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Eliminate "Collaboration Drag" to Drive Growth · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:15
  All right, Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
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  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
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  So excited to have you all here joining us.
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  I am really, really excited about this episode.
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  I'm excited about all the episodes we do, but this topic and our
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  guest today, I'm just so excited to get into this conversation.
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  If you're listening, watching, subscribing on demand.
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  Thank you so much for continuing to download and listen and watch every
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  episode of Sales Pipeline Radio is available at salespipelineradio.com
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  Super excited to have joining us today from Gartner, Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.
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  Kristina, welcome.
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  Thank you.
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  What a warm welcome.
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  Thanks so much for having me today.
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  Oh my God.
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  I've been looking, I seriously been looking forward to this.
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  Cause I geek out on something and I think you geek out on as well.
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  And so we're going to talk today about collaboration drag.
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  We've been working with clients a lot on what we call go to market
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  orchestration, just helping to coordinate better how the work gets done.
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  And one day I get an email from Gartner saying here's the three priorities
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  for CMOs for 2024, and one of them is eliminating collaboration drag.
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  And it was the first time I'd really seen someone name the
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  problem and quantify the problem.
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  So maybe start from there, the origins of this research and how
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  and where you found this problem.
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  Yeah.
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  This research is 18 months or two years or more in the making.
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  And I remember when it started.
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  We've run a study every year, asking chief marketing officers
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  and other executives what they're working on for the year ahead.
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  What are their challenges?
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  What are their priorities?
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  What do they think is it going to get in the way of achieving those priorities?
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  We started to hear from chief marketing officers, primarily, that
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  they were struggling with doing more and more cross functional work.
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  And we brought it to a meeting.
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  We had a multi client meeting and we opened it up to the group.
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  We said, is this true?
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  How are you feeling about this?
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  What does it look like for you?
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  And we got this emphatic round of head nods and some
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  collective pain in the rooms.
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  We said, okay, let's go out and take a look at what this is.
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  So we ran a survey.
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  We studied over 600 marketers and over 300 marketing leaders.
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  So a mix of executives and marketeers or marketing practitioners.
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  And we interviewed a bunch of them as well.
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  So we did surveys, we did interviews, we did qual, we did quant.
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  We were asking people, What is cross functional work like at your organization?
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  Describe it to us.
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  Tell us what it's like.
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  And what we heard back was this thing that we've named collaboration drag,
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  which means there are too many meetings.
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  There are too many processes.
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  There is too much feedback.
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  There are too many stakeholders, and it takes too long to get their buy in.
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  And it's unclear how decisions should be made or where
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  decision accountability lies.
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  And something like 84 percent of the enterprises that we surveyed
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  and interviewed said that they had high rates of collaboration drag.
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  So it was, nigh universal people just saying this sucks at our organization.
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  These things are really hard.
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  Yeah, when you describe the problem and where that comes from, so many people
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  are like, Oh my gosh, I feel that.
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  And oh my gosh, I assumed it was just here.
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  And I think, what I've noticed is that the company's doing go to
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  market the best sometimes experience this the worst because go to
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  market motions today are complex.
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  You got long buying cycles, you got bigger buying committees.
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  There's more coordinated efforts across marketing channels that needs
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  to happen, let alone coordinating efforts across go to market teams.
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  So if you're just still just flinging out emails and just doing random acts of
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  marketing, you may not feel this as well.
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  But if you're trying to do modern go to market sales and marketing right, I think
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  you're more likely to have this problem.
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  Have you found that as well?
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  Yeah, we've certainly heard marketing and sales and all kinds of other executives
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  saying, I really thought it was just me.
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  It's almost a relief to hear that this happens to everybody.
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  I had one chief marketing officer tell me that she thinks
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  her team has meetings FOMO.
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  Far from trying to encourage people to collaborate, she was like, I
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  wish they would collaborate less.
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  Everybody just wants to be so involved.
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  And it comes from this great place.
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  And really what you describe, we understand that buying
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  journeys are complex and go to market motions are complex.
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  And in a lot of organizations, a lot of commercial organizations, I think
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  have really bought into the idea that in order to go to market successfully,
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  we need great internal alignment.
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  We need marketing and sales and maybe service to be working in lockstep.
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  And we want to have A Revenue Council, a Lead Council.
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  We want to do better ABM.
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  And we understand that all of those things require partnership.
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  Earlier we were talking about organizations buying a tool like an
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  Asana and saying, Oh, that'll fix it.
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  We've got it.
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  I think to that point, one of the things we discovered is that, It's not enough
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  to set a mandate for collaboration.
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  It's not enough to buy a tool.
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  It is not enough to get more meetings on the calendar.
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  It's maybe not even enough to be more rigorous about who's in those meetings.
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  If you are not also paying such stringent, rigorous, disciplined attention to things
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  like workflows, operations, processes, handoffs, even talent development.
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  A lot of the stuff that is maybe a little less sexy than buying a
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  technology solution collaboration drag is gonna run rampant.
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  It is.
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  Oh man, talking to today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.
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  She's a Senior Director at Gartner and authored research about a year
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  ago around collaboration drag.
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  You mentioned this concept of meeting FOMO, which I think is super interesting.
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  And I think in some cases, whether it's meeting FOMO or I wasn't on the
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  email thread or it's something's in Slack and everyone has to chime in...
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  There's a lot of different ways to go about fighting collaboration drag.
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  One of the most important tools I've seen is RACI which is an acronym
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  and it stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
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  And it's a really powerful way of designating who needs to chime in on
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  what, and who needs to be involved where, so that across a complex
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  project, the right people are in the room on the thread at the right time.
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  Can you talk a little bit about your experience with, RACI, DACI, I know
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  there's lots of different formats around that, but like, why that's so valuable?
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  Yeah, RACIs and DACIs.
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  So DACIs, for those who might be unfamiliar because I feel
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  it's a bit of a newer acronym, it's a decision making chart.
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  So who is the Decider and who is Accountable and Contributing and Informed.
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  They're terrific tools for combatting collaboration drag because they help
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  to define handoffs and they help tell people when they need to lean
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  in and when they need to lean back.
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  I have seen marketing teams use these and sales teams use these really
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  effectively in partnerships with one another across, for example, a go to
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  market process to be able to identify the places where the marketing team is
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  going to take more responsibility and then also identify the places where
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  that marketing team is going to step back and hand some of those activities
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  off to sales and let sales lean in.
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  I've also seen things like RACIS and DACIs work really well for orchestrating
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  global to regional handoffs.
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  So what kinds of things do we want a global team to take responsibility for?
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  And where do we want the regional team to be able to have autonomy and agency
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  and be able to leverage their expertise?
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  The pivot point there, the thing that makes it work is that it is as much
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  about telling a team when to take their hands off the wheel and step back as it
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  is about telling a team when they need to step forward because in a meetings
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  kind of FOMO environment, the problem that you have is maybe that some of
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  those people should have been in the meeting in the first meeting, in the
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  second meeting, but not the 49th meeting.
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  There was a point at which it was time for them to go on to the
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  other work that they had to do.
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  And nobody was able to define when that point was.
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  And so those meetings and those processes just become really bloated.
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  Yeah.
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  I think for people that are addressing collaboration drag in the organization,
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  I hear them talk about agility, productivity, speed to market on programs.
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  It's hard enough to get campaigns out that we'd planned on doing.
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  And then someone has some idea for something new and pivoting
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  to that becomes really hard.
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  When we published earlier this year, our CMOs Guide to Marketing Orchestration,
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  we also talked about two other things in your report: revenue loss and
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  key employee churn that very much happened as a part of this as well.
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  Can you talk about what you saw there?
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  Yeah.
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  So as I said, 84 percent of organizations are experiencing
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  high rates of collaboration drag.
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  So that sense that there's too many meetings, there's too many processes,
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  there's too many stakeholders.
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  When organizations experience high rates of collaboration drag, those
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  organizations are 37 percent less likely to achieve their revenue and
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  profit objectives, which is huge.
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  37 percent less likely to achieve those objectives.
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  And their teams are 15 times more likely to burn out, and they're 9
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  times more likely to report that they intend to leave their job.
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  So it's damaging at all levels of the organization.
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  And I think a good reminder to us, at an executive level, that even though
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  executives often recognize the pain of cross functional collaboration and
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  complex cross functional work, the executives are not necessarily the
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  ones in those working groups actually executing on those processes, right?
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  And so it's the people who are in the trenches doing the work that are
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  really affected and ground down by all those kinds of dysfunctional group
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  working behaviors that lead to too many meetings and too many processes.
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  And so you're not only going to be less likely to achieve your
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  revenue and profit objectives, you're also going to see probably
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  some of your best people leave you.
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  I'm curious as for those listening and nodding their head
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  vociferously around this, how do we help them take action on it?
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  If I'm a CMO, how should I address this?
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  I know larger organizations tend to have a PMO office as well
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  that has their fingers in this.
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  So where do you see companies start and who's championing this to really reduce
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  or eliminate that collaboration drag?
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  So RACIs and DACIs will help.
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  Defining more clear, more defined roles and responsibilities in a project
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  workflow and defining those handoffs.
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  That's huge.
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  We did find that like when it comes to reducing collaboration drag,
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  reducing stress and friction in workflows-- so improving workflows.
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  And adding some supportive change management to help people adapt
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  to new workflows-- that reduces collaboration drag by 15%.
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  So that's a great strategy to take.
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  The other thing that we saw, though, that really is in your purview as
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  an executive, if you're listening to us today is talent development.
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  When we invest in developing the kind of talent that helps people become
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  stronger collaborators, collaboration drag can be reduced by 23%, which is huge.
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  That's nothing to sniff at.
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  I think you can imagine the role of a PMO office in maybe auditing
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  workflows or determining those RACIs and DACIs, setting those mandates, doing
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  governance around how work is scoped, how it's resourced, how it's completed.
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  Setting things like stop work criteria that tells us when
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  we have finished a project.
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  How many deliverables will we do?
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  What will good look like?
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  How many rounds of revision do we do before we say we're finished with this?
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  That stuff that an executive can own in marketing, a marketing
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  operations leader might own it.
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  Project Management Office, maybe even a Chief of Staff.
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  And then the talent development side, that's something that any
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  executive can own in their function, that team managers, the people who
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  report into you can start to own.
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  And that we found was really about developing people's critical thinking
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  skills, their political judgment, so like trust building, problem solving,
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  systems thinking, all those kinds of skills make people better collaborators.
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  Yeah.
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  I think, if we were having this conversation 10, 15 years ago, B2B
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  marketers, just a lot of media buying, a lot of external coordination,
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  and that still happens, but increasingly we see more and more
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  B2B companies really managing data.
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  It's about information.
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  Intent signals, how those get leveraged.
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  And so all of a sudden the people in the organization that are coordinating
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  and managing that, how they work together versus just what money they
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  have to spend externally on a media buy becomes much more important.
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  And it means that addressing this is much more critical.
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  We have found in our work that once you get to a marketing team of about
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  20 to 25 people, that's when you start to really feel collaboration drag.
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  Take a webinar.
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  You may have had a couple people that could just knock it out, and
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  now you've got eight people that have different roles in getting that done.
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  And if you start to feel collaboration drag, it means
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  it's been there for a while.
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  Are there symptoms or evidence that companies should look for or
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  recognize and say, boy, this is a sign we need to go and do something?
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  So certainly if you were doing any kinds of internal employee service,
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  and it's that time of year a lot of organizations are running their end of
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  year employee health, employee sentiment surveys, and if you're getting anything
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  bad from those surveys where people are saying it feels like process gets in
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  the way of outcomes or it feels like it takes a lot of work and effort to
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  get work done, those are good signs.
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  But there are some other things that I would look for.
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  There are four other group dysfunctions that we saw.
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  These are observable behaviors.
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  So if you're seeing them in your organization, there's symptoms that
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  collaboration drag is probably present.
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  We called one the Ready, Fire, Aim Dynamic.
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  So if you see groups taking action before they have agreed on what
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  they're trying to achieve, they move to action too quickly...
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  Ready, Fire, Aim-- that's a sign that collaboration drag could be present.
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  If you see Control Freaks in your organization, and sometimes that might
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  be you if it's a senior stakeholder who is a bottleneck for decisions--
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  all decisions have to go through just one person and it slows progress
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  down, that creates collaboration drag.
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  You might also see Naysayers.
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  Those are the folks in the room who chime in with criticisms or complaints
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  and they cause unnecessary delays.
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  And then you might also see Dictatorships, which is where the working group gets
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  overruled by a stakeholder who might never have been part of the core team.
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  Like 90+% of teams say that they have experienced at least one of
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  those things in the last year.
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  And wherever you see even rare instances of that kind of group
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  dysfunction, collaboration drag shoots right up as a result.
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  That is a phenomenal checklist that we will publish that in the notes.
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  to say, kind of like, Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a redneck...
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  You might have collaboration drag if some of those things
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  exist in your organization.
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  Okay, last question for you.
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  We talked about project management tools being a great tool, but if just bought and
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  thrown at a team can be counterproductive.
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  What about AI?
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  Is AI going to make this easier or will AI actually add complexity to this problem?
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  I would say in the short term, it may add complexity.
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  The way that AI allows for the proliferation of content and emails
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  and makes it easier to do more volumes of work in a way that can
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  allow us to become very tempted into throwing spaghetti at the wall.
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  We're just executing more.
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  And that kind of focus on more volume, even if the quality is higher, but
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  more volume and more outreach and more messaging and more personalization.
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  All of that more requires more work from teams.
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  And so in the absence of those workflow and process governance that we've been
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  talking about, or in the absence of the right kind of talent development,
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  you're probably going to see more collaboration drag if you're just using
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  AI to help your teams do more stuff.
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  It's possible over time that being able to use AI to take on some execution related
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  tasks and free teams up for more strategic work, that could have a long term effect.
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  But I would lay bets that without good supportive workflows, good supporting
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  talent development, you won't see AI solve the collaboration drag problem.
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  I think you're right.
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  And I think we already see evidence of that in other places
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  in the organization as well.
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  Kristina, this has been amazing.
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  We will make sure we've got the CMO's Guide to Go To Market
• 16:17
  Orchestration in the show notes.
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  But for people that want to follow you learn more about and some of the research
• 16:22
  I know you've got coming up over the next few months, where do people go?
• 16:25
  LinkedIn is the best place to find me.
• 16:26
  Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
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  And then you'll have access to all the stuff that I share about
• 16:32
  the research that I'm working on.
• 16:33
  And then of course, if you happen to be a Gartner client, it's all on Gartner.com
• 16:38
  Awesome.
• 16:39
  Awesome.
• 16:39
  Thank you so much for doing this.
• 16:41
  This is amazing.
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  If you're watching or listening to this and you can think of people that are
• 16:45
  the Dictators, if you think of people in the organization that are Ready to
• 16:48
  Fire Aim, you think of people where you've had these conversations, feel
• 16:51
  free to forward this episode to them.
• 16:52
  on demand on LinkedIn, as well as shoot them over to SalesPipelineRadio.com
• 16:55
  and they can get a copy there as well.
• 16:57
  Amazing.
• 16:58
  Thank you so much everyone for watching, listening, subscribing.
• 17:01
  We'll see you next week.
• 17:02
  Until then, take care.
• 17:03
  We'll see you soon.