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How to Cure a Sick Sales Pipeline · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:15
  Matt Heinz: All right, well, welcome everybody to another
• 0:17
  episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:19
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:20
  Excited to have y'all here.
• 0:21
  As we get boy toward the end of summer we've got college football
• 0:25
  starting this weekend, week zero, the amuse-bouche for the fall season and
• 0:30
  baseball playoffs wrapping up, Bill.
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  And while we're just talking about our Cubbies, excited that they've already
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  taken three of four in a five game series against the division rival Brewers.
• 0:38
  So, go Cubs.
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  Just very excited to have you all here.
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  If you're here live, joining Sales Pipeline Radio in the middle
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  of your workday and workweek.
• 0:46
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• 0:51
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• 0:54
  those, we can answer your questions live.
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• 0:58
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• 1:00
  Over 500,000 people have downloaded and listened to Sales Pipeline Radio, and
• 1:05
  excited to have you as part of that group.
• 1:06
  Every episode past, present, and future of Sales Pipeline Radio, always available
• 1:10
  at Sales Pipeline Radio dot com.
• 1:12
  Excited today to have Bill Dwoinen, who's the Chief Revenue
• 1:15
  Officer of Mural join us today.
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  We're gonna talk about orchestration, go to market efficiency.
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  We're gonna talk about why pipeline is always important, but is so
• 1:25
  different than it's ever been before.
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  Bill, thanks for joining us.
• 1:27
  Bill Dwoinen: Yeah, no worries.
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  Thanks for having me.
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  I appreciate it and I appreciate it even more having a discussion
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  around the Cubs and one of the best of all time Ryne Sandberg.
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  So no, thanks for having me.
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  Matt Heinz: Oh my gosh.
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  I was sitting on my back deck last night watching the end
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  of that game and thinking, are we gonna walk in winning runs?
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  And it was a little more nail bity than I wanted, but I was
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  very happy with the outcome.
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  You guys did some really interesting research earlier this year, sort of
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  focused on what, I guess I would call Go-to-Market orchestration and the
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  real gap for a lot of organizations and how their Go-to-Market teams
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  align and how that affects their ability to drive predictable pipeline.
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  I'd love to have you dig into the research and just what you hear from
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  your customers in terms of the challenges they're addressing on that front.
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  Bill Dwoinen: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think there's, if you
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  take a step back and say, Hey, why all of a sudden is this bubbled up?
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  You know, why have we, you know, double clicked into orchestration or what's
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  the impact of being misaligned is that a lot of the pain points have bubbled
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  up, right with it getting harder to retain customers, harder to go find new
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  pipeline and, you know, I kind of make this joke is like, I think it's, you
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  have to move on beyond collaboration.
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  So, I know I came from a place that taught me a lot about sales, right?
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  Salesforce one of the biggest, you know, sales machines out there.
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  And it, looking back, I kind of realized like, wow, I was at the center of the root
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  cause of the problem because you would have, you know, 20, 25 people, you know,
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  in deal calls or, you know, all this work happening in silos, but nothing really
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  would happen to move things forward.
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  And so it wasn't necessarily, we were meeting all the
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  time, we talked all the time.
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  Even here we really have started to be biased towards the action of like,
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  we are not getting off a call unless there's a call to action, because
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  when you really look at that, we know that that really slows teams down.
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  But Matt, what has really stood out is what does it mean
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  for the customer experience?
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  And so when account teams really lack action or lack consistency
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  it really creates this fragmented experience for customers.
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  Right?
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  And, and one of the biggest pain points is always around account transitions.
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  Like you wanna applaud organizations that promote from within or people move on.
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  But, you know, I feel that probably.
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  A dozen calls last year around, Hey, this is the fifth rep in two years.
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  You know, you're not gonna stop that.
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  What you can stop is just what's the experience for customers throughout this
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  process and when teams aren't syncing up and bias to action it's just such a
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  bad experience for customers, and that's where that kind of burnout comes in.
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  Matt Heinz: Can we talk about the difference between playbooks and systems?
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  Because I think that's really at the heart of doing this consistently, right?
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  I think a lot of, companies have, you know, definitions of
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  what a lead and opportunity is.
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  Can you talk about just the gap many companies have between
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  playbooks and systems and why a system approach is so important?
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  Bill Dwoinen: Yeah, it's great.
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  I mean, I feel like it, it's such a powerful question because, you
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  know, the pipeline playbooks you know, haven't evolved much, right?
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  I think it's more about the ways in which you go about getting pipeline, and I
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  think what organizations are doing, what we're doing, what other teams are doing.
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  We just spent a few days in Chicago to say, Hey, let's take a
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  step back and really think about some of the problem statements of
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  what we're trying to solve for.
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  And then build systems around it, then build plays, right?
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  Whether it's the ability to measure the plays or having the right tools.
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  Like how do you take some of the lift off of, you know ,as A CRO, I get probably
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  30 prospecting, you know, 30 emails a day from people and like how do you allow more
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  strategic approaches to that, whether it's AI automation, so I think companies have
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  realized, I think two things, Matt, it's like both sides of it is you can't just
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  throw a tool at every challenge, right?
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  You know, you just can't throw something on top of something and then
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  throw something on top of something.
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  You have to take a step back and say, Hey, what are we truly trying to solve for?
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  Or what are we truly trying to do?
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  And for us, a big one is really breaking into the different LOBs,
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  the different lines of business.
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  Right.
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  And it's not, you know, talking to different leaders at companies
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  like Glean or ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce, Slack, everyone kind of
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  has the same thing of like, well, we really need to break into new lines of
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  business to find new revenue streams.
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  But you have to take a step back and say, do we have the
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  right systems, the right tools?
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  Do we have the right materials?
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  You know, do we have the right messaging to go create pipeline?
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  You can't just take something and flip it sideways and say, okay, now
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  we're gonna do it for the same thing.
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  And so I think organizations have really started to notice like, wait a minute,
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  our pipeline efforts aren't working right.
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  Let's now take a step back and say.
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  Who are we trying to go after?
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  What are the systems that we need to go do it?
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  What are the tools we need?
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  What's the messaging we need?
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  Then let's activate the playbook versus the other way around.
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  'cause I do think, Matt, it was activate the plays, then put systems
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  and tools around it when it's too late.
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  Matt Heinz: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Bill
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  Dwoinen and the Cubs fan and Chief Revenue Officer at Mural.
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  And I'm looking at the other side of my screen here at this study
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  that you guys did in the Spring.
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  This, Go-to-Market Alignment Gap is what you talked about here.
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  And there's one stat that I wanna point out that sort of stands
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  out to me as sort of this not only a gap between Go-to-Market
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  teams, but a gap between leaders.
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  And people on the front lines doing the work.
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  So when you guys ask the question, how often do you experience
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  misalignment between your Go-to-Market teams, 31% of decision makers says
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  that happened on a daily basis.
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  46% of individual contributors said that happened on a daily basis.
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  So there's a wide gap between what leaders perceive and what those doing the actual
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  work are facing on a day-to-day basis.
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  Sometimes I describe this as the difference between jazz
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  hands at sales kickoff and what actually happens Tuesday morning.
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  Yeah.
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  Can you talk about that Go-to-Market Alignment Gap and why it's so
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  important for leaders to understand at a almost atomic level, the
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  gaps in how work gets done?
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  Bill Dwoinen: Yeah, it's a great call and I was really blown away by the data
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  because when you, when the account teams are out there doing work, you know, they
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  really are the ones that feel the pain.
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  And so when marketing and product and sales aren't aligned.
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  It really makes it complicated to go to a customer.
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  It makes it complicated to accelerate deals, but I think
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  leaders have this belief that our, hey, our teams are working.
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  Right.
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  I see the number of meetings and that's why we kind of have this, you know,
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  me, this kind of inside way of saying it, of like, I think there's too much
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  collaboration, it's part of the challenge.
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  It's that so, from a leader's perspective, I see my teams back to back all day.
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  I see, you know, I made the example, last year that within any given
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  deal motion, there was 12 different documents we were collaborating in.
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  And so I think leaders see work that's happening.
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  Yeah, so they assume that, hey, our teams are working.
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  Right.
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  How many times have you heard leaders say like, our teams are out there
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  grinding, you know, they're with our customers, and the teams are like, I'm
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  not getting what I want from Product, and Products like our salespeople
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  aren't out there telling a good story and the customer is just kind of in the
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  wings and, and feeling the pain of it.
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  And so that's where you kind of see some of that numbers.
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  And I think all, I've been guilty of that sometimes throughout my
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  career where you're just like, yeah, my teams are working.
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  And then what we're trying to do internally is like, how do
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  we activate that feedback loop?
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  Yeah, so there's more alignment happening, and so when we show up in front of the
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  customer, it is aligned, it is consistent.
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  And then also when you look at, not to pivot away from pipeline,
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  but just the drain on employees, like the number of repetitive
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  meetings because of misalignment is what's really kind of driving that
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  burnout people are experiencing, especially in an asynchronous world
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  where teams are very distributed, whether you're in an office or not.
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  Teams are very distributed.
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  Matt Heinz: Well, the amount of work is a really terrible way of
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  measuring, you know, your productivity.
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  You know, we've seen a lot of examples of what Gartner calls collaboration drag.
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  Yeah.
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  Which is how hard it is to actually get work done, and
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  it's impacting speed to market.
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  It's impacting revenue impact.
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  It's impacting morale.
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  Right?
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  Yeah.
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  And so simply just doing more, I mean, all the investors we talked to, all the PE
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  firms right now are all do more with less and they're pointing at AI as a solution,
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  AI is an ingredient to that, but if you don't have a systematic way of breaking
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  down the work that needs to get done, so it gets done effectively and efficiently.
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  You're not only gonna not hit your number, you're gonna reach a, a
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  constraint in what you can get done and you are going to lose your best
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  people, who are getting frustrated and burnt out by having done it.
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  Talk about the importance of those workflows and systems to that
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  get more done with less message that's so forefront right now.
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  Bill Dwoinen: It's, you know, it's such a, it's such a, a powerful statement
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  that you made because the drain, the way that you kind of referred to it is
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  I just feel like, you know, I always say some of my least productive days
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  are when I'm back to back all day.
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  You know, like, you actually need time to be productive and think and move forward.
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  And so, that drain the impact that has in employees.
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  And what I love about what we're doing at Mural is I think there's two things.
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  Number one, we're using our, you know, what's the saying?
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  Drinking our own Kool-Aid, right?
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  Yeah.
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  Bring the visual component.
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  to the sales process, right?
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  There's, if you think about, you know, we started on this journey about, okay,
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  you know, we can build this cool visual, account discovery template that teams
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  can use and everyone's in the same place, and you can create automation.
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  They can pull in, you know, information about a customer from
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  their 10 K so on and so forth.
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  Then we started to realize that we had to move away from a moment in time.
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  Say, collaboration is fractured throughout every part of the customer journey.
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  And so how do you not only surface the right information, how do you
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  make it more visual and clear over who's owning and taking action, and
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  then what we've seen in our companies.
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  That have that kind of that matrix org map, where they have seven clouds, you
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  know, whether it's like a LinkedIn that has four or five different product lines.
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  All selling to the same customer or you know, a Salesforce, Oracle, IBM
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  that has multiple clouds is when people jump into the deal midway through.
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  That usually is creating more work.
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  And what we're seeing is when you bring in this visual, kind
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  of actionable way of working.
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  The teams are able to get caught up sooner.
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  And so someone joins a deal motion and there's not seven calls to get them
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  brought up to speed, or a leader jumps in.
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  And so that's what we're doing internally and what we're bringing to our clients
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  because the retention part is so critical.
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  And that goes back to the, you know, how are you impacting
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  the customer experiences?
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  And so retaining your top talent is more, it's always, there's always a
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  component of can they be successful?
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  Do they have a great career path?
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  Do they feel compensated for, you know, the work that they're doing?
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  But it's also like, can I get work done here?
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  Do I feel supported and do I have alignment?
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  Matt Heinz: Yeah, those are what you just said.
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  Those three things are so critical to making this work.
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  Right.
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  And I think you've seen it.
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  I've seen it in the work we've done the before and afters, right.
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  Of companies that are really just in fire drill mode all the time.
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  To becoming more efficient, more effective, faster to market.
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  Employees that feel like they're contributing better, their
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  morale is better, their team, their collaboration is better.
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  For a lot of companies, especially larger companies that are sort of facing that
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  collaboration drag challenge right now.
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  Knowing what to do next can be kind of intimidating.
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  There's a lot of moving parts that have to be addressed here.
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  Everything from workflow taxonomy, RACI, DACI, like thinking through all
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  the methodology of getting that right.
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  Where should people start?
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  Where's a good place for go to market leaders to start to chip away at this?
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  Bill Dwoinen: Yeah, it's a great question and it's tough, but I
• 13:01
  think if you take a step back, right?
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  So if I, I'm gonna date myself a bit here, but when I first got into
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  sales, it was like a desktop computer.
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  Desk, phone, and spreadsheets.
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  Now we live in a world where the average sales person has, you
• 13:19
  know, 47 tools at their disposal.
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  They have Sales Nav, they have, you know, ZoomInfo, they have Pocus,
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  they have this, they have that.
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  They have all these different things.
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  And I think what got us here, Matt was never truly taking a step back
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  to try to solve for the challenge.
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  And so we were on a call with a CEO of a pretty notable company a few weeks
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  ago, and we walked him through kind of this idea of more collaborative selling.
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  And he was like, you know what?
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  We've been struggling with account planning for years, and we kept
• 13:52
  throwing stuff on top of it.
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  You know, we like kept throwing a different solution at it.
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  Right.
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  Because you can do account planning anywhere, right?
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  You can do it in a million places, but it's really taking a step back
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  and saying, what are we trying to solve for with account planning?
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  What are the current challenges and how do we truly address it?
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  And so what I would encourage leaders to do is, and it's hard,
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  you know, you're closing the month, you're closing the quarter.
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  Then you're planning for next year.
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  Like it is fast, right?
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  It just, it feels like you, you know, it's hard to take a step back
• 14:21
  and sometimes it's annual plan.
• 14:23
  Sometimes it's end of quarter, but there's gotta be a point in saying, okay,
• 14:26
  what do we think are the key moments in time throughout a customer life cycle?
• 14:31
  There's the account plan, there's customer discovery, there's, you know, team
• 14:35
  selling, there's multi-cloud selling.
• 14:37
  There's even, you know, we've started to use Mural for mutual close plans.
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  You know, how do we bring a more visual component versus tagging
• 14:44
  a client in a static Word doc?
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  And so my answer, Matt, is like, how we got here is people kept throwing
• 14:52
  tools at the, at the problem versus taking a step back and saying, what
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  are we truly trying to solve for?
• 15:00
  How can we meet our people and customers where they are, and
• 15:03
  how do we make it frictionless?
• 15:04
  How do we pull in AI and workflows?
• 15:07
  And I'm not sure if you've seen some of the kind of articles floating
• 15:10
  around, but you know, AI for the sake of AI is not helpful, and
• 15:15
  so it's how are you intentional?
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  Like one of the things I love, we showed this to a customer today,
• 15:19
  is like in our account plan, you use AI to bring in all the top line
• 15:23
  things about what a company does.
• 15:25
  And so now you're dangerous going into a first call,
• 15:28
  whether you're an SDR or a CEO.
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  That I know what just came from company X's 10 K, and so it really is
• 15:34
  taking a step back and saying, what are we truly trying to solve for?
• 15:38
  Then comes your point about systems.
• 15:41
  Then comes your point about plays.
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  It just used to be, let's throw a bandaid on it, but it's caught up.
• 15:46
  It's like running into the wind and the wind keeps getting faster.
• 15:49
  Matt Heinz: Right.
• 15:49
  We're gonna have to wrap things up here.
• 15:52
  If you wanna learn more about this, I'd highly encourage you to go do a
• 15:55
  Google search or even an LLM search for Mural Go-to-Market Alignment Gap.
• 15:59
  You'll find the research, it's ungated, it's available, there's
• 16:02
  even slides to download of the data.
• 16:04
  If you want to help your internal team understand the real problem here and the
• 16:09
  impact it's having on revenue attainment for organizations that are addressing
• 16:12
  it today, definitely check that out.
• 16:14
  Bill, thanks so much for joining us today.
• 16:16
  Bill Dwoinen: Thanks, Matt.
• 16:16
  I appreciate it.
• 16:17
  And and go Cubs.
• 16:18
  Matt Heinz: Go.
• 16:19
  Cubs go.
• 16:20
  I tell you what, that is the cheesiest song I've ever heard and
• 16:22
  I love listening to it at the end when Cubs win games at Wrigley.
• 16:26
  Have a great weekend everyone.
• 16:27
  Thanks for joining us for another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 16:30
  Until next week, have a great week.
• 16:31
  We'll see you soon.