Colin (00:02.126)

Hi, happy new year and welcome to our first episode of 2025 here on The Growth System, the podcast that looks at B2B growth through a systems thinking lens. I'm Colin Shakespeare.

Chris (00:15.47)

And I'm Chris Bayless and I'm concerned whether we can still be saying Happy New Year at this point in January. Is that allowed?

Colin (00:22.87)

I think certainly the rule here in Glasgow is I think when you get into the last week in January, early February, it starts to get weird. But I think we can still see mid-January, we can still see Happy New Year.

Chris (00:34.934)

We're just about okay. mean, haven't seen any of our dear listeners since before Christmas. So, I mean, it is official. It's the first time we're greeting them. So maybe let's go with that. So what are we talking about today, Colin?

Colin (00:49.656)

Well, today we're going to talk about something that we are pretty deep into right now for 2025. And I'm pretty sure that most of the listeners will be doing the same. And that is the P word planning.

Chris (01:05.198)

Yes, FY25 planning. Yes, it's exciting time, doesn't it? We've reached that point in the planning cycle where budgets have been made up and the real work of working out what we're going to do about them has started. So we thought it was going to be a good time to dive into how we approach that in a more of a systems orientated way.

And looking at perhaps some of the bigger picture items beyond the, you know, how much, am I going to spend my 20 % less to make 20 % more conundrum that many of the people out there will sadly be dealing with right now.

Colin (01:49.358)

I have to say whether or not it's exciting is think a debatable point Chris. The exciting bit for me is that when we finally got all the planning done and we now have a plan that feels exciting. I've kind of got my eyes on the finish line there.

Chris (02:06.036)

Absolutely. know, reminds me of a, know, actually another podcast that I was listening to from a wonderful business over in the US that does something in the sort of organizational development space that talks about lots of organizations being the objective of the planning process is to create a plan because there is a reassurance and having a nice thick document which has the plan in it.

we're not really thinking too much beyond that. So I think we can also perhaps talk about, you know, implementation and how we plan for success, not just plan for a plan.

Colin (02:48.194)

Yeah, I guess there is something to be said for the psych, as I guess just sort of accidentally alluded to at the beginning there, there is something to be said for the psychological impact benefit of having a plan, maybe not a nice thick document. But certainly there's a bit more to it than that. It's not a PsiOp.

Chris (03:10.954)

Indeed. Yeah, it's a sort of a lovely time of the year, isn't it? Because it's, you know, no matter what mountain you have to climb, no matter how many, you know, pounds, dollars and euros you've got to spend. It's a time of promise, isn't it? Because nothing's yet happened. That means we're off plan.

you know, we can write all the stuff that we want. You know, we've got it there. It's full of promise. The year is stretching out ahead of us full of opportunity. And, you know, at the moment, we're doing a sort of paper exercise on how that's going to unfold.

Colin (03:43.566)

guess what's since coming to RevSpace, what's changed about it for me is, well, first of all, being more involved in the planning process and then having to kind of see under the bonnet how kind of complex that can be. I guess the flip side of that is, of course, that's one of the reasons why we've sort of take a systems thinking approach to how we do this and hopefully don't just make up a bunch of numbers and

put some things in the document to make us feel better.

Chris (04:15.534)

Now, we don't do that. But I think that it's fair to say that making up a bunch of numbers is definitely how the targeting process feels for many. Certainly the people that are handed targets run high with without any real understanding of of where they've come from. And we've talked about that a few times before, I think over over the course of maybe the last season. But

I think this is a good place to get into the conversation because targets, particularly revenue and maybe profitability targets, but particularly revenue targets tend to be the starting point of the sort of growth team planning process, which is the type of planning we're definitely talking about today. And those targets, one thing that you can be sure of is that they're pretty much always going to be bigger than last year.

So we're going to be definitely planning for growth. You we are the growth team. That's what we do. But sometimes those numbers can be quite, should we say, surprising, significant, challenging. And, you know, I thought what we would start talking today is, you know, how do you start to unpack that number before you just start getting on with, you know, the creating the document and, you know, installing Hope 2.0 as to

to how it's going to come together. How do you then see whether that target passes the sniff test? And it's something that we do a lot to some degree with our own numbers and certainly when we get a new client engagement and that comes with a big old sort of goal.

in terms of where they want to get to and I think it's a really really helpful process to start modeling out what that looks like in actual tangible deliverables and I think it's also from my perspective a really really good way to get into the planning process proper. So what do we mean by modeling? Well the way that I approach this and the way I've definitely advocated approaching this is to start creating a

Chris (06:30.466)

basis of metrics on which to start building some calculations as to what it will take to achieve the number. Now, if you're in a business that has recurring revenue, then obviously what we're thinking about is the gap between what we've got in the bag and where we need to get to and where that's going to come from. know, are we expecting that to be expansion revenue? Are we expecting that to be net new? And I think for the purposes of what we're talking about here, let's talk about net new.

in particular, because that is so often the focus within these processes, more so than I think it should be, but perhaps that's a topic for another day. So I think when we're looking at that net new, new business goal, and invariably it's bigger than it ever has been before, how do you model it out? And some of the figures that I always like to start with are things like average order value.

I think that's a really nice place to start. When you look back in CRM, what was the average transaction that you did last year? And therefore, how many of those transactions are you going to have to do to get to the number? How does that compare to the number that you did in the previous year? Now, it's going to have to be more if you're using the same number. It's a mathematical certainty, but how much more?

And I think that's a really nice place to start, sometimes a horrifying place to start, but it's where we start kind of creating this framework of reality around the targets, which are invariably, as we've talked about before, based on a percentage uplift and not really linked to anything in particular. Sad though it may be. So when we start and get into this sort of, you know, how many orders do we need? Then I think I tend to go to, you know, what are the metrics underpinning?

a sale happening, what's underneath the transaction. So when we look at a sales cycle, how long is it? And there's two numbers that I like because they tend to be quite easy to pull out of most CRMs is what is the average time between a contact being created as a lead? So whether that is an MQL or something in your leads object or whatever definition you're using.

Chris (08:52.14)

What is the time on average between that occurring and an opportunity being opened? And what is the conversion rate between those two things? So what percentage of leads turn into opportunities and how long does that take to happen? Typically, that's going to be a figure expressed in a number of days. And in our world, probably quite a lot of days, know, in complex cell cycle kind of B2B, which is where we spend most of our time. That figure is probably going to be

three months, maybe more. You know, I think that on average I see that number being mid to high 80s of days.

Colin (09:29.676)

Yeah, I think three months is kind of almost fair to say that's what good looks like in a lot of organizations to be fair.

Chris (09:36.482)

Yep. And the, but it's a figure that not that many people look at the sort of how long does it take to create an opportunity and therefore how long should we be expecting it to be between when we start doing whatever it is we're doing and when we expect to see something tangible out the back of that. the figure that most people are much better at is understanding the sort of typical sales cycle length, you know, from open to close of a deal, you know, how long is that? And again, actually pretty similar.

you know, 90 odd days, three months, I think is, fairly representative. We have customers that have sales cycles that are far, far longer than that, you know, in some very high value, you know, sometimes governmental that kind of stuff, 12 months, 18 months is not, is not unheard of. but I think that, in most organizations, the higher above three months, is the more you have to ask questions about your sort of deal hygiene.

and how much stuff you've got hanging around on the deal pipeline that shouldn't have been there in the first place that's depressing that number. So I think it is a number that bears scrutiny. You need to really understand what is a true sales cycle length and what is propping up someone's hope in the sales meeting every month.

Colin (10:54.094)

or someone's metrics. I mean, I've been in the position where, you know, the team's working on a sort of SDR, AE model and essentially the AE and the SDR have a good relationship. And of course, when the SDR has done the work and sort of, I guess, created a contact as a lead and there's a nice conversation going on and nothing's going to happen for the next nine months.

but the AE wants to make sure the SDR gets paid and gets their number because they've technically done what they were supposed to do, arguably, then you'll have a bunch of opportunities sitting around at 10 % probability, essentially just kind of spamming so that they don't get questioned until at the end of the quarter, the smart AE chooses that time when everyone's busy to suddenly start closing these off if they're not going to close in the next quarter sort of thing. So there's a bit of a lag there as well. I think there's a kind of

There's a quarterly cull of these. Sometimes there isn't even that. mean, you see stuff hanging around in CRM for a very long time, a very low probability. And I think there's a temptation to see that as relatively harmless. But if you're on the other end where you're

Chris (11:59.693)

Yes.

Colin (12:07.564)

sort of trying to guess what you're modeling and planning, then that's extremely problematic,

Chris (12:08.408)

modeling and planning stuff out.

Absolutely. you know, understanding what you're really looking at, rather than just taking the number out the field or the report or whatever, is important. But you know, I think once we kind of get to that point, we should be knowing how many deals we need.

how many opportunities we need to create that many deals, how many leads we need to create that many opportunities, and how long it takes for a lead turn into an opportunity and an opportunity to turn into a customer. Those are the basics in terms of the sort of dynamics of the deal pipeline, of the opportunity pipeline, the lead pipeline, call it what you will. Because that is going to give us a fundamental understanding of how many of whatever, whether it is a lead or an opportunity we need to create,

and what the average value of those should be to give us the coverage we need to get to the number. whilst what I'm talking about there is not rocket science, it doesn't seem to be done as frequently or as robustly as you would think it would be in my experience.

Just getting that element of does the target pass the sniff test? Do we have a hope in hell of actually getting that many leads and opportunities to do the number? And one of the ways that we really want to understand whether that is the case is by looking at kind of customer acquisition costs by channel. Now that

Chris (13:39.83)

can be a lot to ask in some businesses to have that granularity of data. But as a very blunt metric, how much did we spend last year on sales and marketing activity versus how many opportunities did we create versus how many customers did we close? How many leads did we generate? Those should be figures that you can find out even if no one's thought to build a report for you to just go look at them. And that's essentially going to give us our customer acquisition cost.

And once we've got customer acquisition cost and we've done that basic modeling, you know, those are the mathematical disposition can times one by the other and work out whether that equals the marketing budgets that we have got a stroke need to ask for. And I think just doing that work upfront is really important because it allows a metric driven dialogue with leadership.

before things go into the kind of live environment, you know, before we sort of get into contact with the enemy, we've really got to understand our chances of success. And I think doing an exercise like that is a really good way of kind of opening that dialogue because...

it's going to tell you what needs to move versus the baseline. So, any body, I was about to say any decent marketer, but pretty much anybody with half a brain is going to be able to pretty easily see that if that means we've got to half our customer acquisition cost, you know, year over year, that's going to create a significant shift.

in what we're going to do, which is also going to introduce a load of unpredictability, because we'll then be having to do something we've never done before, which means we have to do something in a way that we've never done before to achieve something we've never got before. you do you want to go into that direction of the unknown? Or do you want to increase the budget? You know, that's very valuable question. Because it could generate nothing, it could generate leads a third of the cost, and it's the best thing you ever did. But we're talking about risk management.

Colin (15:37.101)

Ha ha!

Chris (15:47.694)

to some degree. And I think when we're in a forecasting process, understanding risk is also really, really important. So I think that, you know, that sort of like, CAC, is it achievable? How far does that have to shift? If we were going to achieve leads at the same customer acquisition cost, but, and therefore we're going to have the same number of leads, then the variable that's going to have to shift is going to be average order value. You know, if we need to make 20 % more,

and can only afford to get the same amount of leads, each lead is going to have to close for 20%, you know, greater contract value than it did last year. Is that achievable? You know, if you think that's achievable, why is that achievable? Is it because we've launched some new product? Is it because we've done a pricing shift and we're going to get that organically assuming the sort of price elasticity is in our favor? Whatever, it's about dialogue, and it's about understanding the metrics that matter to then drive that and it allows you to then model stuff out.

So, you if we're going to focus on lower CAC, you know, that's going to have a fundamental impact on the marketing plan. If we're going to focus on higher average order value and we're not getting an organic bump from somewhere, then what's going to change in the sales process? You know, you start to understand those drivers.

Colin (17:03.746)

This is where having more granular information that's quite tough to have for lot of organizations where you can look at customer acquisition costs of by channel and vendors. You can have a kind of higher resolution picture of what levers you might be able to pull there rather than looking at customer. As you say, it's kind of a blunt metric overall customer acquisition cost because it could be that actually all those

marketing and sales efforts produced nothing. Realistically across a year that's perfectly realistic scenario and know 80 % came from referrals from the CEO and you know the rest from expansion revenue or something like that so you really need to have that sort of information but do appreciate that it is challenging and I guess

Chris (17:49.922)

Yeah, it's really challenging for a lot of orgs, it? But you need to, and you raise a really, really good point there that you can't conflate closed deals with marketing sourced deals, even if you can't necessarily get down to the level of how much was.

Colin (17:55.31)

Thanks.

Chris (18:11.168)

whatever, insert paid media channel versus our ABM program versus our, you know, exhibitions program or whatever, you know, we're however, we're slicing that, that's probably okay, just doing a what do we spend versus what do we get, that's probably not okay, particularly if you're in a professional services organization where referral is going to be a dominant, you know, source of business, because you will be planning to fail there, I think is fair to say.

Colin (18:38.478)

Yeah, and to be fair, it's quite a complicated picture to unpack that you're referring to some of those really long sales cycles where you're dealing with enterprise or government customers and it becomes quite hard by the end of that to attribute it. What percentage you attribute to the three partners that you were working with and the overall sort of marketing efforts and an SDR somewhere that set the first meeting and you know, like the

Chris (18:45.389)

Thank you.

Chris (19:05.026)

Yep.

Colin (19:05.119)

the three AEs that have come and gone during the course of the deal and the massive team of engineers that you've had working with your guys and there was a referral to... It gets very complex, it, to try and unpick that.

Chris (19:17.068)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that to be fair, if you're in a sales cycle of that complexity, then you do, you know, to put our systems hat on, you have to make sure you're drawing the boundary of analysis around the right part of the journey, because you are probably not factoring in acquisition cost. At that point, you are just probably looking at

first touch, know, where did the relationship come from? How can we create more of those relationships? know, what was going on there? Or you're looking at, you know, the middle part of the journey, if you are looking at, you know, a very kind of strategic, APM focused organization, then

Okay, how did we go from first touch with, you know, our partners mate who works at X into a relationship with all, you know, seven, 15 members of the decision making unit in that organization and what moved the lead or their way did the traction come from? think we could, you know, we could record as always a much longer podcast episode than we were planning to by getting into that level of detail, but, it's a really good point.

Colin (20:27.63)

Yeah, indeed. I think it also, if I could complicate things slightly further, it kind feeds into some of what we talk about around sort goal conflicts as well. When we have this conversation about how we attribute, like what came from the marketing budget, for example, then of course if we have that goal conflict as a sort of endemic problem.

then suddenly everyone has a hill to die on in competition with each other. In other words, know, I know this definitely should be attributed to the marketing, the budget that we spent missing out the bits of evidence that would go against that.

Chris (20:57.538)

Yes.

Chris (21:07.564)

Yeah, and do you know what, think you've teed me up beautifully there for the second bullet point on my scrappy list of things we need to talk about in the planning episode, which is about goal setting, because I think once you've done that modeling, once you have, you know, resolved your argument about reality versus budget with your leadership team, and we're getting into planning for delivery and getting on with this, then

know, ultimately once we've proved it's possible and everyone believes in whatever version of the numbers in the model we are striving for, then you've got to get into goal setting and shared goal setting is something that we are going to talk about to some extent next week, I think on the, on the pod. we probably won't go too deep into that right now.

But what I am a huge believer in, obviously it's on your growth system Bingo card, it's all about alignment. And in a goal seeking system that is a business, again, probably goal seeking system should be on the Bingo card too, might be a new entry for 2025.

You know, we really need to be thinking about setting those goals together as a growth team. We cannot be in the sales do this and marketing do that world because if we're planning properly, we're planning at the start of the year, we should be planning the way that we are going to do our delivery holistically rather than what marketing are going to do and what sales are going to do. Of course, you will know that. So.

The way that we get into that is really about understanding the levers that drive the model. And what I mean by that is if we have got to win...

Chris (22:52.686)

10 new things next year because we're in a very high value, know, long sales cycle, complex sales cycle organization, and we've got to do 10 things. Well, you know, what are the levers that need to be pulled to get those 10 opportunities or those 30 opportunities that we're going to need to close 10? You know, how many accounts are we going to need to engage with? You know, where are those engagements going to come from?

I think that before we get into planning and the conventional, making a marketing plan, making a sales plan, how we're going to deploy the budget, really thinking about how do we generate the numbers that we have now set from our model?

because the output from that model, once we've crystallized all of that, it's going to tell us what our target conversion rates are, what our target average order value is, what our target number of orders is, what our target conversion rates through the funnel are, and so on.

So we've got this sort of scorecard, which is going to come out of that first exercise that we can then start tracking to. So what are the levers in helping us to achieve that scorecard? And that should be a collaborative round table conversation between the sales and the marketing team. What do we need to do to get there? What does that look like? You know, what does that future state where we've achieved those things, what things happened?

I think those levers are really, really a good way to think about what needs to happen because then once you know what the levers are, you can work out how you're to pull them. Crucially, you can also attach submetrics to those levers. So that might be the number of

Chris (24:41.026)

accounts that we actually need to have engagement with. So, you know, how many conversations do we need to start? It might be how many meetings do we need to book? It might be how many marketing engaged accounts do we need with our collateral and campaigns? know, whatever those might be, this is a good way to then start thinking about the problem of achieving the numbers you need to hit on the scorecard on the model. And

Once we get that, it also gives us a basis for not just sharing the goal stack, but creating accountability for the goal stack, because each one of those levers is going to have metrics and each one of those metrics needs to be owned by someone. And this is a way that we can engineer alignment in to delivery.

And that's a really important thing because it keeps everyone aligned towards those North Star metrics, towards those key deliverables that we need within the scorecard. It keeps everyone pointing the right direction and rowing there in harmony.

And that is such a win because you alluded, you mentioned goal conflict earlier. That's how we get rid of goal conflict at source. We don't solve goal conflict. We make sure there's going to be goal conflict there in the first place. And that's why, that's the beauty of the sort of shared goal setting process. So hopefully at this point, we're starting to paint a picture of actually how we get into the problem of solving the, how do we achieve the 20 % target uplift? And we're great believers.

as regular listeners will know, in taking that systems view of thinking, well, what is the broader picture? What are the elements involved in this system that we need to influence, that we need to manage the stocks and flows in to get us the result that we want?

Chris (26:32.692)

know, those goals and setting the destination very, very clearly upfront is a good way to ensure as best you can that you're going to be orientated towards a successful outcome.

Colin (26:48.29)

Yeah, I'm just thinking about the contrast between or really trying to identify in some detail what the contrast between how planning is actually done compared to how we think about planning on the growth system. And I suppose a lot of people out there will superficially think, but we do do that, Chris. And then I think actually, as we get into some of the details, we'll realize that there's certain key

elements missing there with actually the goal the big tinkle conflict being one of the sort of key blockers there.

Chris (27:26.274)

Yeah, and I think, you you've you've probably hit the nail on the head. To what extent people do modeling. I think that, you know, most mature organizations have a general appreciation of the type of metrics we were talking about to achieve, you to kind of create that scorecard to create the model. You know, I'd like to think that that is not new news to many people. But the way that we go about the goal setting process almost always is

certainly in our experience, you know, we can't speak for every organization, but the, the thing that I see more often than not is, is planning in silos. You know, okay, we might've decided, we might've done the modeling exercise. We might've worked out how many leads we need and how many, you know, conversations we need to have and how many opportunities we need to open. Okay. Well, marketing, you're the leads guys. You go away and work out how you're going to get that many. and then.

Colin (28:17.902)

Here's your budget and here's your target.

Chris (28:21.472)

Exactly. Now, I would have a reasonably robust argument that says they don't recognize that as a scenario, unless you're working in one of our clients, in which case, you well done you. But, you know, I think that that is something that is endemic. Is the marketing decide where the leads are coming from? Sales decide how they're going to close them.

And it sounds so logical, doesn't it? It's reductive thinking, we've talked about that a lot. People focus on what they're good on, it all sounds great, but it just doesn't work. And that's why shared goal setting is super important.

Chris (29:08.63)

So let's think then about how we achieve our goals. And I don't want to go too deep into the sort of nebulous concept that is strategy. But one thing I would definitely alight on briefly is the...

the sort of concept of positioning and messaging and the good old ICP because whilst those are not in any way new news to any organization, we've all got that to some degree. I think that it isn't always connected to the sort of model.

that we've been referring to. If we needed to pull the lever of increasing the average order value, does that mean that it still connects to our ICP? If we need to sell more services to Rich and the Migs, who are they going to be the best fit for? Things change to make the model fit the desired outcome.

because I mean, we haven't even talked about the crazy Nirvana scenario where, you know, people do this exercise in reverse and then work out through the process what they're going to make at the end, you know, that typically doesn't happen. So maybe we won't spend too much time on that. you know, assuming we're going through the other direction, invariably things will change. And your

The IN and ICP is ideal. So who is going to be the ideal set of prospects for the stack of things that you need to sell to hit those numbers? Now, we've been talking about this in quite a simplistic way of one product organizations. There are not many of those out there. So you are going to have various ICPs for various elements of your product stack. Almost certainly, they're going to be at different stages. They're going to be meeting different needs and different value props and getting all of that stuff aligned.

Chris (31:11.982)

is really, really key. And I think that you also need to recognise in this sort of strategic endeavour of the sort of market dynamics that are at play, because if you're in a reasonably mature market, as most organisations are, if you were going to grow 20%, where's that 20 % coming from?

Is it coming from organic market growth? Well, if you're in the UK and planning for 2025 right now, probably not. I think it's fair to say. Unless we're, you know, in AI or, I don't know, probably.

Colin (31:44.609)

You

Chris (31:51.948)

There might be a few other things that are planning for some growth, but I don't think it's, you know, I don't think we're in a general rising tide right now in the UK and Europe. So you're going to be taking that share off someone else and that someone else is also going to be planning to increase their revenue next year because who isn't. you've got this

competitive sort of component and that's why I think sort of positioning is something that you need to come back to at this point. If we are just trying to say the same thing to the same people as our competitors who are offering more or less the same thing, at the same time trying to take the same percentage uplift, let's say heuristically at least, then what we have is a very clustered market.

Colin (32:35.799)

at the same time.

Chris (32:44.654)

We're sat on top of all the other organizations in our sector trying to get the same from the same people. So why are they going to choose us? Well, the answer is if we stay in that scenario, there isn't a good reason to choose us. As much as we may say, we are the most customer centric whatever, bullshit, it's not real.

Colin (33:06.926)

When you ask that question in the meeting, okay, so why are they going to choose us if we're just going out with the same, basically say what you just said, and you start to get answers like that back. At that point, it's like close your laptop time, you know, you're just gonna hear a bunch of nonsense. There's not one sort of new thought in there, and people just start to waffle something about, know, delighting your customers or something like that, and actually no thought about how can we.

Chris (33:28.684)

Yes, they are the lies we tell ourselves.

Colin (33:36.024)

for example, like reposition so that we're, you know, we kind of sit on our own in the market and are not sort of stacked on top of the competition.

Chris (33:46.87)

Yep, exactly. So that is something that I think rarely gets talked about at this stage that if you've got a big old goal, you know, we're going for 400%, not 4%, you know, that is going to probably require you to do something you've not done before, or to go to market in a way that you've not done before. Because frankly, if you don't do that, you're going to get whatever you got last time to some, you know, to a greater or lesser extent.

So we need to think about how are we unclustering from the competition? How are we positioning and presenting ourselves to the market in a way that is generating significant value and competitive advantage? Because if we've got a big old growth number to do, that is almost a sort of strategic reality that you are going to have to do something of that nature to affect the step change.

Unless simply you have, you know, when your senior leadership team said, we're going to grow 100 % this year and here's 200 % more budget, then, you know, great. Maybe you don't, maybe you can just, you know, crank the handle a lot faster, but, but inevitably that probably hasn't happened.

Colin (34:58.414)

It probably hasn't happened and actually I would ask a few questions beyond that to figure out if actually this was still a sane proposition, like looking at the market dynamics for example. it even possible? Impossible is maybe too strong a word to grow that much like, or are we getting diminishing returns on the increased budget?

Chris (35:17.772)

Yeah, exactly. I think this all comes back to the, you know, does it pass the sniff test piece at the start? Because

If you're what you're going to have to do with so wildly divergent from what you've ever done before, then you better have a really, really good proposition as to how that's going to happen. And it is going to come down to some factor of re-presenting yourself to the market in a different way, presenting yourself to a brand new market, an additional geographic market, whatever it might be. But we're talking about some sort of strategy fundamentals here, and you need to have a coherent answer to the question that is probably of a magnitude of change that equals the step change required in revenue.

And that is...

that's just a truism. know, what precisely what that thing is, yeah, that's not really possible to generalise about, but you are going to have to think like that to achieve the outcome that you want. And, you know, who are those people, ICP, kind of, you know, messaging, all of that good stuff is going to need to align with whatever that sort of positioning to the market is, and who that particular subset of the market are.

So I think that strategy and thinking about that component on top of your thoughts around kind of shared goal setting and building the model. And because we are endeavouring to do a shorter cast than normal, I think I would like to probably offer just one last point in terms of the planning process, because

Chris (36:48.684)

You we were never planning to talk about what's the nicest template for your marketing plan here. I think we can rely on everyone to, to get on with that. think it's just.

Colin (36:57.43)

I got sent a free time plate in my junk emails today anyway so it turns out we wouldn't be adding much value there. Problem solved, marketing planning is easy.

Chris (37:02.264)

beautiful. Someone's beat us to it. So I think that the final bit that I would talk to is what you might term foundations, what we would turn the growth system. And that is the sort of people processes data and technology that you're going to build this plan on top of. Now,

The plan as we have hopefully made light of, if we're affecting a step change, then we are going to need to work different. We are going to need to do things different because if don't, we'll probably get the same. And therefore, we need to think about people, processes, data, and tech as a natural part of strategic delivery.

tech stack is the one that probably gets the most air time, I would say in these conversations, because typically they're related to budget lines, and therefore they're quite visible in the planning process. And sometimes, you know, some of that route to market will be based on a new bit of tech, because

That is very often as marketers and sellers, we do like a shiny new piece of SaaS to go along with our plan that we're going to then pin our hopes on and sometimes quite justifiably so.

Colin (38:30.242)

Maybe sometimes a little bit of over promising on the potential or the immediate potential of that piece of the tech stack in order to get the budget approved for it in the first place. Maybe, might have seen that.

Chris (38:40.462)

Maybe, who knows? mean, yeah, I think that's a conceivable thing that maybe we've seen a million times before, And do you know what? Sometimes if you're gonna go and buy a account-based advertising tool and you're gonna completely change the way that you're advertising the business and utilizing data, or you're gonna go buy a...

something that's got a bombora subscription and you're going to bake intent data in, if you're working in North America, you're going to go buy RB2B and see every individual that's coming on your website and then we're going to build an outreach program around that. Maybe that tech will affect a step change. It probably will, whether it will be a massive step change or not is debatable, but it will be additive for sure. But every time we do something like that,

the bit that doesn't tend to get thought of in enough detail at this point is the process and the people that relate to the tech. And a couple of the examples I've used there are probably quite good ones maybe just to paint the picture with. If you are gonna use a account or contact denormalization tool on your website, then how are you gonna drive that?

So if the workflow is someone comes on to the website, the account gets de-anonymized, then what? Well, that's going to live inside this new bit of tech, but your sellers don't live inside that new bit of tech, your marketers probably don't.

sequencing, automation, segmentation, know, CRM tagging, account creation process doesn't. So how are we going to start stitching all of this stuff together? What's the workflow going to be? You know, what's the playbook that we're going to use to get the value out of that? Because just giving the money to the SaaS vendor isn't going to get you the value. It's implementing that into whatever processes.

Chris (40:42.348)

you're going to use or create for that. So, you know, in that particular scenario, there's invariably going to be an integration piece. You know, is that data getting into Slack to say this person just came on the here? Is it going to run through some sort of an automation engine where we're going to say, enrich it with some firmographic data and then test whether that firmographic data meets our ICP before we present it to a seller? You know, how is that going to make it into CRM? If at all, does that have to go through

someone in rev ops or can you just create that straight away? Are you going to create a Slack bot where the seller can press a button and opt to create the record? Lots of options there that we could disappear down a rabbit hole talking about. But if you've de-anonymized an account because you're in Europe and that's all you can do, who are the contacts going to be? So we're in B2B world, we can go find contacts.

Are you baking your Apollo or your Zoom info or your Cognizm into this workflow? If so, how is that human in loop thing where someone then has to go and grab stuff out of it? Have you built an ICP profile inside the tool, which means they just have to say, give me all the ICP people inside here. How are you going to pick if it returns 400 results and, and, and, you know, just, just the, the, great hope of, of buying the tool.

you know, it's not going to do the job for you. And of course, when we come into planning, well, who is going to deliver all that stuff? Can we afford to have it? Do we have an integration platform? Do we have anyone with the capability to build any of this stuff? So

Maybe we aim with a shameless plug and think, well, actually, maybe the thing you also need to think about is skills gap. If you're going to go build this system, if you're going to go structure that, if you're going to add those tools, or frankly, if the whole thing we've been talking about sounded wildly confusing, then can we also factor in getting some help? And we'd love to. So let's end it there. But hopefully some...

Chris (42:48.32)

some slightly fresher perspectives on the planning process than just the template you got in your email this morning and hopefully some value created for everyone.

Colin (42:56.686)

which looked as if it had been generated on the free version of ChatBee GPT, but the old free version as well, like it was maybe last year's with a new date put on it. I'll share it with you later for the laugh. Yeah, indeed. Yeah, I think overall, sort of my sort of last thought about the kind of focusing on planning is that particularly when we're looking at annual planning, it's an unmissable opportunity to really

to take a systematic, holistic approach to all of these things that we've been talking about, not just planning, budgeting, strategy, processes, people data, a holistic view of where the business is going is an unmissable opportunity for that. And if it seems complex, well, that's essentially why we look at this through a systems thinking lens, that is indeed a sort of, just think of that as a tool.

Chris (43:47.426)

Yeah, because it did.

Colin (43:53.678)

for managing that complexity as you often see Chris.

Chris (43:57.134)

Absolutely that. Yeah. So what are your outtakes then to round us off?

Colin (44:03.982)

Well, guess that was, to be fair, attempt to have a single outtake in the interest of potentially landing at a slightly shorter. So for the audience to see, as we mentioned a couple of times, we have attempted to have a slightly more concise episode here, and yet we are hovering just on the brink of 45 minutes. So was going to leave it at that with a very general point.

Chris (44:06.414)

That was your outfit. Thank you.

Chris (44:29.294)

Let's leave it at that then. I will end as well with one parting thought, is start and end with the numbers, build a model and test the reality of the scenario before we go and commit a resource.

Colin (44:48.268)

Yeah, and don't be put off by the complexity. There's a system out there for that.

Colin (44:55.214)

We shall end it there for this week. Back again next week, normal service resuming for 2025. The growth system is brought to you as always by RevSpace. We're an applied growth consultancy that connects B2B organizations with the future of growth. So we offer consultancy, education and applied delivery services. Please don't forget to follow and rate the podcast. It really helps us bring the content to a wider audience.

As always, we really appreciate a moment of your time to tell us what you think. Your feedback is really valuable in shaping how we go forward with the podcast into 2025. Thanks very much. See you next week.

Chris (45:36.44)

Thanks for listening.