How to Make Real Change

What’s left? Merely to enact it all within your company. Which is the hardest part, honestly. But that’s why you're in the leadership position that you are.

Change is inevitable, success is in how you manage it. You are now the revenue org prophet of profit who knows that it is essential to make an orderly transition. Because even while your executives will continue to see their peers cling to YAWNS (Yet Another White Paper Nobody Sees) and MQL readouts, everyone’s results will quietly plummet. What others say on LinkedIn is not the whole truth.

In this chapter, we explore the five steps you’ll need to take—the change management to change your management, if you will—to get your new marketing adaptability machine running. And to help everyone else realize that marketing is not an MQL gumball machine.

Note: These steps do not have to happen sequentially. You know your org best and what will be easiest to get done first.

Step 1: Establish your revenue framework

The honest truth is that nobody is about to trust a team of marketers whose numbers are dropping say, “Actually, we need to be looking at things differently.” Even if the insight is valid, others will be skeptical. Marketing already faces a credibility gap. That’s why you’ll want to approach those meetings with a framework like the Demand Continuum, pictured.

The continuum arms you with the authority of a ready-made system plus a question that is sure to stump them:

“What if instead of asking what campaigns we should run, we asked, ‘Where do we want our revenue to come from?’”

This question shifts the conversation from tactics to strategy and forces, encourages, invites alignment across the entire revenue team.

Who should be at the table for this exercise?

Bring together cross-functional stakeholders from:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer success
• Finance
• Leadership
• Marketing and sales operations
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Do not forget to include marketing and sales operations—having folks from both of those roles is essential. The success of this framework often depends on your ability to technically identify and surface your ideal buyers and marketing qualified accounts (MQAs) within your revenue technology stack. (You may also need to revisit your sales compensation plan—another critical lever that shapes behavior but that’s a topic for another article.)

Build a Demand Continuum together

The Demand Continuum connects marketing directly to revenue by mapping key segments to go-to-market (GTM) strategies. This creates focus and accountability by clearly defining where revenue will come from and ensuring your team has the capacity to deliver.

Use it to: 

• Map your bookings or revenue goal to your ICP account segments
• Align those segments to the appropriate GTM strategy (e.g. this one gets ABM 1:few, that one gets a partner approach, etc.)
• Validate your plan using historical data to model expected performance
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So when you ask, “Where do we want our revenue to come from?,” the answer won’t be fuzzy. It will be clear, documented, and aligned. Though you aren’t quite done. Because what you have there is a retrospective look; it’s based on what has been. It is up to you to carry that definition forward into the future and to describe ideal customers you do not yet have.

There will of course be a transition period. While you want to get to where 70% of your customers come from your ICP, your new ICP probably doesn’t correspond with the current sales territories. For a while, you’ll need to do a bit of both.

Strategies to consider:

• A graduated transition culminating in new year territories
• Offering stronger incentives for ICP deals now
• Having marketing take on more of the initial outreach lift
• Offering heavier support to the business development team
• Preparing the success team to help ICP accounts get early wins
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Do not let any lack of alignment at this stage prevent you from doing what’s right. Take courage. 

“Now is the time for a hard reset,” says Patrice Greene, Co-Founder and CEO at Inverta. “When you interviewed, you likely told them, ‘I’m here to do something different.’ Now is your moment to cash in. Tell them you’ll keep your incubated project inside your department until you’re crisp and clear on the ask—but then there will be an ask.”

Step 2: Set up your success metrics

Nothing is going to clear your marketing name like hard, numerical evidence. We covered all the new metrics already, but to recap slightly, you’ll need to maintain two dashboards for a while—one with the old metrics that everyone is accustomed to that ties to sales territories, and the new one, with your more useful future metrics like LTV, net revenue retention (NRR), and MQA.

• Dashboard 1—Old metrics: MQLs and attribution for executive stakeholders familiar with traditional measures.
• Dashboard 2—New metrics: MQAs, NRR, and LTV for internal marketing and sales conversations, to measure what actually drives growth.

The reason for two dashboards is simple: Your new metrics will take time to show results. Until then, it will look like the plan isn’t working. One company we know of was ramping up account-based marketing for two quarters and the results weren’t showing, so the executives asked them to shutter it. In the fourth quarter, several big accounts came calling. Everyone scrambled. They’d judged it prematurely.

If you’ve read this far and are thinking, “Wait, setting up new dashboards is hard!,” you are right. It’s a difficult process to ensure the right fields are reporting the right numbers across the CRM, marketing system, intent tools, and analytics platforms. This is why you must involve marketing operations from the start. They’ll advise.

In addition, set up a metrics inspection process with regular audits, where you check in and compare projections to actuals. You will never get your targeting and definitions 100% right out of the gate, and you’ll need to keep asking, “Was this account really an MQA? Yes or no?”

As part of that inspection process, incorporate:

• Credible sales feedback
• Credible customer success feedback
• Ideal-fit buyer feedback
• Campaign and program data

Step 3: Sell everyone internally on the change

Yes, you have already taken the revenue team through an exercise to agree on your ideal buyer, goals, channels, programs, and metrics. But if this were a buyer’s journey, your teammates are still in the “consideration” phase. Now, you’ll really have to sell them and start thinking through how they will activate and own their parts. In other words, you need their enthusiastic signature.

Make it a real sales pitch. Apply everything you know about persuasion internally and write an evocative yet concise story about how market conditions have caused this change, with data and evidence.

For example:

• ‍Problem—Buyers have changed. We’ve all seen the numbers drop off the cliff. Evidence: 86% decide before talking to sales.‍
• Cause—Bigger committees, digital evals, AI, a tough economy.‍
• Benefit—If we figure this out, we can still exceed our growth targets.‍
• Action—This requires a whole new GTM approach.‍
• Warning—Things will appear to get worse before they get better. We must learn, adjust, and trust.

If you are extra clever, you’ve had your marketing operations and data science team run a regression analysis on how things might have played out over the last two years if you had the new approach and metrics in place. What big customers could this new system have predicted? What expansion might it have led to? What churned customers might it have helped you avoid?

You probably did have a few ICP customers come in last year. Place them at the center of your story—that will make it extra real and put a logo to the idea. “We want more of MegaCorp.” 

Now’s the time to define all your agreements in great enough detail that everyone can implement and abide by them. For example: 

• An MQA is __
• A buying group is __
• Our collaborative rules of engagement are _
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At no point should you assume other teams will know what to do with this new structure and guidance. You’ll have to keep up the internal campaign until it’s working, and as problems arise, teach others or create tools for them. You can conduct workshops and create synthetic personas to give everyone insight into what buyers need.

Step 4: Launch a pilot program

Remember that you are trying to phase this change in, not switch overnight. Select a representative segment to run an initial pilot of the new system, such as a specific ICP or product line. Set your goals for the pilot in terms of LTV, NRR, and MQAs, as well as the old methods, so you have two dashboards. That way, you can understand if the new system is better and tell a before-and-after story. 

Nothing will convince everyone of this new system like closed-won deals that fit the ideal persona, and closed-lost or churned deals that do not fit. (Though obviously, you’ll take all the wins you can get, and you should be fully committed to learning—if the new ideal persona isn’t better, you need to know now!)

Define your success criteria for the pilot:

• On which exact dates will you assess progress? 
• At what performance level is it considered a failure? Indeterminate? A success? 
• What specifically will you do in the event of each outcome?
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Agree on all of this ahead of time and formalize it in a written memo. Otherwise, the inevitable result will be that nobody is quite sure and you’ll go in circles discussing. The project will lose momentum.

In tandem with the pilot, you’ll want to roll out dynamic planning as discussed in Chapter 2. Set monthly and quarterly meetings where you adjust the plan based on what you’re learning.

We recommend building your pilot around an always-on campaign, so-named because it is an ever-running, full-funnel, multichannel campaign designed to retire a good chunk of revenue without much ongoing effort. With that as a foundation, you can add in additional tactical sends and programs via dynamic plans.

Always-on campaigns inspire long-term thinking because they’re built to be forgotten, and take the pressure off everything else you’re doing. One of the great dangers with this pilot, by the way, is that you must run it in addition to everything else you’re doing, you can’t devote enough attention, and the strategy appears to not work.

Set your reporting cadence so everyone involved in the pilot is apprised of its progress. Turn what you learn into a playbook for rolling this out to other segments.

Step 5: Launch fully

With a successful pilot under your belt, it’s time to go on a whole tour. You now have the evidence you need to convince everyone, including those beyond the revenue team, that this is the future. Invest some internal marketing dollars on branding this initiative and giving it a name that’s short and mnemonic, which creates excitement. 

Distribute the materials so everyone knows how it works—your annual plan on a page and Demand Continuum.

Implement those new sales and marketing territories and incentives to align with this. That pulls everything together—people manage what’s measured and compensation is destination. 

From here, you return to somewhat normal-feeling work, with learning loops, and reminding everyone of the reward: finding your organization’s path to sustainable, profitable, repeatable growth. 

Set a roadmap, milestones, and timeline

• Short-term (0-3 months)
  
  • MOPs takes a baseline of current metrics
  • You launch your paunch pilot programs
  • You start teaching executives the new metrics
• Mid-term (3-12 months)
  
  • You iterate and expand on your pilots
  • MOPs gradually transitions dashboard reporting focus
  • You hold quarterly cross-functional alignment meetings
• Long-term (12+ months)
  
  • You and MOPs sunset the old metrics (MQL)
  • You fully embed dynamic planning and data practices
  • You and MOPs establish an ongoing process for refining your metrics (dashboards, analytics)

Remind everyone of the reward: finding your organization’s path to sustainable, profitable, repeatable growth.

Wait, did we talk about AI? What about AI?

Nice catch. AI didn’t get its own chapter for the same reason we no longer have “chief digital officers.” It’s now intrinsic to everything we do. But also, AI is not a strategy. Nothing about the fundamentals in this ebook will change with AI or any conceivable technology to follow. It’s an accelerant. That said, absolutely need this foundation if you’re to make use of AI—which we’ve already written extensively about.

At the end of every journey, the hero is changed

To paraphrase T.S. Elliott, after a long journey, you always return home and know the place for the first time. A marketing team that successfully implements Playbook 2.0 will start to feel like working on a marketing team running Playbook 1.0, back when it actually did work. You’ll see demand teams in the conference room scouring spreadsheets. You’ll notice marketing operations teams, headphones on, working on plans for a new integration. The sales floor will reverberate with the dull thud of the gong. 

Yet all this change management will also leave you changed. You’ll have learned to ask all new questions and figured out tricks for dialing in MQA definitions that are profoundly counterintuitive. You’ll have united the revenue team and put up a big win together. You may also find yourself possessed of a calmer confidence about how marketing works—less affected by criticism and clearer on your core purpose: to bias the market toward your company’s goods. You’ll know that change is inherent to the role and that Playbook 2.0 will be your last playbook; because you’ve internalized what it takes to build an adaptive organization, and now it’s intrinsic to you. You’ll never stop.

You’ll have positioned your company at the forefront of what it means to meaningfully engage buyers—to listen, understand, and reach out with pinpoint accuracy to those most in need of your services. And you’ll have restored marketing’s good name, with a new furry black coat as evidence.

If you want to discuss any part of this playbook, please reach out. We consider it a living document and will continue to add to it quarterly and publish additional articles that go deeper on each section.