This past week Kyle Poyar shared thoughts about where he foresees the next big GTM (go-to-market) impact being made: the operations owner.
I love Kyle’s content. I honestly have no idea how he’s able to put out the depth + quality of content as regularly as he does on LinkedIn and in his newsletter. So when he shared the above post that I largely agreed with, it prompted a reminder to myself of a mistake I’ve made a few too many times before:
Your strategy dictates your tech stack, your tech stack should NOT dictate your strategy.
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Attribution. If you want to stir the hornet’s nest with the marketers + GTM leaders at your organization, just bring this topic up in your next meeting. Why is it so divisive? Because so many use it to assign credit to channels and departments + this leads to internal arguments over who should get credit for that 5-6 figure deal that contained hundreds of touchpoints along the way.
Enter: HockeyStack. Hockeystack is not just an attribution tool; it's specifically designed to show the holistic funnel instead of department-level analytics. It is fully customizable, and it's the only product that allows you to build literally any report you need without any code.
So when I told them I didn’t care about using attribution to assign credit to a channel, but that I wanted to understand how channels + departments interplay with one another in order to structure our GTM moving forward in a way that increases the likelihood of us being more successful and they said, “Yeah, we can do that,” you know that caught my eye.
“Those who sell the panic, sell the pill”
Growth Operations Manager
ABM (Account Based Marketing) Specialist
Paid Search Strategist
Social Media Manager
The list could go on and on. These are job titles that didn’t exist until new technology came along in recent years. Having individuals who can specialize and understand these functional areas is critical if you want to be successful in using them, but we have to remember one thing:
The increase (and decrease) in these roles has a strong, positive correlation with the bottom line of certain technology platforms.
More simply put, don’t be surprised when you see…
Clay championing growth operations roles
6sense championing ABM roles
Google championing paid search roles
Facebook championing social media roles
They recognize that if they want more money spent on/in their platforms, that by putting a spotlight on a specific problem or to a specific role, that it’s likely to gain more attention in some form of $$$.
So the next time you see an ad, article, video, etc. that seems to be really emphasizing “just how big a problem X is” or “how Y is the future,” remember that the organization or individual pushing that message most likely makes money off of that.
Story time: hiring a RevOps manager
Our GTM team (sales, BDRs, marketing, customer success) has grown significantly over the past two years. With that growth typically comes more software, more processes, more reporting, etc. Unfortunately, that also often means those are being done in silos by each of the departments. Enter: the RevOps manager.
This person is typically a player/coach at a startup in that they can operate both strategically and tactically to make sure that the departments, their tech, the processes, and more are all working in 1) a logical way that enables the teams to be successful and 2) the most efficient way by reducing redundancies and ensuring information is passing between them.
To be honest, it’s a daunting role that is massively underappreciated by most organizations and leaders. Think about it for a second, they need to understand things like:
Systems thinking
How sales, BDR, marketing, and customer success departments function from a macro view
Data analysis + reporting for each of those departments AND leadership
And so, so much more
The ironic part is that at the very top of the internal business case for this role, I have in bold we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s what this person is going to help us with.
But one thing I do know after scraping my knees a few too many times learning the lesson of always having your strategy dictate the tech you use and not the other way around, is that I wouldn’t let us make this mistake again.
So while having some back + forth with a candidate for this role, they shared a 90/365 day plan outlining how they would approach this role. They were provided with our current issues and tech stack as some background, then came back with their plan.
One of the examples they provided was taking a part of our tech stack (Gong in this example) and then listed a few things they would leverage this platform for, including keyword planning, forecasting, and GTM insights.
And seeing this brought me back to the theme of today’s newsletter: how can we avoid falling into the trap of allowing tech to dictate our strategy when it needs to be the other way around. So I challenged them with the following:
A common issue with many organizations is they let the tech dictate the strategy + execution when it should be we have a strategy + know how to execute THEN tech enables us to do that.
Pulling on that thread + where this idea came from - underneath Gong you have 3 bullets that are broader JTBDs (jobs-to-be-done) across the company.
Keywords inform SEO, content strategy, paid search (if we ran it), etc.
Forecasting spans different teams as they have different goals + levers.
GTM Insights spans everyone.
What if you flipped the bullet/sub-bullet hierarchy and instead said to help with our acquisition strategy via SEO, content, etc., we can use Gong to help by XXX, Hubspot to help by YYY, Google Analytics to help by ZZZ, etc. To help with our forecasting efforts, we can use Gong to help by XXX, SFDC to help by YYY, etc.
Remember: no amount of tech can make up for a poor (or lack of) strategy. It doesn’t matter what players you have on the field if there isn’t a coach to guide them.
One podcast episode I enjoyed this week
SEO has been top of mind for me lately. More specifically, what does SEO look like given the rise in usage of tools like ChatGPT to get answers. These AI tools are starting to eat away at Google’s long-held search ownership. And they also play by different rules.
So how do we as marketers adapt to this? Does the traditional technical and on-page SEO playbook still hold true for how these AI tools gather information? How do we account for this channel when the answers are given within the tool itself instead of driving the user to our website for the answer?
This space is getting shaken up and honestly, it excites me because it needed it. And this episode both confirmed a few things our team was sensing, as well as giving us a few new ideas on how we should be approaching this moving forward.
And for anyone interested, here’s the playlist I add to each week with some of my favorite podcast episodes:
See you next Saturday,
Sam