Latest / WTF to Unstuck™ with Clint Williams / Navigating the Dance Between Strategy and Execution with Ben Bartalone
Transcript
- speaker-0: Hi friends. Today I have the pleasure of chatting with my friend Ben Bartalone. We met on LinkedIn earlier this year and discovered our love of paradise on Hulu. If you haven't seen it, highly recommended. He is an ex-Broadway producer and he's in the outbound sales and revenue space. And I'm so excited that he's here today on the Coffee Chat. Ben, welcome. speaker-1: Thanks, Clint. Very glad to be here and I love getting to catch up with you. So this is wonderful. speaker-0: Always a pleasure. And you're up in New York City, right? speaker-1: Yes, sir. In Manhattan on the upper west side, NYC and weather's just starting to turn. Some people are really excited. I'm gonna miss the summer. speaker-0: Okay. I'm a little jealous the weather's still pretty hot in Oklahoma, so I'll just live for the ⁓ speaker-1: ⁓ I looked at and I like But ⁓ my gosh. speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so you know how this format works. I sent over a couple of questions yesterday, and you got to pick which one you really wanted to talk about. So I'm just gonna dive in. We've got about five or six minutes. ⁓ we talked a few times over the last year, and one ⁓ one of those times you had mentioned that strategy and execution are cousins. Sorry, there's a nap. Strategy and execution are cousins, not the same skill. And when an owner speaker-1: Love speaker-0: hands a strong plan to a junior team and nothing moves, what do you think breaks first? speaker-1: I love this, and I'm not just saying that because I I said it first, like ⁓ I love this question kind of thing of like put the metal on myself. I love this conversation in general. I was having this last night with somebody when I went to ⁓ an event. Strategy and execution are related, but not the same because obviously they're start to finish of one plan. Right. I work in outbound, I work in sales, go to market, marketing setup of things. This could be anything. But you need to have the vector. Which what are where are you pointing? What is the goal of this? What do we want to do? How are the ways we measure this? You can use all the abbreviations of our own KPIs that we like, but it's what do we want to do? How do we make sure it's happening along the way? And when will we know we've reached a goal? And is there a second goal? Or is there a goal over here? Just being sure before you get in the car or the map kind of thing. This is where we're going to make sure. And also Like a kid playing bumper bowling, or me at too old of an age to be playing bump you know, bumpers on in bowling alleys guidelines to follow just to say, like, you don't go too far off course or this way. And strategy stays on a board or in people's minds. It's not action. Mm-hmm. The point being, then you take it into action. So, folks, often I I kind of take pride in that a lot of people don't really know what I do exactly, and that's okay. I had someone introduced me the other day as like Ben trains SDRs. I was like, Yeah, I I I do, I have, but do this strategy and execution through, in my case, go to market planning and foundational work for small companies. What are we doing? How are we doing it? What are we measuring? Things like that. And about three or four weeks into what's average for me, like four to six month engagement for folks, I want to be the training wheels. I kind of want to work myself out of a job. So we're building these things up. speaker-0: Taking those bumpers away a little bit. speaker-1: Right, take the bumpers with but also like I'm the bumpers after a while. You don't need this anymore. That's the point. ⁓ getting into execution is then okay, doing it. Doing it, doing it, doing it. And we talked about a senior team here and a junior team here. Yeah. The junior team often works best with senior team oversight or one senior team member oversight just to kind of go, Hey, just make sure this is happening. Make sure this is happening. Terrible comparison for some folks. Like the way a dentist shows up at the end of your appointment and is like, Okay, looking pretty good. Actually, you know, no speaker-0: The hygienist like, ⁓ good, yeah. speaker-1: That's awesome. did most of the work. And the person at the end comes and just makes sure it's all good along the way. ⁓ this is what a good manager does of oversight of the whole plan of hey, let's make sure this is happening. And in the case of a team I've been speaking to over the last few months on and off, of they have good strategy. They're not sure how to get someone in place to execute on the strategy. This is why they're cousins. Because the execution is always has to tie back. Execution always has to tie back to. Right. This is the map. We're staying on the map. We make sure things can change. Sure. A strategy person or team. This is why a little bit of oversight is helpful to go, why would this change? We found evidence that nobody wants to buy it this way. Okay. But they want this instead. So we adjust the strategy. This is where things can go off the rails of not really sticking to like our our North Star, our baseline of let's always remember why we're doing this and what we're doing it for. speaker-0: Which is the strategy, right? speaker-1: That's the strategy. And other ways to say it is people saying find your why, find your roadmap. It's all like the let's just anchor ourselves, not to anchor ourselves for the sake of, but to guide the journey. And if this doesn't serve after a while, it changes. You just have to make sure to give it another comparison. ⁓ I am a baker. I am a home baker. I love British bake off. I cannot wait for the new season might actually be out. ⁓ I forget if it just did or not here in the States. I love it. You have to plan when you bake. You can kinda jam and jive on things when you're cooking. Baking is a science. So you have to build the recipe in a certain way. And if you shift one thing, you have to make sure it's all in balance. speaker-0: That's great comparison. speaker-1: This is my brain of like, yes, we can, but we have to shift this to make sure it stays in balance of what we're aiming to do. Right. If customers want a more of something else we don't know yet, we need to add a little research in. Let's just make sure that the research doesn't step on the toes of the next step and the next step and things. And do we accelerate something? Do we take something out? Is there a deadline? So if this is the hard deadline, let's just make sure it doesn't go over. Right. Otherwise over budget, over schedule. This is how things happen. With a weaker strategy, or let's say like a an ignored or fizzled out strategy over time, that's why things kinda get off the rails and go six months over plan. Right. Usually. That's kind of my idea there. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. And that's I mean, you mentioned kind of removing yourself as a bumper, but what a great way through that thing to like gradually remove yourself as the bumper so that you can kind of keep pointing them back to their North Star of the strategy. Hey, look at the dock guys, let's do this. And then you're kind of there as that oversight, right? For a for a while during that four to six months saying, Hey, let's let's think about this. We can't just act on this. Like, yeah, that's a that's a great place to be. speaker-1: It's fun and it's it's fun to see people in a very good way get it when they're hiring someone like me to show them how it's done and also do it. So strategy and execution. But it's also fun, it's to continue the baking thing, just because why not? going from this is the recipe we're using to I'll I know how to make this recipe, sh I'll show you versus saying, All right, here it is, good luck. You've never gone through the steps before, you haven't tempered Cream into something else or something specific that's like separating an egg. To be totally honest, when I started baking like eight years ago, I was like, what does that mean? Do I just keep the eggs apart? And my sweet wife was like, ⁓ you were so innocent. So continue. It's like, right, right. It was like, I know how this works. Let me show you until you feel comfortable making that thing over time. That's generally the point. speaker-0: That's awesome. Well you know what? Thanks for thanks for explaining that. Thanks for being on the chat today. Always a pleasure to see you. ⁓ Sam. We will stay in touch and I'll talk to you later. So much. Bye. speaker-1: Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you very much, man. I appreciate the time. Bye.