that in the the talk that we that we did and and you know why I thought it was absolutely worth talking about it again on the on the podcast today.

Colin (15:11.942)

Yeah, and at this point, once you start going through these numbers, suddenly all the phones come out and everyone's like taking photos of your slides. And there's a great point about actually, I wonder if that number, that trillion dollars number is probably not thinking about the lifetime customer value. What's the difference in a lifetime, the customer lifetime value, If they're having this joined up.

Chris (15:20.602)

It was.

Colin (15:40.938)

Aligned experience with you, then it's probably going to be vastly more than 10 % of an increase, I would imagine.

Chris (15:49.552)

100%. Yeah. Yeah, no, this study was just was just looking at total contract value, you know, deal one.

Colin (15:56.566)

Yeah, exactly. it's a simplistic metrics, I think. So it's probably a lot more. So obviously, this is one of the biggest opportunities that most businesses have out there without actually really, it's not necessarily connected to how many leads you can generate or how many more customers you can win. It's kind of about fixing what you do within the organization. I guess the next.

place that we should go with this is to figure out where does all this misalignment come from? Like if it's such a problem and we're hemorrhaging or just leaving so much money on the table, why does it happen?

Chris (16:38.904)

Yeah. And that's, you know, that's the, well, the trillion dollar question. In a nutshell, it's from siloed thinking in all ways, on all means, in all places. know, businesses, as we have talked about many times before on this podcast, are complex human systems. Their purpose is to create value. And in the systems thinking world, as we've talked about before, we call this value and emergent behavior.

Colin (16:43.34)

Ha ha ha.

Chris (17:07.874)

So what we're really talking about here is that every part of the business working together to form the whole, to create value for the customers, you know, that is this sort of more than the sum of its parts thing that we've talked about before when talking about immersion behavior. And the thing with siloed thinking is that standard business practice says that whilst typically a top-down strategy probably exists,

there will be a vision and there will be a number that has been set for the next year. All of the goal setting, all of the budgeting, all of the strategy happens within functional teams. And it happens in blissful isolation from all the other functional teams in the complex system that we exist in. And that strategy and those budgets and those goals.

get reported back up the chain of command for approval. It is completely normal in most businesses to totally abdicate responsibility for alignment to management teams, to senior management teams. And of course they don't do that because what they're trying to do is fill a spreadsheet in that makes some sort of sense. This siloed thinking is endemic.

in most businesses, it is a sort of standard business practice. I don't think there's even necessarily a recognition that is that there is any other way of doing it. And of course there is. But the problem with this siloed thinking is that it creates what we call goal conflict. And that's a concept again, that we've talked about on the podcast before. But essentially, what goal conflict is, is not thinking about

horizontal alignment predominantly. So businesses are typically really good at vertical alignment, know, that reporting up the chain of command, you know, do all of the numbers add up so that we're going to get to whatever the big number is you told us we needed to get to by the end of the year, you know, what are we going to spend to get that? How does that compare to last year? Very, very sort of verticalized thinking in terms of how we align to goals and plans. But what businesses are typically really bad at.

Chris (19:23.638)

is checking horizontal alignment. So this is where, you know, this is where goal conflict comes from. And it's one of the main reasons for organizational misalignment. You know, it is the, it is the byproduct of the siloed thinking. It is the emergent behavior of the siloed thinking, if you like. And goal conflict ultimately is when two or more seemingly sensible goals like generating X number of MQLs per month and

sales generating a X percent conversion rate from initial conversation to opportunity or simply generate, you know, however many quid by the end of the month, simply don't work together.

It's such a common thing to see, you know, sales and marketing setting their targets, setting their goals, setting their KPIs completely in isolation from each other, thinking that they are both doing the same thing because they're both working towards the same, however many millions number they've been set by the senior team. They are both doing their best and doing good work to do the best thing that they can do in their team to get to the number.

they're not thinking about how it stitches together. And of course in that example that I just gave, generate X number of MQLs, if that's a lot of MQLs, and the goal of conversion rate from initial conversational opportunity is going to be a key metric driving behaviors in the sales team, then funny enough you're not going to follow up on many MQLs because you're trying to hit your conversion rate number, so you're only going to hit the things that you think are going to support the number. You know, we've talked about that before.

as a sort of systems archetype. But it really is this one example, I believe, that is the root cause of sales and marketing misalignment in many organizations. And of course, this isn't really new news, is it? You we've talked about it on the podcast before, but it's a lived experience of most people that work in sales and marketing. know, I'm sure everyone that's listening to the podcast has experienced it in some way, shape or form. But the problem is that nothing changes. And...

Chris (21:32.09)

It's because in business we're taught to be reductionist thinkers. We use phrases like, let's break this down or let's unpack the problem. It's such a normal behavior that much like this sort of siloed approach to goal setting, we don't even question it. And it's this completely normalized business behavior of solving problems by chunking them down to their smallest possible component parts that

causes the siloed thinking in the first place. It's the reason that, you know, we have, yeah, I guess it's the reason that when we've got a problem in sales and marketing teams, we fix it by trying to fix a component. You know, we replace the CMO, we hire a new agency, we switch out a bit of software. You know, we're hunting solutions down by changing elements.

and not thinking about the system. obviously for fans of the podcast, you already know what I'm going to say next. This is the opposite of systems thinking. In systems thinking, we understand that behaviors, whether they're positive or negative, are actually the byproduct of the relationship between all the elements in the system, the component parts.

Colin (22:36.812)

Thanks

Chris (22:55.308)

It's the component parts that most businesses to say we need to bubble things down to so they don't look at the relationships. And it's these kind of interconnections that create the emergence and it's really this that is driving misalignment. It is a lack of focus on the things that are actually connecting the bits in the system in simple terms. So it's kind of natural that if you

you know, try to keep solving business problems by breaking the solution down into component parts, like what are marketing doing and what are sales doing, then you're going to leave yourself wide open for goal conflict. And you're going to bake misalignment into the processes that you're using. So in a nutshell, that's where misalignment comes from. But I think the other common sort of the culprit that we've got to kind of highlight here as well is short term targets.

short-termism and setting monthly targets is the single stupidest but equally completely logical thing that almost all businesses do. It's a sort paradoxical relationship and it's due to the fact that whilst it's essential for businesses to set targets and to measure their attainment across the year,

The very act of doing so is likely to be hurting their ability to actually achieve the targets. And the reason for this is that people do what they're measured on. A concept we've talked about on the podcast a few times before. If you measure and particularly compensate people on achieving monthly targets, then they're always going to have their eyes down focusing on what they can do to close this month. And they're not going to be developing long-term opportunities.

And this is never more of a problem than it is in long sales cycle B2B organizations where we spend most of our time. And it is basically the reason why that 79 % of MQLs never convert to opportunities that I mentioned earlier. It's that salespeople aren't incentivized or in many cases even given the time to go and develop those things, or it's contrary to some other goal that they've got. It's conflicting with, you know, as I mentioned earlier, something like a conversion rate goal. So

Colin (25:18.73)

It's a good point. may very well have goal conflict with two conflicting goals that are just your own personal goals within the organization. Not just misaligned between sales and marketing, but you may have two conflicting priorities.

Chris (25:37.978)

Absolutely, absolutely. it's this sort of, the solution is holism. The solution, of course, is thinking about things as a system as we, as we always implore people to do on the podcast. And really the way that we kick that off is with shared goals. And that's what a lot of the, you know, the talk was about. And I guess we can, we can unpack a bit now.

Chris (26:07.406)

So.

Colin (26:07.552)

Yeah, actually, like, this is another point where people are getting the phones out and taking photos of your slides because it's like, wait, there is actually a solution out there. And I guess you see the heads nodding. like all good ideas, this seems obvious. It's like, if it's so obvious, why are we in this position? But yes, it.

Sorry, go ahead. Shared goals is certainly foundational to the whole thing.

Chris (26:39.256)

Yeah, I think it's such a good point, isn't it? Because it, like most good solutions to problems, it is really obvious when you when you think about it. But it doesn't happen. You know, I think it's a strange thing. And it's just that baked in siloed thinking. yeah, shared goals. mean, shared goals and cross functional teaming, to a degree, which I know are not necessarily the same thing.

But getting connected, you know, whether that is by bringing the sales and marketing team to become one team, or whether it is just being really good at having

two distinct teams that are working on the same thing, that is the key to success. It's not by having meetings to talk about stuff, it's to genuinely be working on the same stuff. And that's the sort of jumping off point for the sort of concept of shared goals being a big part of the answer here. You know, it's my personal opinion that

in long sales cycle B2B, the concept of sales and marketing being two distinct teams with two distinct lines of reporting to the board is totally outdated and is one of the things that drives the wedge between the two teams when they should really be acting as one.

shared goals or the concept of shared goals as a way of kind of creating cross-functional teams if you are accepting that you can't necessarily make that big move all in one go and just bring it into one team with one single line of report to the board. It's a great way to actually bring sellers and marketers together because what it does is get you on the path to genuine alignment and

Chris (28:31.652)

There's a fairly simple kind of five step process that we use within our consultancy engagements for setting shared goals. And that is to start off with setting what we term a North Star metric. Now, shared goals can take many forms. In fact, we've done entire podcasts just on goal setting before, and I'm sure we'll unpack them again because there's so much to talk about.

Setting a kind of North Star metric, something that everyone can actually get behind, can play a really, really significant goal. Sorry, a really significant role in setting goals that are actually meaningful across the growth team. So when we talk about a North Star metric, you can use revenue for that, but it's almost always better if you don't. And you use instead something that

is actually sort of understandable, is tangible. And something that, you know, we often recommend is something like the number of good fit new accounts won or the number of good sort of good fit accounts engaged with or engaged in marketing activity or whatever it might be. Something that can be counted in terms of human engagement, I think is always a really strong place to start.

because what you can then do is have a really meaningful conversation as a team of determining the drivers that help you actually achieve that North Star goal. And that could be the number of opportunities, number of conversations, number of engaged accounts, average number of engaged stakeholders per account, whatever. But you start creating a set of drivers that really

are actions and they're actions that you can attach metrics to and they're actions that you can attach ownership to and that's really really key. So you go about this sort of process of setting the North Star metric together, you go about the process of collaboratively working out what the drivers are and then you set some sub goals for each one of those drivers and they need to be based on ideally performance levels that are actually achievable.

Chris (30:55.978)

But that's probably another story. And once you've got this sort of stack of goals, you've got the North Star metric, you've got the drivers, you've attached a metric to each one of those goals, then you can actually go about building out a strategy for achieving those submetrics that will actually ladder up to the North Star. And they can make sure that you've actually baked in

an approach for achieving those goals and sort of optimizing towards them. And I think this is a really, really key thing that you reframe the planning process. You get everyone aligned behind the same thing. You get them to collaborate on what's going to the drivers of achieving that. And then you ideate together in terms of how you build that plan. And you can already, I think, see whether this is a particular process that you would subscribe to or not.

that it is a process that is fundamentally different to the process used by sales and marketing organizations because it is about collaboration from day dot and it is about building a goal stack, building a sort of set of KPIs and a set of ownership of those KPIs that is inherently shared from day one and that is the building block that

that we can start moving forward with the drive's true alignment.

Colin (32:28.546)

Yeah, yeah. We've both been suffering from some respiratory issues after that trip to London, I think afterwards. I blame public transport in London.

Chris (32:29.146)

briefly to cough there.

Chris (32:47.0)

Yes, I think it is going around, that's for sure. So, that sort of set of shared goals and stacking that up together is clearly a great way to reframe the sort of goal setting process and to kind of create a process that engineers out too much potential for goal conflict. But

think the other thing that you've really got to think about as going through this sort goal setting process is time horizons. Now,

It's quite a contentious issue, think this is one that we've talked about a little bit before, but I'm a great believer that monthly sales targets, monthly quotas are really not very helpful unless you have a business that has a sales cycle that's shorter than 30 days. Because what it does, as I mentioned earlier, is just put everyone's eyes down on the end of the month.

and you move away from achieving long-term value, you move away from kind of building towards larger sort of value-driven goals, you kind of lose focus on on some of those North Star metrics because you're just under the cosh to go do a monthly number. So as part of that sort of building out a new framework of measurement, you've got to think about the time for measurement as well.

I think that quarterly targets is a good compromise, but you know, half yearly, maybe even annual. think that you've got to fit what's right for your organization, but it's got to be what's right based on what is going to drive the right behaviors, not what is what you've done previously, because those two things are likely to be misaligned themselves. But what I would suggest is kind of map the time horizon to average sales cycle, or at least to a target sales cycle and

Chris (34:52.18)

really track the behaviors that it is creating within the team, certainly with respect to the interface between the output of marketing and the sort of inputs of sales. And that I think is really in relation to targets. Measurement is a whole different thing. You measurement and targets are probably defined by the fact that targets typically are what we get paid on and what we get upset about when we miss.

But measurement is there to use to inform optimization and measurement really can be as frequent as you need it to be. In our organization, we use a sort of weekly balance scorecard approach, but it's driven by dashboards and data that are fed in live 24 seven. But really, the important thing with measurement is that it needs to be automated as possible. It needs to be measuring things that genuinely drive.

optimization, by which I mean, you know, making decisions about what you do and don't do going forward. And I think if you can start getting that goal structure right, and you can start getting the time for delivery, the framework of measurement, the structure of targets right, you know, it just sets you up on this incredible path to being aligned almost by default. But you got to get there.

And I think that's the next thing that we talked about is the sort of building this operating system around the growth team.

Colin (36:32.616)

Yeah, I guess that's a point to really get into the operating system side of things, like that you need to build an operating system effectively.

Chris (36:46.33)

Absolutely. This is something that we focus on a lot in the business. We have our own framework for this, which we call imaginatively enough growth team OS. If anyone wants a copy of that, I'm happy to share, message us on socials or something. But ultimately, the operating system is there to make sure that you achieve the goals, pure and simple.

You know, having goals set and measured and targeted over the right time horizons is a great point, but you need to actually achieve them to do the number, whatever that number is. And this is where you need to build out an operating system for the growth team. And the sort of key attributes, I guess, the key outtakes in terms of building an operating system is that you need a clear system for managing that goal attainment. And this means

that you need to have clear goals and clear metrics and crucially clear ownership of those metrics and goals. You need to have a sort of regular meeting cadence, not just to kind of go through, you know, what's everyone doing, you know, show and tell, but actually to go through the metrics that everyone owns and to understand, they on track? Are they off track? And actually have a meaningful

proactive discussion in the team about solutioning, about how you fix them. You know, we do this within our own structure and we call that part of the meeting IDS, which is, think, I've gone out of my head, identify, discuss and solve, you know, it's the sort of, we've got this issue, let's get all the brains in the room and let's try and fix this as a team. And that's a really key thing that kind of flips the

the purpose of those meetings from being a sit around the table, drink coffee and, you know, talk about what a good job we're all doing and go away again to actually driving that concept of shared ownership.

Colin (38:53.474)

In order to do that IDS, but you need to have engineered out the goal conflict in the first place. Otherwise, the way that people with different roles will interact to try and solve a problem may not be in the common interest because of course it can't be because we have a goal conflict.

It's only possible to have that system if we've achieved the deconflicting of the goals.

Chris (39:25.89)

Yes, absolutely. And I think that, you know, that is such a key point that if the goal stack's not right in the first place, then actually the operating system will be operating you towards the wrong goals. You know, that is a sort of systems issue we've talked about before, you know, wrong goal archetype. So that is something that, yeah, it's a really, really key point.

Another thing which I think is really crucial within the operating system is ensuring that the data that's driving reporting on goal attainment is clean and easy to access for everybody involved. So we have complete data transparency and that it's being driven by a really well integrated tech stack so that it is being fed as close to live as possible. know, it's not the data isn't all owned by some data team, you know, insight team.

they're having to pull stuff together for a report. Everyone needs to see the key metrics all the time and they need to see whether they're on track because, you know, we're going to talk about self-organization in a second and that's a really key thing in terms of making sure everyone can do the course corrections themselves, you know, that can understand how they are doing because they want to be on track for the next meeting. They want to be on track for the next milestone and you need to be able to show them whether they're on track or not.

And think finally, within this kind of iOS, you need to have an agile mindset. You know, we've talked about the sort of set and forget trap on a previous episode. I think that's a really key point here that you need to have this mindset that nothing is set and forget.

not even the goals themselves, to your point, if you're pointing at the wrong goal, then you're orientating the system in the wrong direction. So you need to be prepared to kind of change anything to kind of create a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration that's interwoven into the system that you've kind of built for the team. So we've got the goals right, hopefully. We've got the alignment around the time horizons.

Chris (41:40.836)

we've built an operating system for achieving them, you can really see how you can create meaningful alignment like this. And it kind of brings us to the, I guess, the final big systems concept. And this is self-organization. Self-organization is a concept that describes the capacity of the system, or at least the group of elements within that system, to organize themselves spontaneously.

without the need for central authority or external control. Ultimately, it is the ability for the system to adapt and to make decisions and regulate its own activities autonomously. And it's got to do that based on the interactions and the relationships between all the components within the system. So you can see already that this sort of spontaneous organization

is really driven by that operating system. It's driven by those well aligned goals because everyone's in it together. Everyone knows where they're trying to get to. They know what the North Star is. And the self-organization principle is just that sort of course correction. It's everyone knowing where they're trying to get to and being able to have the authority to start deviating from whatever course that they're on if that course isn't going to get them to where they're trying to get to.

And that's a really, really key principle in driving genuine alignment because it's all well and good kicking off a project and everyone being aligned, but stuff never goes to plan. So if you don't have a self-organizing team, you don't have a sort of self-organization enabled within the system that you've built, then the cracks will start. You will start deviating from the point of alignment as things go forward. So you need the ability to course correct.

And in businesses, as we've said before, you businesses are goal-seeping systems. They're, they're, they orientate themselves towards achieving the goals that are set. And therefore the shared goals that I've been talking about, that sort of North Star, is there for the system, the business to orientate itself towards. And that, that sort of shared goal stack is the starting point for self-organizations.

Chris (44:05.206)

within teams and within your business. And really effective teams have the autonomy to arrive at solutions that are maybe unexpected, maybe a more innovative, but they can really only be effective in this autonomy if you create some simple rules, if you create the guardrails, I guess we would call it.

within the team. So there's a balance to be struck. You you can't just say, get on with it, do whatever you like, spend whatever you like. You could do that, I suppose. And, you know what, it might work great, but I think you need that sort of governance in place. And, you know, the rules that you need to apply to a growth team focus on the links between people predominantly. So

It's how they kind of, we sort of need to govern the interactions, if you like, because as we've talked about before, the interactions is where the emergence comes from predominantly. So my kind of top three recommendations in kind of creating guardrails within this sort of self-organizing team would be to create what we call an accountability chart. So this can look a bit like an org chart, but it doesn't actually have to be hierarchical.

What it's there for is to list people's roles, list what they're responsible for delivering, list what metrics they are accountable for within that shared plan that you've built, and often actually to record their sort of devolved decision making, you know, maybe you'd call it, you know, what they can make decisions about, you know, those sort of guardrails. So how much flex have they got?

What are they on the hook for delivering? What is it they're actually supposed to be doing and what are they responsible for? Just the process of writing that down and structuring it through the growth teams are really powerful exercise because not only does it make it very, very clear for every member of that team what they need to be doing and to some degree, you know, what flex they've got to kind of make their own decisions in getting there, but it also uncovers gaps.

Chris (46:33.358)

very often in terms of, okay, this person can't own all those metrics, that's unrealistic. So how do those get split out? Maybe we don't have enough people. This person's role is too big, they're be pulled in too many different directions, or simply there's just no one to own this bit of the plan. So that accountability chart is a really powerful tool in kind of building out that sort of structure and understanding of how is the plan gonna get delivered.

I'm also a huge advocate and this is a dimension within that sort of growth team OS that I talked about that you really need to invest in people not just as the professional self, but the whole self and creating a culture of kind of learning and shaping things like personal development plans to build expertise in the things that you need to have an effective team that's going to deliver a strategy.

And that is quite a broad church in my opinion. And I think this is a, it's an interesting, mean, maybe we're sort of straying into the realms of a HR podcast here and I'm sure maybe HR people would maybe disagree with me and have an interesting point of view here. But I really think that personal development plans need to be more than just about what professional skills do I need? They can be about the functioning of the team. So self work.

know, inner work, I think is just as important as, as kind of professional development there. And I think if you bake that culture of learning and development into the team structure and into the operating system, you can achieve great things. And I think the final point really is about creating a culture of what I would term tactical autonomy. So it's giving the team the power to sort of

pivot and try new things. And one of the ways that I really like for doing that is creating a sort of internal pitching process. So if someone's got a new idea, you know, they've got an idea that things going to get them to the North Star or to their metric or what they're accountable for, then, you know, having a process whereby they pitch that within growth team meetings, they put the case forward and

Chris (48:56.108)

ultimately that they get sponsorship and subscription to that from across the team so that they can, you can continue having this collaborative development, this collaborative delivery of new ideas and trialing stuff and optimizing. So I think that that's covered the main points there. But yeah, just maybe as as a sort of a very brief recap.

Misalignment is a huge issue. It is costing, well, trillions probably to the global economy. There is a sort of org level opportunity to generate significantly more revenue by nailing this, certainly significantly more revenue from marketing generated leads. And the way to do that ultimately is to unify your team.

behind shared goals and a shared operating system that is there to sort of drive this principle of self-organization. So teams can kind of really genuinely work as one and course correct their way through to the sort of innovative solutions that are gonna help you achieve your goals in the long term. So hopefully we did a reasonable job there of sort of painting the picture that we did with a bit more visual aid at

at the B2B Expo recently and maybe we do some summing up.

Colin (50:28.66)

Yeah, guess something that... Thanks for that Chris. I know I've put a lot of the efforts had to come from you and this one, but it was about your wonderful talk at the Expo. But a big outtake that I've really had is that...

There's a big mindset shift that needs to happen within organizations in order to really capitalize on this fantastic opportunity. You need to start to see misalignment as a cultural pathology, not a tactical nuisance. So that trillion dollar plus or maybe trillions of dollars misalignment figure, it's not just an attention grabbing statistic, although admittedly it was quite effective as that.

but it actually underscores the systemic pathology. So when misalignments the default state, it's really reflecting a cultural issue. And we've got leadership tolerating, or let's face it, probably incentivizing local wins that may well be at the cost of system health. And it's not just a matter of tweaking the funnel and adding more leads. It's about asking whether you're

Chris (51:37.518)

Mm-hmm.

Colin (51:43.362)

companies actually organizing principles, it could be monthly targets or siloed budgets or narrowly defined success metrics. Whether these are actively sabotaging your growth, and we've talked about some of those issues before, I think the real insight is...

Correcting misalignment isn't like a, it's not a project. It's a cultural intervention. If that's not being too dramatic, it's about changing, not just how people collaborate, but like what the organization actually deems to be valuable over time. And I guess having a system to define that value. And I'll probably for once leave my final summing up thoughts to that for today.

Chris (52:24.27)

Yeah.

Chris (52:29.944)

Yes, I mean, I think it's such a good point. And it's one that we didn't really touch on today, but it's a dimension within the sort of growth team operating system that we deploy within our clients, organizations, is values, know, values alignment is such an important thing. Because if you build a culture of trust,

and tactical autonomy, you build a culture of learning, you build a culture of generating long term value, then the sort of things that we've talked about as being the negatives, short term targets, eyes down, siloed thinking, they become culturally incompatible.

So actually, your point about culture and the sort of way that you frame values to drive culture within the org is so critical. And I think it's such an interesting point that maybe we should expand on in another episode.

Colin (53:39.01)

If you have, if that is all from you, I think that's probably about all we've got time for this week. We're actually going to come in at under an hour this time after a couple of long episodes.

Chris (53:52.44)

I think so. Yeah.

Chris (53:58.777)

Makes sense.

Amazing. Well, yes, that I think that probably is all we've got time for. And I think that we've had to sort of have the opportunity, I guess, to talk a lot more in a bit more detail about what's been going on today. But

it raises some really interesting questions. I think as we're doing our 2025 kind of content plan for the podcast, think, you know, looking at the role of culture in kind of shaping systems is one that I'd be really interested to talk about.

Colin (54:35.778)

Yeah, very often when we get to that summing up part of the episode, end up coming up with the topics for future episodes as they just kind of organically come out of that part of the discussion, which is, guess, how it's meant to work as a system, I guess. But yeah, sorry, go on. Funnily enough, yeah. Yeah, OK, so it's a nice kick off to the growth system for 2025. But that's all.

got time for for this one. So the growth system is brought to you by RevSpace, that's us, an applied growth consultancy that connects B2B organizations with the future of growth, consultancy and education and applied delivery services. Don't forget to follow and rate the podcast, really helps us to bring the content to wider audience and we would really appreciate a moment of your time to tell us what you think. Your feedback is always valuable and in fact what led to

this particular episode. Thank you very much. See you next time.

Chris (55:36.41)

Thanks, everyone.

Colin (55:37.718)

Bye.