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The Digital Utopia Podcast Episode #28

Why is Alignment so Difficult to Solve?

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About the podcast

The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.

Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.

The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.

Episode transcription

Frank  
Hey, gang. Welcome to the digital utopia podcast episode 28. I'm your host, Frank Cowell, and I'm joined by my co host, 
 
Joe  
Joseph Freeman. 
 
Frank  
Joe, we have had a great discussion about alignment this morning. 
 
Joe  
Yes. 
 
Frank  
And so I know we went off in a bunch of different directions. And we have a lot of different facets of this to go over with our audience. I think this actually might unfold over several episodes. But where do you want to focus today? Specifically, we talked about aligning b2b organizations, when it comes to revenue, potential revenue growth, their revenue engines. 
 
Joe  
Yeah, well, the question is, why is alignment such a difficult challenge for b2b organizations? Right, and 
 
Frank  
loaded, loaded question. Lots of answers. 
 
Joe  
It's a question that's being asked all over the place. And I think one thing that we talked about this morning that we should mention here is revenue operations has the propensity. I think it has the potential to just become a heady conversation. And there's a lot of people talking about it. There's a lot of people philosophizing about it. So with that, let's go with that. But who's doing anything about it? How do you actually bring it to life. And so one of the things to bring it to life is definitely this alignment conversation. So when we talk about alignment, we're talking about alignment between the different departments in an organization marketing, and sales and service. But above and beyond just sentiment, let's talk about how you actually get aligned in where a lot of b2b are not currently aligned. 
 
Frank  
Yeah, I think it's an important point you just made, I think there is a lot of posturing going on, in around this conversation. And I think for most organizations, it just becomes a philosophical discussion. And, and there isn't much specifically happening, that's different. So I think that's a great point, when we talk about alignment across those three areas, marketing, sales and service, and you've probably heard us mention this before, on a past episode, we're talking about specifically aligning in three ways for those three areas. For those core functions of the business, those three functions, the three areas in which you want to align, those are process platform. And people, you've heard us talk about that. And so if you were to kind of visualize that in a grid, you would have like a three by three grid. And it since we're talking about getting being conceptual and philosophical here, so let's start there with something philosophical. So in your organization, when if you were to put that grid together on the top is marketing, sales and service and on the left, you have process platform and people and you would check the box, if you know you are process align for those if your platform align if your people aligned. So ideally, if you were to, again, conceptually, look at this box, you would have chain links, going left and right and up and down. And they're all interlocking that that's revenue operations. And so there's a lot of people that put a lot of flour around that, right, a lot of flowery language. And a lot of like you said, it feels good to talk about it. But if we just get rid of all the flowery language, that's what we're talking about, if you want to just talk about the conceptual philosophical, do you have that nine box grid interlocking up and down and left to right. Okay, specifically, then what do you do? This is where we're sorely lacking when it comes to this revenue, operations, conversation, and why most people don't achieve alignment now, because they don't have anything beyond that. That visual I just shared right? 
 
Joe  
Now, you're absolutely right. I think today, let's talk about three specific things. Let's talk about people who are focused on their specific function or role, which is good, but you also have to be thinking outside of your role to get alignment. 
 
Frank  
I think which I think people have a hard time doing not just in this context, but in every context of life. So we can talk about I think that's an important part. I think people just have a hard time getting out of their own, you know, box. 
 
Joe  
Hmm, yeah,
 
Frank  
getting out of their own identity. That's very difficult to do. So we're gonna challenge you here today, not only from this business perspective, but maybe just personally as well. 
 
Joe  
Yeah. Okay. We all talk about misalignment cause from varying data across different systems. 
 
Frank  
Big one, big one. 
 
Joe  
And then we've talked about conflicting KPIs. And I have some specific thoughts on whether or not there is misalignment on the actual KPIs or something deeper. So we'll get into that as well. But let's start at the top. Let's start with people who are focused on their specific function in their role. Why is this a problem? Well, I think we're going to touch on this too, when we talk about technology. Right? But I think the problem is, is everyoneputs together their plans, they get really entrenched with what they're doing. They get their favorite software's in there, they do this and then when it comes time to come together as a team, everyone is putting their flag in the ground and they want to stake certain territory and they want to make certain claims
 
Frank  
And they want to hold on to certain things. And just by default of that nature, going into those alignment conversations means you're limiting the potential outcome. Because you go in with preconceived notions. And so this is kind of what I meant a moment ago that this happens in every aspect of life is that we get locked in to identity, we get locked into what we believe is so and so when we go in with that mindset, we're not truly open. Right to be truly open means to divorce yourself of any preconceived notions, identities and beliefs, that's really critical. So not only are we talking about, you know, Rev ops and getting aligned, but just anything, any initiative that you would move forward with, you have to divorce yourself of those things. Otherwise, you're not truly open. And if you're not truly open, then you're going to miss, you're going to miss nuggets that are possibly right in front of your face, 
 
Frank  
I don't want to miss one nugget, 
 
Frank  
I don't want to miss it. 
 
Joe  
So what we see happen all the time is we will talk with the marketing team. And they actually might have stuff pretty dialed in from marketing, they might have their KPI set, they might even have their technology kind of dialed in and their different processes. Let me go talk to the sales team in same thing, they might actually have a decent sales process and good decks and a good training system and they've got it dialed in for them, then over and service, the same type of thing. where a lot of companies don't have it dialed in is the handoff between them. So once leads are generated and even qualified "qualified" from marketing, handing them off to sales, there's often a big gap there. And the reason there's a big gap there is because sales and marketing haven't discussed and aligned on any number of things, they haven't aligned on, what is a quality lead, hey, we all talked about getting 20 new leads, but you sent me 20 that I don't want to call, right. And so having that kind of alignment, that regular communication around expectations is so important. And we just see time and time again. You know, again, the marketing team, doing what they think they're supposed to be doing, hitting numbers that everybody agreed on, but still getting blamed by sale, there's a lot of finger pointing, sales kinda blames marketing for not enough leads, marketing, blames sales for not picking up the leads, service blames sales for over selling or over promising. There's just a miscommunication across all of them. So I think the solution here? Well, it's Rev Ops, right, as zoom out, zoom out and say, yeah, we might have some operational alignment within the departments. But we need to zoom out and figure out how we bridge those gaps between each of the three. And that actually might be a little painful, because you might actually have to undo some of what's working in your little bubble, to make sure that it aligns with what needs to happen as you toss that over the fence to the next department. 
 
Frank  
Yeah, and again, going back to process platform people, right, so then zooming out to process, which is the strategy. And what most organizations don't have. When I say process. I don't mean, logistically, how a contact and lead moves from one area to the other and what's the MQL criteria? And what's the SLA between those two organizations? The logistical process? I'm when we say process, we're not talking about that. That is part of it. And that is way deeper down. in that discussion. That's a tactical, the part that's most important is the strategic process. What is the strategic glue between marketing, sales and service? And are you operating from the same strategic plan? That's the process? So the question becomes, in our organization, how do we go about creating awareness and positioning and attracting attention? and converting those into opportunities? and converting those into customers and turning them into fans? How do we do that in one linear, seamless, cohesive fashion? That's the question that marketing sales and service needs to be on the same page about and you need to see literally on a sheet of paper, what that journey what that process looks like. And most organizations don't have that they don't have that strategic glue. They do what you said, which is, we agree on mql criteria. And we're gonna set up an SLA to commit to that to one another, and we're gonna toss them over. But there is no unified strategic way in which they all know exactly how that happens. From a strategic point of view, so here's which is that's the process we're talking about. So when we say process, yes, you know, again, getting the the middleware in or getting your platform and and getting things logistically facilitated is a piece of it, but it has to happen. But that's not where the money's made, the money's made in getting strategically aligned. 
 
Joe  
Yep. So here's your first step towards fixing that. You got to sit down and you got to zoom out. And you have to look at every single lifecycle stage that your buyer is going to go through and we talk a lot about this, right? This is they're going from a stranger to a visitor, they're going from a visitor to a lead a lead to a qualified lead, then they're gonna go to an opportunity, a customer, and then hopefully a raving fan, you got to zoom out and look at that. And you have to define at each of those levels, who's responsible for it? What is the major KPI that's going to allow us to know whether or not there's a bottleneck at any of these levels? You need to understand what your supporting metrics are. And everybody has to agree on this. Yeah, everybody, you gotta have everyone's that everyone in the room. 
 
Frank  
This is the one sheet view 
 
Joe  
Exactly. And we actually have this right, we, we put this together as an implementation matrix that, you know, if you contact us, we can get it to you. But you got to zoom out, you got to look at this, and everybody has to agree. And in that room, in that conversation, there's going to be some disagreement, and you got to get aligned. Once you're aligned, you can't put that in the shelf and walk away or in the drawer, and walk away, you have to put on the books, a monthly meeting, where everybody pulls that out again, and says, are we doing this and has anything changed in Do we need to realign, and it's just that it's just the exercising of that muscle that keeps everybody every month in alignment across all lifecycle stages. And that, to me is the first step to a fix here. Yeah, that's the first step. 
 
Frank  
And I would say even better is when you then pull your tech together such that all of those lifecycle KPIs are exposed somewhere and updated regularly on dashboards, to where you go into that monthly meeting. And everyone already knows, you know, where everything's at, from a movement standpoint, across that lifecycle on what those KPIs are currently set up. And then what the metrics hopefully are telling you about what's likely to happen in the coming weeks and months. So having that is, is a critical component, don't have to get there right away, everyone can show up to that meeting and bring their separate, you know, numbers and report on those. But that's ultimately where you're trying to get to. So when we talk about platform, you know, there's a couple of things that you know, yes, a specific software package is part of the platform or having specific solutions defined are part of your platform decisions. But more importantly, do you have revenue? Rev ops analytics, right? Do you have analytics that actually show that? Do you have the ability to keep, you know, contact life cycles in sync across their entire journey as they travel from one system to the other, and those are the kind of like platform critical things. As you mentioned, in one of our past conversations, some of the features are nice to haves, right? It's not necessarily the features that are the deal breakers, it's some of those attributes that we talked about, like, you know, that the analytics and you know, keeping the contact lifecycle in sync, like, those are the most important things. 
 
Joe  
So that's a perfect segue into our next alignment problem, which is misalignment caused from varying data. 
 
Frank  
Oh, perfect. 
 
Joe  
So misalignment from varying, so what are we talking about here we're talking about, you might have a system as a marketer, where you've got some data, and it's collecting certain information about a contact record, sales may have a different system. So let's just say you're using MailChimp to send all your emails and to collect all of your new leads, at least leads that come in online. Well, sales is using Salesforce and Salesforce, they're putting different leads in there. And every once in a while, you're kind of sinking them up and making sure that some of the contacts go between the two. But there's not true. There's not true alignment between those two platforms and a lot of organizations. So what you end up happening, or what ends up happening is there's mismatched data, right on a contact record, you might have different demographic information stored in one system than you do for the other, you're going to have one system with, you know, a certain number of leads or contacts, another system with a different number. And there'll be some crossover, but not always the same, 
 
Frank  
right.
 
Joe  
And while there is middleware to bridge those, you know, you get the zap years of the world, you got these other software's that will help those two software's communicate with each other. A lot of times, it's not even, it's not that good. 
 
Frank  
I mean, we You and I have witnessed a lot of integrations. And we can probably count on one hand, the ones that are like seamless, and perfect and work really well and the data comes over. And even then in those that may be working well. But there are certain data that just doesn't come over, like API's, and middleware is great. But oftentimes, these platforms, they don't inherently expose every bit of data in views of data that you can get in the native platform. Like, for example, when I in our finance system, when when we connect to that via API, they expose all the data, there's all the tables, you can get them and pull them into a dashboard and mash it up. But certain views of the data that exists when I'm in that financial platform aren't in the API. They're not there. And that's the that's the same with all these systems. So your there's just a layer that's just never going to come over. Sometimes that is the meta information, especially when we talk about contacts, right, like knowing their history, what have they viewed, what have they download, you know, what requests have they put in you know, like, how many
 
Joe  
At times, you know, what was intriguing to them is all this behavioral stuff oftentimes doesn't come over. Yeah, and a lot of organizations don't think it matters. They think, well, we collected this information on the marketing side, but we don't need to pass all of it over to the sales record, because a sales team doesn't use that. Same for the sales team, a, we put in a new contact that we met at a trade show, we put in their information, but we didn't put in all the information that marketing collects, because they don't really need that. And that may be true, they might not really need that. But if we go back to our last step, where we all zoomed out, and we looked at the lifecycle stages of an individual buyers journey, and we all agreed on what has to happen there, the only way you can make sure that's really happening is by making sure that that contact information is consistent all the way through the journey. So everybody's having the same conversation. That's just not happening in a lot of organizations. Right, right. You know, in a recent survey done with marketing leaders and sales leaders, the question was posed, would you rather have one system that kind of, does it all your marketing and your sales and your service? Or would you rather have different software's to do it all and kind of connect the dots between them? And surprisingly, to me, most of them said we'd rather have different software's. And if you dig into that, I think it's because they have the software's they're comfortable using, they've been using it for years, or they know that some of the individual software's are come with a bunch of bells and whistles, and maybe the one software to rule them all doesn't. And I get that, I get that you want to have a software that does all of the special little fancy things that you love to do. But I actually think there is much more to be gained when you bring it all under one roof, and you have one software that can do it all. And even if that software is lacking in a couple of the magical areas that you love about your specific software, the gain is better. 
 
Frank  
Absolutely. And I I'm willing to bet that the respondents of that survey, were more of the practitioners, they were in the functions, I guarantee, if you did that same survey, to GM COOs, CFOs, they would say the one platform why because they understand what you just said, the value of having things in one system, the value and to be able to expose those insights, because you can see the entire lifecycle and the entire pipeline of things. And so you know that again, to me, that doesn't surprise me people answering that they're feature focused, as opposed to being business focused. 
 
Joe  
Yeah, and I like to think of it as like a KitchenAid. right in your in your kitchen, you've got the mixer, 
 
Frank  
which KitchenAid because there's a kitchen, it's a brand, 
 
Joe  
it's the beautiful mixer that's red or yellow, or kind of like a vintage blue. And it's got 
 
Frank  
not the one that's got the bowl and it goes the circle thing. Okay, there's a name for that the brand is KitchenAid, just for our listeners in my house, because we don't want them to go to like Google, I don't want to buy a kitchen, like that. KitchenAid makes a lot of stuff 
 
Joe  
in my house the name for that is KitchenAid 
 
Frank  
got it. 
 
Frank  
So there's a KitchenAid mixer. Alright, and that KitchenAid mixer comes with all the attachments, or at least it can come with all the attachments you can come with the shredder for the vegetables can come with the bread neater and oh, come with the egg beater and with all the different things.
 
Joe  
And for most households, that's exactly what they need. Because they need one tool to rule it all they got to do a little baking, they're gonna do a little cooking, they're gonna do a little prepping and they need it all under one tool set. Now, I would bet that a chef or a baker has a whole bunch of cooler fancier one off tools to do every single one of those things that I just said, they probably have a special tool for needing the bread and they probably have a special tool for shredding the vegetables, and it does it a little bit better and actually maybe arguably a lot better. But for most situations, and most households, you don't need to have a collection of all the fanciest specific tools to do that specific job. Even if it does a little bit better. There's just not enough value not enough gain and the efficiencies that are gained from having one tool. I just think blow away. You know the extra flavor you get out of chopping it with a special tool. 
 
Frank  
Well don't tell my wife this because I have this knife set that a I've got way more knives than I probably need. But I needed to fill the blocks. So don't bring up this discussion around her because I spent a lot of money on this knife set. 
 
Joe  
Yeah, well, it looks it looks cool when you have parties, right? 
 
Frank  
Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's a lot like the Ron Popeil since we're talking about kitchen stuff, like set it and forget it, right? Like, the number of things you can cook in that is like, pretty epic. But like, could you roast a chicken better using a more specific method? Yeah, probably your point but like, Damn the chicken off the set and forget it tastes pretty damn good. Pretty good. 
 
Joe  
Okay, so here is the here's what I think you got to do as a first step for getting your misalignment from data back in alignment. You either have to go get a software, we talk a lot about HubSpot. We love HubSpot or HubSpot fan people. You got to get a software that has a marketing component and a sales component minimum and a service component yeah, at minimum,
 
Frank  
yeah, that I just want to be, in my opinion would be like, at minimum, it's the marketing and sales integrated. 
 
Joe  
Oh, I gotcha. 
 
Frank  
Because in some businesses, the servicing component, there are industry specific solutions to then manage those customer client patient subscriber member relationships, right? Like you, you're probably you might have something that's specific to the accounting world specific to the construction world specific to, you know, your gym, or membership or whatever, right. I know, we talk mostly about b2b here. But if we look at the broad spectrum of businesses, there are a lot of, you know, service functions, specific platforms for those industries. But at minimum, the marketing and sales especially we're talking about like a b2b sale or a sales cycle stuff, you can get a HubSpot like system, and it will facilitate that for almost any industry where it starts to like, you know, separate as in your, like, service specific platforms.
 
Joe  
Yeah, that's a good point. You know, whether it's HubSpot, or whether it's a custom installation as an ERP, or whatever it is, you got to get full alignment across those under one umbrella, if at all possible. Now, for some organizations, that's just not going to be possible for a myriad of reasons. If it's not possible, you have to make sure that the data synching between each of the different systems is 100%. In alignment, yeah, and even though sales doesn't actually care about some of the demographic information, you're picking up on the marketing side, or vice versa, sync it, make sure it follows all the way through, because when you go to run a report, or when you go to take the data out of any one of those systems and put it up on a dashboard, you got to make sure that you've got the whole story there. Right. So if you can get one system to rule them all, if you can't go back in and make sure that you have all the same fields on every contact record in every system, and that they're all sinking over, including stuff like how many web page, you know, visits, there's been in, you know, how many emails they've opened all that matters all the way through in terms of reporting and dashboarding.
 
Frank  
Yeah, and just going back to my point about marketing and sales, today, there's no today in 2020, there's no reason why you shouldn't have one platform, one vendor for marketing and sales, there's no reason you're not talking about sold by the same company. And they bought a package. And they're kind of somewhat integrated. That's not real. That's not really under what I'm talking about a platform built, specifically, where marketing and sales are all part of the same platform, there's no reason 2020 why you don't have that doesn't. Because even if your business has a specific industry, client servicing platform, the marketing and sales will pretty much adapt to any sales process in any marketing style. So there's no reason today to not have that. Because at minimum, you have to know which efforts are turning into customers, you have to have that full attribution. And you can't have a disconnect between those two. There's no excuse today,
 
Joe  
which by the way, that's the number one complaint that I hear from sales leaders is that the attribution model is not there. A lot of times we look at attribution models that are lost touch, meaning, what was the last thing they did before they became a contact or sales conversation? Did they click on an ad, whatever that is valuable. But a lot of the sales leaders that I talked to actually want to know, what are all of the things they touched before we actually got to talk to them? What ads did they see? What things do they subscribe to what pages on the website did they go to? That's all important because that gives the salesperson a ton of context when it comes to having a personalized conversation interaction with this person?
 
Frank  
Sure. I mean, we live in a world where you have to the promise of this tech long ago was that you can do personalization at scale. Okay. And so what that insinuated is that people would receive personalized messages where the machine did it for you. And I think that's not the reality of it, the reality of it is, is that at scale means you can get a lot of these insights so that when you go to contact somebody one to one, you have the right data, you have the right information, to be able to, to engage with them with a lot of history with a lot of contexts, knowing what they are interested in knowing what they're about. That's the personalization at scale today and what it means. And so if part of your process is you want to send a prospect, a hot prospect of book, right as a way to delight them and open the conversation. Well, now you know what book to send them, you know, like, what information they've been looking at, you know, what pain they probably have, you know, what their job role is, and what organization right, you have all of this context, so you can then do that more efficiently. And more accurately, it becomes much more relevant now.
 
Joe  
So this now leads us into our final talking point, which is conflicting KPIs, ones that don't complement each other. So again, if we go back to step one, where we're zooming out and looking at the entire lifecycle stage, all the different stages that one buyer goes through, we can assign at that moment KPIs that makes sense that bridge from one to the next. But what we see a lot is marketing will have a KPI, for instance, marketing qualified leads, which makes a lot of sense for a marketer. And in sales has a KPI, which is new revenue is actually a big gap between marketing qualified leads and new revenue. So by going back to that first step we talked about, you can actually fill in the gaps and assign it to different kind of micro changes in that lifecycle journey of a customer as opposed to just their lead now their customer. Yeah, we that's a big gap.
 
Frank  
Yeah, we and that's why I think, you know, when we came up with our methodology, that digital utopia methodology, the essence of it was that we needed to infuse natural relationship progression into the marketing and sales in fan creation process. It doesn't it's not binary, it's not, they're not a customer, they are a customer, like you're saying it's not binary, there's actually a progression with that relationship. And that's what needs to be defined in your organization. So you understand that, okay, they're at this stage, and it's actually normal for them to be at this stage, which is actually not already. Now. That doesn't mean we ignore them. There is a relationship there. Maybe it's not the at the stage you want just yet. But there's a whole swath of people at this relationship stage that aren't ready now. What are you doing? How are you building that relationship and measuring those major relationship changes is important,
 
Joe  
super important. In fact, we've seen time and time again, I'm thinking specifically of this one particular company we worked with where marketing got involved, and it was given a number you need to give us X amount of leads, you know, what marketing did that, in fact, marketing surpassed that? I think by by two times, they handed so many leads over to the sales team. That one, I think the sales team got a little overwhelmed, but to what wasn't in place was and this is where I think this goes beyond a KPI conversation, but wasn't in place where the next step sales needed to take with each of those leads. Sales thought their next step was, I'm going to call them if they look like they're ready to talk. What should have been put in place was, no, you're going to maybe send them an email and they're not going to respond and you're going to send them a second email, they're not going to respond and you're going to send them a chat on Facebook or LinkedIn what they should have had a plan to nurture those new leads into a sales conversation. It wasn't just toss it over the fence, and they're ready to talk. Yeah, and I think even though marketing was hitting their KPI, and actually sales was hitting their KPI because of some outreach and outbound that they were doing. Everyone was hitting their KPI, but the actual goal wasn't being hit. And the goal was to make sure that they were getting more sales conversations from those leads, there was nothing bridging that gap. Had they gone back in the beginning, and looked at the different lifecycle stages, they would have understood what types of actions each team should have been taking above and beyond just getting new contacts in the database or picking up the phone and calling them.
 
Frank  
This is where I think the role of BDR really was born business development, or SDR, whatever you call them in your organization. And I think this is where it was born from, which is someone to bridge the gap. So I'm going to take those leads that aren't, you know, going to move into quote, unquote, opportunity stage just yet. And someone to nurture those and reach out and gather the info and whatnot. I think where a lot of organizations go wrong is how they is the mission of that role and how they compensate that role. They oftentimes in organizations, they ascribe more sales like objectives to that role, when in reality, that role doesn't make sales. That roles job isn't to make a sale in there. If the mission is more aligned with sales, it just becomes a junior salesperson. Instead, what a lot of these middle middle ground leads need is they need nurturing they need almost like customer service. And so if the mission of that BDR is to create conversations, create engagement, show value, you know, start to create a relationship with the brand, they're going to actually generate a lot more conversations and then beginning to look like it's slower and not working. But as that snowballs they will absolutely hand over a much better sales opportunities to sales, because they're going to be creating real relationships. And that's the mission of the BDR SDR role. And in a lot of organizations, they get it wrong. They basically just assign sales like, you know, objectives and just becomes a junior salesperson. Yeah. Which is just a wrong way to if it's just another salesperson, then tell your salespeople to get off their butts and call these people and, and do their sales thing, right. But that's not what it is. It's supposed to be a relationship maturation mission.
 
Joe  
So I think first step in fixing this problem, the problem being KPI misalignment, I think it's less about KPI misalignment, and I think it's about missing metrics in between them. So zoom out, define what the key prs are at each of those levels, and then look at what metrics will help bridge the gap. So you know, that might be mq The KPI for the marketer, maybe new revenue is the KPI for the salesperson. But what are all the little metrics in between that you need to be measuring to make sure somebody is actually helping those people move along. And that could be things like from mq l to sales qualified, that could be things like number of phone calls made to each of these number of emails sent each of these, those things should be defined, assigned an owner and actually owned and reported on, so that you can make sure again, that no one's just tossing stuff over the fence and hoping that the person on the other side catches it and runs with it.
 
Frank  
And then going back to what we said earlier, I think KPIs are part of it. But also, the strategic process is still important here. Because again, if it's just about delivering the KPI, then the BDR acts like the junior salesperson, okay. But if if everyone understands the journey, that relationship driven strategy, then you understand why you're doing what you're doing. So when you're a BDR, you're not just a junior salesperson trying to hit a quota. You're trying to move people along in a relationship journey. That's different context. Completely different context.
 
Joe  
Yep. Okay, so we talked about people who are focused on their specific function, we got to break them out of that and make sure everybody's looking at everybody's function, and complementing it. We talked about some misalignment cause from varying data. So you got to get your systems, your platforms talking to each other, at the very least, even better, get them all under one roof. And then the third thing was making sure that your KPIs are aligned, and that there's some metrics in between to help bridge the gap. And I think if you want any more information on this kind of stuff, we have so many tools and so many resources that we can we can pass out to help you start, you know, operationalizing, this
 
Frank  
Yeah, go to buildingyourdigitalutopia.com, buildingyourdigitalutopia.com, you can have access to all of our other episodes. There's a lot of episodes where we've touched on related topics, and we're going to continue this conversation. So you know, like, share, subscribe and join us again for another episode, but go to building your digital utopia.com. As you mentioned, Joe, lots of things to download there. There's links over to the book where we talk about this, this topic and in a relationship driven approach, and let us know what you think. But I think we're about out of time today. So thanks for joining us. Tune in next time and have a great day.
 
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