Alignment Eats Strategy for Breakfast

[jbogaert]

Alignment eats strategy for breakfast. It's one of Alison Elworthy's famous sayings. Here's what HubSpot's EVP of Revenue Operations (RevOps) means by that: When you're deciding how to move your company from growth to scale, alignment will be far more important for your success than strategy.

Because when teams are not aligned around the same goals, things will go awry. There will be a miscommunication about expectations, duplicate work, and conflicts around priorities. Money will be wasted, and your goals will take much longer to achieve, if at all.

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At HubSpot, we saw this first hand. So we went for the RevOps approach and never looked back. We aligned all go-to-market (GTM) teams in marketing, sales, and customer success teams by giving them a single leader: a Chief Customer Officer. Then, we detached our functional operations teams from those GTM teams, and we created a RevOps department that reports into the Chief Customer Officer. 

However, the RevOps approach doesn’t necessarily require restructuring. If you're considering this approach, here are some questions you might want to get answered in your next leadership meetings:

• How do we get aligned when launching a new initiative, product, or project?
• Do I have the right people in the room and do they have the same objective?
• How do we contribute to our goals and hold ourselves accountable?

If you are looking to get going with an operating cadence for all of your functional ops teams before hiring a head of revenue operations yet, you might want to answer these questions:

• Am I bringing my GTM leadership together regularly?
• Are my GTM teams aligned on what the customer-facing strategy looks like?
• Is there an agreed-upon operating cadence for how and when these customer-facing executives and teams are making decisions on an ongoing basis?

Starting with these guardrails, you can start to align your marketing, sales, and customer success teams. If you want to learn more about how RevOps can take you from growth to scale, take HubSpot Academy’s course on RevOps.

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