Revenue Alignment: Eliminating Silos for Efficient Growth

[00:00:00] Aaron Janmohamed: Well, welcome to another episode of the Revenue Mavericks podcast. I'm the host, as you know, and I'm joined by a very special guest, Kyle Lacy. You mind introducing yourself? 

[00:00:16] Kyle Lacy: Hey, yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm Kyle. I'm CMO at a company called Jellyfish. I'm also a dad, an avid reader and I love Orange Theory Fitness. That's my, that's my bio.

[00:00:28] Aaron Janmohamed: That's an expansive, uh, uh, introduction. We'll have to talk about books and exercises that you love. But, um, I, uh, I invited Kyle to come on. He can talk literally about anything, but we settled on a, I think a theme that's going to be relevant to anyone that would listen to this and that's revenue alignment.

But before I get into that, uh, maybe a slight personal question I wanted to ask is, is there something in your Personal life, maybe some experience you've had that, um, you would say shaped, shaped you in such a way that you're able to do what you're doing. Now, 

[00:01:01] Kyle Lacy: I think that, you know, professionally it's hard, it's hard for me to separate the two, you know, personal and professional are very.

intertwined for me. Um, you know, a lot of my, a lot of my self worth as a human being is based in my career. And it's always been that way. And I think it's, it's changed since I've had kids, but, uh, for me professionally, it was when my agency failed and I decided to take a job at a company called exact target at the time, which was my start in software.

And I was very lucky that my first job in software, I got to witness. what it meant to scale a company and IPO and get bought. And then what that, what that acquisition look like. I'd say that's number one. Number two, professionally is the Leslie acquisition, which was a massive win for everybody involved.

Um, and then the third one's more personal, which is the passing of my aunt. Um, during, I think it was right after COVID, uh, 2021, uh, where I think it, I think it puts when somebody close to you passes, I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. And, um, I thought that it would, it would have less impact over the years, but, but it has been a constant reminder of.

Where to focus time and energy. And I think all those things kind of bring me to where I am today with, uh, how, how I lead teams and how I think about my family and how I think about the job. 

[00:02:41] Aaron Janmohamed: I appreciate that. It's always interesting to learn some of the backstories of people's lives that you don't necessarily get through LinkedIn.

Um, that kind of, uh, shape and form and motivate, you know, behaviors and actions and decisions. So thank you for that. Um, and. Like I said, I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Um, so to kick things off, I, uh, I was reading an article, um, in HBR and, uh, a group of people had done this study on strategic alignment.

In businesses, and they found something interesting. People generally reported being optimistic about the alignment that their organizations had. But when the, um, the, the study people carrying out the study dug into it, they found that there was a wide gap in actual alignment. So, the, the, just to give you the data points, 83 percent said that they were aligned.

23 percent were actually aligned based on a series of metrics. I'm curious if you see this kind of disconnect. Between perceived and actual alignment. And if so, what creates that? 

[00:03:48] Kyle Lacy: Well, I, I think I do see it. Um, I'm lucky that we have great alignment at jellyfish, which we have worked very hard to build, you know, since I joined and our VP of sales, Ben Solari and I have.

Spent a ton of time and energy trying to make that happen. I mean, I think that the main reason is a lack of metrics between all the go to market teams or, or all the teams, let's just say all the teams in general. Um, I don't, I don't want to go down that route of sales and marketing alignment. I think it has to be alignment across the board.

I think it's a, I think it's a different, uh, people have different opinions on the definite there's different definitions of alignment, but ultimately it comes down to business metrics and it might be boring to say, but it's. If you're not aligned around what will make the business successful from the CEO, all the way down to the individual contributor, then there's not going to be alignment.

There's not going to be so I think it has to do with metrics or lack thereof. 

[00:04:52] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah, interestingly, in a conversation with Forrester recently, they had mentioned that they find data visibility of which. Alignment around metrics is a key subset seems to be the most common missing link preventing teams from being aligned.

So I don't know how 

[00:05:09] Kyle Lacy: you feel about that statement. I don't think it has anything to do with visibility of data. I think it has something to do with just a lack of strategic metrics. Like, I, you and I, there are plenty of BI tools, plenty. You can use a damn Google sheet. Use a Google sheet. You don't have to go buy Tableau.

But I, I, you know, I just get really frustrated when people are like, there's not visibility in the metrics. It's usually because you don't have the right metrics or you're not looking at them constantly. 

[00:05:40] Aaron Janmohamed: That's interesting. So what, why do you think that is? Cause it seems like, you know, I'm on a, on a lot of executive team meetings and we talk about our revenue goals and we break those revenue goals down to the quarter and like who owns, you know, pipeline production and how do we get customers a lot, you know, how do we orient around customers so we can achieve.

It seems like it's almost hard not to be aligned on metrics. I'm wondering why is it? But I don't, I don't 

[00:06:05] Kyle Lacy: know if that's the. I don't think that's normal 

[00:06:09] Aaron Janmohamed: real honestly. 

[00:06:10] Kyle Lacy: Yeah, I think that the fact that we look at leading and lagging indicators. I don't think it's normal. Um, at least from the companies that I'm involved with, in terms of the people who I'm talking to, whether it's.

You know, you and I, uh, shooting a breeze talking about companies, like, there's a lot of lack of. Metrics, um, across the board. And I think a lot of it just has to do with the leadership team and how they're building the company, depending on what stage you're at, especially in microsoftware. Right. Um, but it just, I think a lot of times it just takes a lot of time and energy.

to align finance to sales, to marketing, to CS, to all the go to market teams that we're all looking at the same thing. NRR, GRR, Blokeens, pipeline, conversion across the funnel. Um, I'm lucky that our exec team at Jellyfish just, you know, cares deeply about all of those things. Um, but of course I think we're, I think we're the lucky ones, honestly.

[00:07:15] Aaron Janmohamed: Where does driving customer value come into play? Um, because there, there are all sorts of metrics. One of the things I found interesting that HBR article was they found that the most Common and effective remedy. There's a lot more detail here that I'm not getting into, but generally they said the teams that were aligned around driving customer value tend to be aligned around most everything else in the business, which I found kind of fascinating.

I've heard other leaders talk about, you know, even going to the degree of, I'm not going to spend much time thinking about our competitors, we're just focused on our customers and driving value for them. And that seems to orient everything else. Do you see that being, uh, applicable or is that also too vague to

[00:07:55] Kyle Lacy: I think it's too vague. I think it's too vague. And I also, I don't, you, you could correct me here, but highly competitive people. It, it blows my mind that somebody could say, we only focus on customer value. We don't focus on competitors. Come on. 

[00:08:11] Aaron Janmohamed: Oh, I know all 

[00:08:12] Kyle Lacy: of us in this world of high growth, we're raising money and we're trying to win a category.

That's just complete BS. You can, you can spend 80 percent of your time thinking about customer value, but you are definitely not ignoring your competitive set. You shouldn't, right? So I do think customer value is, is to, is to high level, you know, customer value, you've got leading indicator, leading and lagging indicators that can show customer value, right?

You've got NRGR expansion, you've got upsell, you've got all of these different things you can use to try to show that you're providing that. But, um, I think that's when, I think that's when businesses get in trouble is that they have an exec team talking about customer value and there's nothing underneath it.

It's like, they gotta be, we gotta have good NPS scores and the roadmap needs to be moving and that's about it. There's not any connection between the different teams and marketing should care about CS. Marketing should care about sales. Sales should care about the handoff between an AE and an AM. Or a CS rep, right?

Marketing should care about what product is doing. Um, and I just, I don't think that happens a lot. 

[00:09:20] Aaron Janmohamed: The current company I'm at the last two companies I was at, I felt like we, we did a pretty good job of understanding what other teams were focused on, why it mattered to the overall objectives of the business, and that informed all of our strategic decision making.

I guess you're right. There are a lot of teams that, that don't do this effectively. If you were consulting somebody, I mean, how do you tell somebody to go out and fix that problem? What is, what is, what is the thing that, that helps them do it? 

[00:09:46] Kyle Lacy: Start with one thing. I mean, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't give myself credit for the jellyfish stuff.

I mean, they're our exec team, our CEO, like. We have a weekly business review where we talk about all of the metrics. And initially it was a lot, but then as we got into it, it's like, okay, this makes complete sense. Everybody's looking at the metrics all the time. We're talking about it as a leadership team.

Um, for me as a marketer, if I'm advising somebody, it's start with a pipeline model. That's, that's the first step. And I don't, if you don't have. If you don't have historic information, make it, swag it. You gotta have something, right? And I, so, you know, for me saying, hey, you should focus on the entire go to market.

There, there is definitely tiers of focus, right? Like my main focus is sales. Right. Like I want to make sure that marketing and BDR, like all the channels are supporting our AEs to full quota 

attainment. 

[00:10:47] Kyle Lacy: And then secondary, which will change as this company grows is CS and okay, how do we think about onboarding and how do we get more involved in that and how we think about the experience, but also what do we think about upsell and expansion?

But that's, I think it's very much dependent on the stage of the business, on how much you should focus on. You know, customer, but ultimately you should care about renewals and churn and stuff like that. But, um, I think it's just dependent on where you're at in your stage of growth 

[00:11:19] Aaron Janmohamed: a few weeks ago. I saw.

If I'm remembering correctly, you published or shared your revenue handbook, which I believe you described as a service level agreement between. Marketing. Yes. Yes. And I'd like, can you explain a little bit what what's behind that? What's the intent behind that artifact and how you use it? 

[00:11:37] Kyle Lacy: So to be clear, uh, we built this out at less than Lee.

One of the main authors of it was a, was a man named Justin Clifford, who was our sales leader, who's, who's now CEO of a great company. You should go check out called brief. But, um, this was a work in progress that I have then borrowed multiple times over. Um, as I've talked about alignment. Uh, I mean, it's as simple as it sounds, it's what's the service level agreement between all the different people that are working on taking a prospect to a customer.

So what's the follow up time for a BDR on a on a MQL as an example, what's the what's sales cycles? What's the territory agreement that the sales leader has with his managers, his or her managers? What's the What's the handoff look like between sales and CS and, you know, jellyfish mainly our handbook right now is more sales oriented with some marketing.

You know, at less than Lee, we had, I think we had all three teams. But it's you can think about it as like a contract between all the internal teams to say, this is what we agreed to do. And when we have to have difficult conversations or arbitrage on something, then we have a document. We have a document that we can go back to to say, this is what we agreed on at the beginning.

What went wrong and ultimately it feeds a better experience for the customer in the prospect. 

[00:13:05] Aaron Janmohamed: Do you, um, do you incorporate or, uh, you know, given our audience, a lot of them are, are in operations and revenue operations specifically, um, uh, what role do they play? They, they seem to be the arbitration author 

[00:13:17] Kyle Lacy: in their case.

They should author it if you have a rev ops team, if you have a rev ops leader, they should be the one leading that, um, initiative it with support from all the go to market leadership team, but it's definitely operations for sure. If you have it, they should be the one leading it. 

[00:13:38] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah. Any reason why you, why you wouldn't have that?

I mean, that's the, what was it last year? The fastest growing role in SAS was revenue operations. It seems like that's kind of a trend at the moment. Um, yeah, no, no, no. I 

[00:13:50] Kyle Lacy: mean. Any reason you shouldn't have RevOps lead it? Um, no, I don't think so. If you have a RevOps team, I don't, I don't care where they live.

I don't care who they are. They should be at the center of all this. And that's what that document is supposed to be. It's like the, the handbook to say, this is how we do business as, as a go to market team. 

[00:14:15] Aaron Janmohamed: Um, I'm curious to get a little bit more, uh, detail from you on, on, on key metrics that you and your business are, are, are aligned to.

It would really help. I think people generally like to understand how other businesses are orienting their, their activities and, How do they ensure that the business is strategically aligned in the right place and metrics obviously a big part of that. So what are the key metrics that you're operating by, not just in marketing, but across the business?

[00:14:41] Kyle Lacy: Yeah, I, we have a, we have quite a few. Um, I'll pull out some that I think are extremely important, at least to the, to the topic of alignment. Um, we definitely do stage one and stage two pipeline numbers, both by count dollar by segment and channel. So how much does inbound need to produce? How much does inbound need to produce for mid market and up market?

Um, and then stage one and stage two is stage one, which is. Open pipeline stage to spot by pipeline. Um, we do look at demos. We do look at MQLs. They can, you got, you all can hate on me all day long for using MQL still with this, you know, if they convert, it's a qualified lead. Um, and then there is the, the, the, uh, high level metrics, which is.

NRGR bookings, um, and then from a leading indicators, it's. We look at pipeline and, um, pipeline and attainment metrics by rep. So every, uh, and I credit Ben Solari, our, our, our sales leader for putting this together. But, uh, bi weekly we're meeting as a pipeline team to say, how is each account executive doing in terms of coverage and how are they doing in terms of quota attainment?

And so I think that that kind of that brings everybody together. So you have the leading and the lagging indicators, but ultimately where I'm focused is. That top and middle of the funnel, and then you've got conversion rates by stage. You've got, you know, um, health of the, the, the other side of the business is health of the customer, right?

And how are you looking at that? And Nicole, our, our customer success leader has been amazing at that. So there's a lot that, that we kind of unpack, but for me, it's mainly like that top half of the funnels where I'm focused the most. And my team's focused the most 

[00:16:44] Aaron Janmohamed: and you said on the broader metrics every week You're doing a business review with the ceo and the executive team and going over these key metrics.

That's interesting 

[00:16:53] Kyle Lacy: And yeah, that's and that's credit to our ceo something that he is You know, Andrew has championed that from the day I joined and they were doing it before I joined and, um, there's a lot of value that comes from at least having conversations about this stuff. And some, some weeks it might not bring it, bring up anything, but there are other weeks where we'll, Unpack something that we wouldn't have seen unless we had been looking at it 

[00:17:22] Aaron Janmohamed: as a business like jellyfish has grown and is scaling.

How does the nature of alignment change? Like, are the challenges the same whether you're, you know, 10 million, 20 million versus 100 million? Does it does it really alter that much or does it become harder to manage? 

[00:17:37] Kyle Lacy: I would say it really depends on how the team's built out, but it's definitely it would definitely become harder to manage.

The more, the more human beings that you have involved in a process, the more difficult it becomes in my opinion. Um, I think that potentially the metrics that you're looking at will change, of course, you know, like a hundred to 200 million company is probably looking more at upsell and expansion than they are necessarily net new bookings depends on the business, right?

Um, but a growth stage company, definitely new bookings. Terms important, of course, always. But, um, you know, that's where, you know, and then the, and then the discussion becomes product SKUs and buying things like there. I think it changes based off of the size, of course, but I, I would say it becomes more complicated.

Yeah, that seems like a very generic. Of course, it becomes more complicated. There's more people and more money. But I, I think that, you know, there is no way that jellyfish, you know, two years from now is less complicated than the jellyfish today. Yeah, 

[00:18:47] Aaron Janmohamed: it 

[00:18:47] Kyle Lacy: stands. That's the 

[00:18:49] Aaron Janmohamed: reality of complexity is just going to keep keep increasing, 

[00:18:52] Kyle Lacy: which is, you know, I think is what defines whether or not you want to stay in a job like this.

And you and I both know that as, as it becomes more complex. I actually, I appreciate that more, um, than I have in the past. And it's what I enjoy more, honestly, because as, as you add more people and you've got to figure out things changing and how do you adjust and change management. Making sure you have empathy and making sure you're growing fast, but also have difficult conversations like all that stuff.

I think it's very important, 

[00:19:27] Aaron Janmohamed: especially when you have several years of foundation building in place. I can imagine it's easier. I mean, I'll backpedal a little bit. Something I said earlier, I have stepped into a couple of roles where there, there was clear misalignments. Yeah. And the signals were pretty, I mean, you, you notice from day one, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

And that can be an intimidating thing for any leader. I mean, not just marketing can be a sales operations, the CEO. I mean, everyone has to grapple with that. Um, what I've noticed is that when, when, when you're not aligned as a business, you, there's a lot of guessing, but you treat your guesses as gospel truth because you have no other alternative.

You're not, you're not looking at the right metrics. So you have to assume that your assumptions are right. And you start to operate off of those assumptions and, and it can spiral pretty quickly. Yeah. What, what do you tell people or what have you done yourself or seen in your own career when you, if you've been in those situations?

I mean, how do you, how do you grapple with that and what, what steps do you take to start to fix it? 

[00:20:35] Kyle Lacy: I mean, you got to own it. You have to own fixing it. If you see something wrong and you have to stick to owning it until it's done, no matter what somebody says. And I, I think that our pushback that you might receive, I think that it is important to note that there are C, I think it, I think it starts with the CEO for what it's worth, you know, if there's misalignment on the leadership team, it's the CEO's fault, as much as we would like to say, sales and marketing CS, we all need to be, we don't need to be friends.

We just need to be aligned. If they're not, if there's misalignment, fault, but there are some CEOs and founders that were forged in this idea that misalignment actually drives faster growth. Because there's competition and things happening within the leadership team. And I, I would, I will vet that before I joined a company, right?

Like I'm, I'm not interested in being a part of something that is misaligned to drive growth. Right, because I just don't I don't believe that it works. Ultimately, there could be some out there that say, hey, you know, these unicorns did it great. That's fine. You know, I'm good for them. It's just not how I lead, right?

It's not how I function. So, you know, I, to fix it, it's to say, hey, this is this model is missing. I think we need it. Who are the 2 or 3 people I need to help get it done internally? Okay. And then you own it. That's why I advocate for marketing leaders to own pipelines. Pipeline models for the board or for anybody for the leadership team so that you have a seat at the table.

And it's something that you can control. It's something you can manage. It's something you can forecast. And you're never going to get in the deep weeds with a sales leader on headcount capacity or quota attainment or anything like that. You should understand it. But I think pipeline is where. We'll go back to what I said at the beginning is that I think pipelines is the first step marketing can make instead of saying, you know, instead of celebrating top of the funnel constantly, you know, this happened, I'll say this, you know, this has happened to me in the past where, you know, you've had a marketing team celebrate something when the sales team is underperforming 

and 

[00:22:45] Kyle Lacy: that that can't happen right at all, ever, because you've completely lost trust in that.

So. I think that, um, it's just important to know as you, as you're looking at companies, if you're, if you're interviewing, if you're trying to find the right leadership team, it starts at the top. 

[00:23:02] Aaron Janmohamed: How do you vet that? You said you try to vet that in the energy product. I mean, that can be difficult because sometimes you can't be fed.

Well, ask 

[00:23:10] Kyle Lacy: them what they measure, what they look at. What do you care about, CEO? And if, and if the CEO cares about things that seem like, you know, making sure that the sales team's fed, making sure that the sales team's meeting conversion rates, making sure that marketing is producing inbound to support sales, making sure that, you know, CS is onboarding appropriately.

If they, if they have a more holistic approach to metrics instead of, Hey, I want to grow 200 percent this year or whatever, you know, pick a, pick a percentage that, and you know, there's a more holistic approach to how they think about leadership and growth and not just, we're going to hit our bookings number no matter what.

[00:23:53] Aaron Janmohamed: Can you think of an example, uh, either at your current company or in the past where. Because of the alignment you had, it, it shaped other strategic decisions that were important to business. And if so, what were they and how did it do that? 

[00:24:07] Kyle Lacy: One that I've actually experienced a couple of times now, not just a jellyfish, but I think when you have alignment between CS sales product.

And marketing, you're making segment decisions, territory decisions based off of the entire model, not just whether a rep can hit quota, right? So territory development, account development, ICP, use case, persona, all this stuff that is about targeting, finding product market fit, scaling product market fit. I think gets better and it evolves faster when there's alignment.

You know, when, when you have sales engineers that are constantly on calls. And you are constantly talking about those calls and go to market leadership meetings. And you understand where they're falling short, or you're looking at conversion rates, or you're looking at the product road map together, and you're understanding what's coming up in a meaningful way for skewing or whatever, right, for skews or whatever, then it's just going to, you're going to be able to move faster, and territory alignment, rep quota attainment is one where I've experienced very quick shifts in a meaningful way because of alignment and everybody looking at the same thing.

That's just one thing. I mean, there's tons of different examples. 

[00:25:29] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah. Specific to your role in marketing. Um, I, I, I would like to understand, I mean, how, how do you set things up so that you're in support of, of, of sales? I mean, I've heard this. Spoken by a lot of different leaders. In fact, I think the last time I heard this was from Udi who said the From from gong who said hey the purpose of marketing is to make sales easier so, uh 

[00:25:51] Kyle Lacy: God, I wish that I would have said that I the amount of times that that's been a couple years Or that I have quoted that.

Um, I just I i've said that to him personally I'm, like man, you just you knocked it out of the park on that soundbite 

[00:26:05] Aaron Janmohamed: How do you get focused on that? I I I do see a lot of marketers You Not oriented around the object of making sales easy. And I wonder why that is, because ultimately, like I, I, I had the same feeling as you, if I create a lot of pipeline, but we don't close it, I don't feel like there's anything to celebrate, 

you 

[00:26:25] Aaron Janmohamed: know?

And so there is an orientation problem, I think with a lot of marketers, but maybe it's more fundamental than that. You 

[00:26:31] Kyle Lacy: got, yeah, I don't look, man, I think that, I think it's a pretty simple answer, very hard example, Matt. 

[00:26:38] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah, 

[00:26:39] Kyle Lacy: you gotta set the goals together. I don't care what you're looking at. I don't care what goals you're measuring.

You have to set your goals together. You have, the sales leader has to understand the pipeline model. You have to have, as a marketing leader, you have to understand headcount capacity. What happens when we add a BDR? What happens when we add an AE? What happens if we change something in the product or, you know, the product led growth side?

I, you gotta set the metrics together. And however you do that, I happen to really enjoy a pipeline council. I happen to enjoy the fact that there's a handbook that you can reference, you know, having a weekly business review is, is important, but it's. Agreeing on and setting the goals together and I think that's when sales becomes easier is because you're looking at the same thing Yeah, you're not looking at everything.

[00:27:33] Aaron Janmohamed: Um, i'll i'll end with a slight departure from the theme Although it's somewhat related back to the the fact that a big part of our audience is revenue operations um What have you seen in in the best rev ops people and best rev ops teams that you've worked with? What do they do that's different from from other rev ops teams?

You I guess this is very connected to revenue alignment because they're probably forces in driving that. But if you don't mind speaking a little bit more broadly about the role and how you as a marketing leader offend value from, from that function, I, I think people would be really curious in understanding that, that relationship.

[00:28:07] Kyle Lacy: Ultimately, it's about, it's the difference between reporting and surfacing findings. A lot of RebOps teams, leaders, Um, marketing ops, sales ops, whatever, whatever you want. You can throw ops under there in general. They, they, they fall back on reporting what they think somebody wants to hear instead of surfacing things that they've found.

Help me, help me fix something. Help me celebrate something that I wasn't normally looking at. Surface challenges. Don't wait for me to say something. I think that's, that's the difference between. a great RevOps team, and one that is just order takers. Um, so don't be an order taker, be somebody that's a strategic partner, and understands the data to the point where I don't have to surface things, that they are brought to me, and the decisions can be made around that.

I think that's the difference.

Uh, called Do Better Work that was written at Lessonly from our CEO at the time, Max Joerger. And there is a chapter in this book, Do Better Work, called Have Difficult Conversations, Chapter 6. And then Chapter 7 is Get More Agreements. So if you want, like, something to do tomorrow, buy this book, read those two chapters, and then go have a conversation with your leadership team on what's going wrong.

Why is it going wrong? I think 70 percent of these issues is people just don't understand how to communicate effectively or appropriately. And a lot of it is just misrepresentation of emotions or feelings. And that's where this entire thing will break down. A difficult conversation is saying, Hey, sales leader, you know, I, I very much appreciate the fact you care about quota attainment, but when you all talk, when all you talk about is your rep quota and you're coming down on marketing constantly, it makes me feel like X.

Can we figure out a way to work on where we're reporting, where we're talking about the same thing so we can work together on solving this problem that we're running into? That's. Most people just don't do that. They get pissed off and then they don't talk about it. And I keep this on my desk as I read it like once a quarter, but this is having difficult conversations is probably the best way to approach this.

Go do it tomorrow. Read the book. That's where you should start. 

[00:31:10] Aaron Janmohamed: Effective dialogue. I love that. Effective dialogue. All right. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for the advice and for your input on this, uh, on this conversation. I appreciate you coming on. Um, a great person to follow somebody I've been following for a few years now.

So if you're not Kyle, you need to. 

[00:31:27] Kyle Lacy: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.