Name: Mind the Gap: Why GTM teams misalign & how to fix it
Uploaded: 2025-06-26T16:06:03.797Z
Duration: 50 min 4 s
Description: Mind the Gap: Why GTM teams misalign & how to fix it

Transcript for "Mind the Gap: Why GTM teams misalign & how to fix it": Alright. Hello, everybody, and welcome to our webinar today, Mind the Gap, Why GTM Teams Misalign and How to Fix It. And I am joined by an esteemed panel today to talk about what is this challenge, this age old challenge that, you know, you know, when you talk to anybody involved in a GTM function, we think about that as sales and marketing and and r and d. How do we get better aligned so that we can drive faster outcomes? And, our group today, certainly a panel of experts to be able to weigh in on that. A few, housekeeping checks just for your information. This webinar will be available on demand, on our website at Mural. Go to the blog. The research study that we'll be referencing around GTM alignment is also there, the GTM alignment gap, so you can see the research in, in its unabridged form. So please check that out. And if you have questions, you can always reach out to us on social or directly on LinkedIn. We're happy to help. So with that, let me do some introductions. We have, Gordon Galzerano, if you wanna give us a little bit about you and your organization. Hey, Christina. Thank you. And it's great to be with you and Mike today. Gordon Galzerano. I'm president and CEO of the Strategic Account Management Association, an organization that's all around the practice of how organizations align in service of their most strategic customers worldwide. From a background perspective, I grew up in the IT industry, and I've always sat at the intersection of the technology and the business and working with our organizations, both public and private, on how technology enables outcomes. And it was early in 2002 through my career at Cisco Systems, which was a big part of my IT background, where we leaned into SAMA to help us get better at customer experience and align around go to market, recognizing that we had, an opportunity to create new streams of value and differentiate differentiation, in the marketplace. So and again, a pleasure to be with you and the team today. Amazing. And Mike, tell us a little bit about you. Thanks, Christina. My name is Mike Hyzy. I'm the vice president of strategy and innovation at CGI. CGI is a global business and IT consulting company. While we do many things at CGI, both in the private and the public sector, I work in product development and in AI strategy. So my work is horizontal. Everything from thinking about, you know, concepts, testing prototypes to implementing and launching products, which we'll talk about some today. So very excited to be here. Excited to have the conversation with both you and Gordon. Amazing. And like I said, just thrilled to be able to have the representation. I'm Christina Bottis. I'm chief marketing officer at Mural. So we've completed the GTM circle there. All the folks are at the table. And with that, let's get started. So we we talked about, you know, obviously, both of you have extensive experience, in these spaces, and misalignment is something every leader has faced. And it's funny. I I usually joke that when you you go to a conference, it's it's usually some sort of keynote, right, topic of how do you get the teams aligned and how do you go to market faster and get everyone swimming in the in the right direction. So just given your experiences, just to kick us off, like, share something, a memorable moment or a challenge, where you saw misalignment really manifest itself into a noteworthy stock, right, in being able to execute on the strategy that we spend so much time putting together, and then doing it is kinda where things might might fall apart. So, Mike, I'll I'll start with you on that one. Sure. The first example that comes to mind, we're doing an international product launch and, you know, this is a former company I was working at. There was a revolving door on the executive team. So we have business requirements that keep changing, and then, you know, sell sales teams are selling features that that we were not planning on building. So that was putting more pressure on us. Right? You know, selling things that were not in our backlog, continuing to add thing that extends the product roadmap. So then we would be able to miss dates. You know, marketing struggle to understand and convey our actual value proposition, what we're initially going for. So you have all these different teams that have different ideas of the product that is launching, even what times that the product is launching at. And that miscommunication and lack of a cohesive strategy resulted in the, you know, a disjointed launch. Some customers had certain expectations, you know, than than other customers did, and it it caused confusion both internally and externally. And that's, you know, that was a a big lesson for me to to understand, like, the heart of this is is cohesion between groups, like no silos. Right? A lot of people say that. There's a there's a reason people say no silos to avoid things like this happening. Yeah. You said something interesting and very important there of I think when we say misalignment, we think of sort of internal churn and swirl and and, you know, too many meetings, but there's real impact to the customer and to their experience and certainly to our bottom lines. But being able to align first within the family, right, enables us to best support our customers. So great insight there. Gordon, what about you? Yeah. I I think, like, your example is a good one. And so in my experience, oftentimes, where we get stuck is we think very inside out as an organization to your point, Christina. And and and that is how does the left hand and the right hand work together whether that's sales, marketing, r and d, customer experience, etcetera, when in fact we should be looking outside in and what is truly the customer experience that they're having doing business with us. And they can tell firsthand whether we're siloed or truly stitched together as a fabric around go to market, and and they're gonna tell us that. And one of the examples recently I'll I'll share was with, one of our practitioner organizations as they were sitting across the table with a with a customer and and and was asked the question, what's it like doing business with us? And the customer reached into their drawer and pulled out 18 business cards from the company and found that across the table. Right? But that speaks truth to the experience. Now back to what we're talking about but being siloed. Oftentimes, I think the reason why and through the examples that I've seen, this falls down is because the leadership expectations of what good looks like isn't well defined, number one. Number two, people don't see themselves in it. They think they're doing a great job around go to market. They feel like they're working closely with their brothers and sisters and other functions, but in reality, they're not. So the misconceptions and a lot of it's because the the goals, the outcomes, the KPIs are siloed in nature. So the the need for cross disciplinary, cross functional, integration and alignment, I think, is what really creates some of that connected tissue. I'm sure we'll talk more about that. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that that the alignment of metrics and what success is is so great. Well, we'll get into that in a second. But, Gordon, you said something that partly is perfectly into one of the next data points. So, the big kind of component of the study and one of my biggest takeaways, ironically, was the data showed that there's an 85, 85 alignment gap. What did that mean? When we asked people, you know, how do they feel about their their alignment and their GTM strategies, 85% of them said, hey. We're great. Right? We are cruising. We love it. I can talk about it. I feel like we're headed in the right direction. And then when asked directly after, they said, oh, yeah. But, 85% of the time, we definitely feel misaligned, like, regularly, weekly, monthly. So there is this paradox, right, of we think we're we're we're doing the stuff. But on the daily execution level, we feel the friction and you both of you brought up examples of that, in some of your stories. But what do you what do you think derives the disconnect between that sort of perception and the reality? Yeah. Go ahead, Mike. If you wanna start, please. I could just jump in. It reminds me of that, Internet famous Spider Man meme where they're all pointing at the other Spider Man. Right? Because, you know, everyone thinks that go to market is someone else's responsibility. And I've been in product development, product management, product strategy for for most of my career and, you know, I I think it's our responsibility. I would tell my teams, like, we own this. And if you wanna be an elite product manager, you understand the pains of marketing and customer service and things like that. And we are there to to help these teams. It was also missing like a a racing model. Right? Who's responsible for what? In the beginning being very direct. You are responsible for this. You are responsible for this. That should be one of the first meetings. Number one, go to market should not be happening when you're about to release. As soon as you get an idea for a product, you should be talking about go to market. You should have your racing model set up. You should be assigning who's responsible, who just needs to be informed. There's a lot of things, at least marketing is in the loop. Sales team's in the loop. Right? That's how the sales team doesn't start selling things that that you're not working on. It's like, hey, you know, sales team, this is what exactly what we're selling. You know, we want you to just hold tight right now. We're gonna feed you information. We get feedback. Thing things like that. I think it's it's communication and expectations. Yeah. It's an interesting point you made because, we were doing just some some chats around this and the idea of ownership. And even, Gordon, when we were at, the Samba conference about a month ago, it came up of who does own it. And if we if no one feels they own it or if everyone feels they own it, you can see where some of these things start to manifest under under the surface. And to your point on who's accountable for what and at what stage, what some of our research even showed was sales and marketing figured, yeah, everyone keeps saying we should probably working together and whether or not that's going well, it's a whole other that's probably a full webinar. But product felt a little bit on the outskirts over here, like, we're we're building the stuff, and we'll let you know when it's ready. And it's an interesting theory of, okay, if this is a true motion, at what point do we all come together so that we can at least be aligned throughout on where are we in that stage? Because I know just personally from my own experience, the when are we activating and when are we doing the promotion or when are we doing the enablement always feels like it's a little bit fuzzy. Right? Who's on deck? So I think even clarifying and having clear even just the process, we'll talk a little bit about, you know, the fundamentals around that. But, Gordon, interested on your take. Yeah. I wanna build off of what, Mike, you said because I think, first of all, the left hand doesn't always understand what the right hand is responsible for. So with a lack of clarity and transparency, oftentimes, there's a lot of misconceptions. And what we know to be true, and I think is also revealed in the research you and your team did, Christina, is that when when you look across the organization from a go to market perspective, sales marketing, r and d, and customer experience and so forth, they all own a piece of that puzzle, whether it's customer acquisition, customer penetration, customer retention, and all the pieces within it. There's a lot of shared ownership and responsibility, but organizationally, we're not talking to one another in a way that creates an empathy for wait a minute. We're more aligned on paper than we recognize. Now how do we build this into practice so that I can help you be successful in marketing and you can help me be successful in sales? Symptomatically, what happens today, marketing generates activities that don't necessarily align to our sales and go to market motion that would achieve a customer outcome. Conversely, there's this tension between the two and others where we're misaligned. It we've made this very complicated when in reality, it it's not as complicated as it as it appears to be. Yeah. You bring up you said my favorite word, empathy. So I wanna shift us into just around this idea of roles and and what success looks like and how we all work together. As marketer, I think there is there is oftentimes a lack of empathy for the role that everyone on that team plays, mostly because it's not informed by true understanding of what goes into the role or how hard it is or how hard they're working. And as as someone who has worked in both, sales and product, my goal is to always bring that to the table with our teams to say, okay. But we we need to be all on the same page on what is the end goal that we're trying to get to. And to your point, Gordon, each to the customer, they see us as one brand. Right? One partner. And all of us have a place just like on a sports team. Right? I mean, Mike Jordan couldn't I'm from Chicago, so I can't help it. That's my example. He couldn't win win the championship. It doesn't mean a thing without the ring on his own. And I I think that is really important, especially when you get to success metrics and making sure that we care about the right stuff where all of us win together. Because I can say as a marketer, it doesn't matter to me if we just got it over the fence. Right? If we didn't win at the end, collectively, we should all feel like we needed to be doing more. So I just want, like Mike, you said something about the racy, but curious around, like, role clarity. Like, what do you think we can do to improve, like, and where have you seen it done well? Any advice you would give to folks leading these teams when it comes to that sort of, clarity? Yeah. And I could talk from both sides because I've I've seen it what we mentioned earlier is where no one's kinda stepping up. And I think that that it it's okay if you're in product management marketing, someone, you want your entire team to win, someone step up and get the conversation started and say, hey, I heard a race is a great way to start. Let's get the team together and let's go through roles and responsibilities. It might take a couple of drafts. You know, this is you get better at this by by doing it. Right? You're not gonna be in alignment master right away, but just get started. On the other hand, which is a little bit more difficult, and I know you talked about empathy, is sometimes you might have the loudest voice in the room that has taken you a direction that is not go to market best practices. And that gets a little bit trickier, but you have to have the the courage and the emotional intelligence to be able to sometimes talk people down or or align them with the team. Like, it's not a one person show. You know, one person for marketing or sales or product, whoever that is, there's there's no one go to market person. And sometimes to be successful, you need to have tough conversations with with loudest voice in the room and let them know that this is a a team effort. But find a place for them to contribute to make them, you know, feel like they're they're part of the team. Sure. Gordon, I'm curious. You touched on metrics. Let's let's talk a little bit about the alignment of those metrics and how you've seen it done, in best practice. So it's so funny because, well, it's not funny. It's actually reality that a lot of the conversations I'm having now with CEOs and other executives is the one thing that's that they recognize there's three headwinds that are occurring. The proliferation of technology and AI, the shifting sands around the expectations that customers have and the stakeholder map growing, and then you have new entrants into the market, agile competitors that are leapfrogging legacy infrastructures. Right? And and what CEOs are telling me is we're just not moving fast enough. And when we start talking about go to market and how they're aligned, it reveals exactly what we're talking about, this fractured organization. And so one of the best practices that I've seen work really well is that, again, I think we're all going after the same in terms of outcomes for our customers around acquisition, penetration, and retention. But when you look at how those functions in silos are focused, measured, compensated, rewarded, it creates the siloed nature. And through cross, what I call, interdisciplinary or cross functional teams, where they now have shared responsibilities and shared metrics and shared KPIs, when they have that dynamic, that fundamentally knocks down the silos because people are gonna gravitate to what's most important, how they're measured, how they're compensated. And that seems to be a very simple academic approach, but it really does have tremendous impact because what we know is in in organizations that are siloed, that are fragmented, that creates a lot of problems for the organization. It speaks truth to their inability to move fast enough, be agile enough and flexible enough, especially during times of uncertainty, which then builds resiliency as a result. So in the absence of such, these all create elements of how organizations or why organizations get disrupted versus become disruptors in their own space. Mhmm. I I totally agree and can even say in my experience, but, certainly at Mural, we we align the goals together, specifically sales, marketing, and product. Right? And and trying to orient around, if this is the end goal, here are the things we're gonna do that lead up to that. But that we're we're gonna talk about cocreation in a second. Even even cocreation around goals is so critical because it feels less of a baton pass and good luck with the rest of the race and more about we're in this together, but we're also so clear on what we own and what success actually looks like so you don't get to the end of emotion and you go, well, we did great. And someone on the other side of the table goes, no. We totally failed. And that seems to be I mean, to your point, Gordon, it doesn't seem very earth shattering, but it is definitely something that can make or break that execution. And certainly in marketing, it's it's a challenge that, you know, my just my colleagues, we always are trying to understand, okay. How are we aligned with sales, and is this what we need, and is this enough? Unless there's, you know, collaboration around that sort of decision, you're almost doomed to get to the end and be surprised. And no one wants to be surprised in that in that state. Yeah. If I could just add one comment to that, Christina, because as I was talking about those three headwinds that become tailwinds when you sort through it. Mhmm. At the same time, when we talk about customer expectations shifting, their expectation is I want a more personalized differentiated experience. I want you to truly understand my business. I want you to help me understand what's coming next. Right? That's the difference between a supplier and a trusted partner or an organization that actually understands the customer's business, but it can also anticipate what's coming and how they should respond in in service of that. And that cannot happen if my go to market functions are fragmented. I can't take advantage of personalized experiences, taking customer behavior and customer experience into account to create something that's new and differentiated. And I think that's what executives are telling me most is, I've gotta make this transition, and now I need some systems to help my teams enable that. And I think right now, CRM isn't in its own right the answer. And, you know, that you know, it's not about a bunch of fancy, shiny objects. So, I I think that's really where the value proposition comes in. Yeah. It it's a good transition into to and from the the study when we asked the respondents, what what would be some things, right, that would help to solve these problems? Generally, it was sort of people process and platforms. And, specifically, we've been talking about silos of teams. And, Gordon, you just brought up CRMs. And every team, ironic enough, has their own operational system, which thereby becomes the silo. Right? In order to really remain sort of customer centric and deliver and keep that at the forefront of not only what we're building, but what we're selling and what we're marketing, that sort of needs to follow us throughout, so it's our anchoring guiding principle. And one of the things that, when we were asked, they said 95% of respondents say that a centralized platform is highly impactful. But when we look at how folks are working, there isn't it's ironic enough. Right? Like, what's the what's the platform for bringing us all together along GTM to have this working relic and source of truth of I mean, lord knows the plan changes as you test and you bob and leave. So, you know, curious even, Mike, as you're working with your customers, you know, how how does that fit into where you see misalignment potentially being fixed? Yeah. It's I mean, that's a great point because, you know, someone's on Teams, products in Atlassian, marketing has their own thing, everyone's somewhere different. And I talked about a racing model earlier. And, yeah, like, you could do it in Excel and you're gonna just bore the heck out of everybody. Right? Because they're gonna go into a spreadsheet or you could build a table and something like Mural. And then what I the biggest advantage I see to that is actually stoking cocreation by doing things like icebreakers. Come in, I have this one that I created on on Mural. I put a bunch of memes on there, and I put and then drop a sticky on what meme you feel like today. Right? And it's all like major TV shows and movies, and it's fun and it's funny and we've, you know, it it kicks it sets the tone for the rest of the meeting. Right? We're here to have fun and work together. And then we jump into, you know, you could structure things like, what do you think you're responsible for? What are you actually responsible for? And then how do we bridge the gap? And it's a lot easier to move things around and and and visualize it, and it stays there. Right? It's not like someone's gonna go in the conference room and and and wipe off the board and and things like that. I think the key though, and then just just a, a pro tip is pin that board in your team's channel. Because the biggest thing that I deal with is, oh, I I don't know where the link is. I lost the link. I lost the link. So over communication's okay. Right? Pinning it, sending it out an email. Hey. We're gonna meet about this. Gee, you know, go to market plan, tomorrow. Just a reminder, here's a link for the board. Here are expectations. I think whoever is leading that over communicating is okay, and then just continuing to bring people into the creative space pays off huge dividends in the long run. Well, something as as I've been digging into this research and just working with our customers and our teams, I've become very passionate about specific to the GTM process of understanding what when are those collaborative milestones that you need to bring people back together. Because, again, you're you're sort of overlaying a process of people with processes. And and to your point, we need to kick it off with when do we regroup? When do we need to visually look at? Here's where we are. Here's what we're doing. Is everybody on the same page? What's the next step? What's the workflow? And how do we get to that next outcome? That tends to feel at some again, some of the the feedback that we got in, our our luncheon at SAMA was that it's a little it's a little fuzzy. We're not really sure, a, who is owning that process and making sure that we are coming together, And two, well, how do we do it and where do we do it and being able to collectively bring all of that insight and those perspectives together and more importantly, dependencies. Right? There's so much that needs to go into each person's motion that if you are kinda cruising along in your own lane and there isn't literally something in front of you, though, okay. We are here. This is my next step, and turn that into an execution plan. It's very challenging. And that's why, like, the idea of cocreation, I wanna dig into this topic a bit more because what I love about solving the misalignment internally is how do we then get most aligned with our customers? How do we get ourselves into the best, sort of, most informed state where, to your point, we're about creating a differentiated experience for them. It's also bringing the most knowledge, bringing the most intel, and and empowering them with how we can help. And being able to do that differentiates us as partners. So cocreation was a huge topic, at your recent conference, and we'd love to just pick your brain on tell us how you're you're what are you hearing from your member base, first of all, and, you know, how are how are have you seen it used? What's working? Give us a little insight there. Yeah. Happy to do that. You know, if you think back in time, and I I've been doing a lot of talks publicly now about this whole concept of disrupt or be disrupted. And what we learned through the pandemic, because it was global in nature, was it irrespective of who you were, what company you work for, geography, industry, fill in the blank, everyone felt the pain. Supply chain disruption, etcetera, etcetera. And and in my consulting practice before coming to SAMA, and I would lead executive advisory boards, ideation labs, and and some design thinking workshops with other colleagues. We got to the point very, very quickly where organizations realized that they needed to think and act differently in a useful way now. And whether that was in urgent care, primary care and health care, supply chain, consumer packaged goods, every organization realized I have to build a resilient, redundant model so that when the next fill in the blank disruption happens, much like we're experiencing now through geopolitical and economic headwinds, organizations public and private are are recognizing that they have to co create and innovate around platform process and people with outcomes that are in support of their customers. Having said that, they recognize too organizationally they can't do it alone, and their customers can't do it alone. So there's a clear burning platform to come together, and then how do those ecosystem partnerships help perpetuate and build on that as well. Right? And and go to market is critical critical to that being an enabler to help customers see the value of their strategic partners to enable the outcomes they're trying to achieve. Otherwise, it's just all great conversation and nothing really really comes in it. So it's bringing the best of the capabilities of the organization from a go to market perspective in service of the outcomes and, the directions that customers are trying to take. Right. Mike, I'm curious. You've been working with your customers, tell us a little bit about what you know, how does cocreation play a role and what have you seen work well? Yeah. I think it's starting with the the basics. Like, what what problem are you trying to solve? You know, to to Gordon's point, there's a lot of things, a lot of different headwinds going on right now. AI is disrupting the market and how a lot of people think about, product development. And there are ton of shiny objects. I'm like, oh, that looks cool. Look at this new model just dropped out. There's a 100,000 AI startups that are out there. Right? Everyone wants to play with all of them. Yeah. But kinda like reeling it in, like, what customer problem are you trying to solve? And let's dig into that first. Like, 90% of the conversation should be about what is the problem, how much do we know about the the problem, and then move on to solutioning. And I think that gives a a good lens to go to market strategy as well. And that's why you pull the teams in the beginning at marketing and sales and customer service. If they all know the problem that the customer has, then they're gonna have a better idea of how to explain the solution and why we built the solution. So back to what we were talking about earlier, like, what are timeline and milestones look like? I tell all my clients whenever we're talking about go to market, start early. I had a client that spent millions of dollars on building an application, and then we got to the the end of it. I'm like, so what's the go to market plan? You have a $100,000 for Facebook ads. Okay. What's the go to market plan? You know? So so that the the huge investments, right, can can can tail off with without bringing the right people in at the right time. And to me, I've always said the right times at the beginning. When you've gotten past that prototype phase and you're like, we're gonna invest money in this, we're gonna do this. To me, that's the time to to start collaborating with that team, co creating, and then bringing your customers in early and often. So I just talked about, like, the prototyping phase. Yeah. Your customer should should be in that phase. And, like, hey. We're building this. Does this work for you? Is this solving the the pain point? And there's different ways to to figure that out. You know, focus groups, one on one interviews, and and things like that. But you wanna have that that validation early in in the process. And talking about, like, COVID, that's when things shifted. We used to be on the ground all the time, traveling, going to customer sites, things like this. But now with the age of AI, we could spin up a mock up. We can make it clickable or even, like, visual in in a shared platform, and we could send it to a customer and and do a a video interview and get their feedback. We have the tools to get that feedback early and often. It's almost like there's no excuse now. Right? Launching a product without getting that customer feedback. Yeah. Both of you talking about all of this, the likelihood what we know about cocreation even at a psychological level is people emotionally feel more bought in, right, to even on the internal and the external side of I helped create this. I feel like I was heard. And, literally, I can I can the the best value of the sort of visual cocreation component is, no? That's not what I want. We're going the wrong way. Right? And to your point, Mike, about early and often, you want that early so that you can course correct, right, and get everybody back on the same page. But there's also a sense of, you know, we're gonna talk about sort of change management and transformation, that feeling of, again, inclusion and the fact that we're all swimming in the same way because visually, we're all looking at the same thing. And I don't have an idea of it, you don't have an idea of it, you don't have an idea of it. We are literally creating it together. We feel collectively aligned and part of something, which is, you know, obviously from from just an engagement standpoint, great on all ends, internal teams and from our customer. And so there's this underlayer, right, of that sort of emotional buy in that all of that stuff gets you without even even really making that the point, but it results in quicker decision making, right, faster go to market, long time satisfaction of customers, which is what we're all trying to go after. And in that in that same vein, everything that you all are talking about is the key. Right? The keys to solving these problems, and it's really hard. So and and all of your experience, Gordon, we're just talking about, like, how do you how do you work through the transformation? Give us some change management tips. What were you gonna add? There's There's a couple of things that you both just said that I wanna kinda come back to. Number one, when organizations are siloed, there's a tremendous amount of stranded value. The best ideas never get to the surface because, again, we're not talking to one another. We're not visually anchored around the problem we're trying to solve to use Mike's point. And then what does that look like? What are some of the ideas that we can put on the table to solve for that? You know, we oftentimes have this misconception too that innovation comes from the executives. You know, Prime as a membership program at Amazon was not Jeff's idea. It actually came from someone, an individual contributor in the IT organization. So some of the best ideas when you create the environment for the why behind the what, they percolate from places we wouldn't otherwise think they could originate from. So that's that's point number one. Number two, creating the conditions to your point, Christina, where people now have clarity on why we're even trying to pursue this in the first place, and they see themselves in it. All too often, we do things to people instead of with and for people. And when we bring them along early in the process, they now buy into it. They now see themselves in it, and they're more likely to lean in and take a risk and share ideas around cocreation and innovation opportunities. That's how transformation happens. Because, again, in times of uncertainty, we can either react or we can respond. And you wanna create a culture and an environment where people are collaborative and they're challenging the status quo with questions like what if. What if we looked at it differently? What if we did something differently? And what if our customers saw value in a different way from the product solutions and services that they consume today? And I think that platform mindset of bringing those minds together is incredibly, incredibly powerful way to do that. But you have a bigger question that you're asking me and I'm I'm gonna tell you No. You hit you hit all all all the points. Okay. Good. Mike Mike, I know you wanted to add something. Let's start with you. Yeah. You know, most of my career consulting and and industry, I've I've worked in food, fitness, nutrition, and health care. So all areas that take a lot of strategy and insight to to change. There's always been a behavioral aspect of a lot of product development that I work that I've done. Right? People wanna eat better, they wanna work out more. We want them to adhere to their medication, so so they're not in in urgent care or things like that. So so during COVID, I I wrote a book on gamification for for product development, and it's never been more true now than than AI is the behavior aspect of it. Right? You know, there there's all these, flashy things that we could do with LMS and video and things like that. But the at the at the end of the day, there are still humans that are that are using the software. And and AI is scary to a lot of people. They're scared they're gonna lose their jobs. They're scared that, that they don't know enough about prompt engineering to be good at AI. And there's things that we have to think about when we're building products or or teams. And and even though the book was on product development, I gain I gamified a lot of my product development processes within my own teams because it's it's fun and it and it brings them to that culture when you try to change things. You know, you could try to, you know, shove it down everyone's throats, that's not gonna work. But when you, you know, for example, we did, we're on a large analytics process and we created a game called data detectives. So everyone got the same excel sheet and whoever found the the best insights by the end of the week got a little like badge that I bought on Amazon. Right? Super corny, but it just it created a different level and it and it made that that striving to be more innovative and and to be creative, like, part of our our culture. So that's the same thing. If you're trying to change the go to market, you know, capabilities or or process at your organization, you have to think about who are the humans behind this? What are incentives? One of the biggest things that I've seen too is misaligned incentives. When marketing has a different incentive than product and then, you know, all these other teams, sometimes the the incentives are are fighting against each other. So that needs to be figured out. And then at the end of the, you know, as part of your process, look at the best practices of behavior change and organizational change management, incorporate that. If you're a leader trying trying to be better at this, there's studies out there, there's papers, there's there's processes. Lean on that to transform your team. And and again, those those dividends will be incredibly valuable for you when you have a cohesive go to market team. Well, we're gonna have to check out your book. We got I didn't say esteemed author in the beginning. I should have added that. I can I can say personally for the way the great experience that I have had so far at Mural in terms of how our go to market teams work, was really an unlock because in past lives, it felt very functional? Right? Like, this team, this team, this team, we'll call you running the world already. And the the sort of mental and almost kind of team shift around, here's the goal we're all trying to achieve. Here's the motion we're all gonna do together to do that, and and really treating the teams around that as sort of your your first family in some ways, right, where you're all aligned towards the same goal, everyone's working on their work streams, you're coming together at your collaborative check ins and milestones. Even that mentality, I think, gives folks the the buy in and the accountability that is just really hard to do when it's you're you're this team and you're that team. Right? Are you really embodying being part of go to market as being the go to market team that function, or are you simply sitting as a representative, right, at the table of some some other function? And and that just watching that work has been one of, kind of my great joys because you can you can see how fast things go. When people are totally clear on what's next and what they own and what makes me most excited is the engagement and just the the thrill of folks seeing an idea come to life and then watching your customers delight from being delivered and using the tools, using the functions. So I think that was a huge unlock for us and and something that, you know, we we continue to talk about and refine because it's a different mindset to think I'm I'm GTM, not I'm this one part of it. We're all part of this motion, and, you know, there is no better feeling of than leaving a meeting and going, gosh. We are on the same page. We are proven, and I feel like I know what I'm supposed to do, and it seems like this is like, we're we're an oil machine. People people love to feel like they're seeing progress. Right? We know that just in in, you know, employee engagement. So alright. Lots of incredible topics. Lots of incredible insights. As we close this up, would you each kind of leave some parting words of advice to our community about how like, what would you say first thing to do if you wanna go kind of assess the misalignment and just some advice on things to do right away? If you could, you know, share that with our crew. Gordon, we'll start with you. Sure. Well, so I'm I'm gonna start with, I'm just thinking about this. I'm gonna look at it from two different lenses. Okay. When you say what do I need to do first? I think first and foremost, this is a leadership motion where it's bringing these go to market teams together to recognize that they have a lot more in common than they do that's differently. We talked about, again, either whether it's on the customer acquisition, penetration, and ultimately the retention, elements of that and to see where there is clear alignment. Because I think what I found from my executive engagements is, again, there there just isn't that empathy and alignment because they don't know what they don't know. And I think, Mike, that then perpetuates down into what you were talking about. The KPIs are misaligned. The the incentives are misaligned. Right? Putting on the table, what is in common today? And then working back from the customer, what does good look like and how do we need to refine? And then again, intentionally create the interdisciplinary connections across go to market that make this a reality. So there's a leadership and organizational change management as we were talking about. That needs to be a critical part of that. The other piece I just wanna say is that I I talk a lot publicly about how every company is becoming a technology company. They're not becoming an IT company, but they're using technology as a competitive advantage, whether that's around productivity, collaboration, and some of the other things. What organizations tell me a lot is that they've got a lot of tools, they've got a lot of software and capabilities, but there's a tremendous amount of stranded value. And so there's a sensitivity to adding yet something else. But here's what's important, because we were talking about CRM and some of these other tools and platforms. There isn't there isn't something today that they're using that creates the collaborative platform to create that common, right, taxonomy and engagement and visually become a learner. Right? And in that research that your team did, it speaks truth to Mural and why that's such a compelling platform. It creates the connected tissue that otherwise some of these other despairing systems aren't enabled to do, or we've made we've taken something out of the box and made it incredibly complex, and it now becomes a square peg in a round hole. So I think for me, for our listeners and our audience, think of it in two ways. One is, how do I get the organization aligned through some of the comments that we're making today? And then secondly, how do I leverage the right technology to enable this? Because that to me is the way that the organizations are gonna show up and see themselves in it and ultimately achieve the outcomes they're they're intending to achieve. Right. Yeah. And just just to go on with that and thinking about, you know, who we're speaking to, another pro tip, Mural has a go to market strategy template already. I save so much time by, like, checking those things out first. Go on. Is there a template for this? Great. I'm gonna go with that. I'm gonna customize it. And just, you know, tips to to it doesn't have to be a huge effort or attention to get this started. You know, grab a template, make one of your own, get the conversation started. Because, you know, I've seen this too many times. The costs of fumbling a go to market are huge. Think about the direct cost of, you know, what's one of our biggest expenses no matter where we're at, it's labor. Think about the cost of wasted labor, working on features that the customer doesn't want or having to add add features or not make the right features at at the right time that aren't utilized that are needed. That's a huge cost. Think about the indirect cost of first impressions are a lot. You fumble a product or feature and that's your brand. You're you're you're getting brand damage by not doing this, but the right way. And then if you fumble release, morale's low in your team. So it makes sense to invest in go to market strategy, planning, and execution. And along with Gordon was saying, right, there are some some some some very key things that you could do to to get started. And, you know, it's alignment within these teams that we've been talking about. This is not a one time task. It's not like we've done alignment, check it off our list, we've done. It's a skill, and it's a skill that you can get good at. So if if you don't think that you, you know, rock that alignment meeting the first time, that's okay. You did the first step. You got the meeting started. Keep working on it. Keep practicing your communication, understanding the other humans in the room that they have goals and motivations too and what they're trying to accomplish, and create that mutual respect along the teams in that organ environment. You're gonna go you're gonna go far. And that is just gonna organically help you be successful in your go to market planning. Well, thanks, Mike. We, you you're you and your teams are are clearly Mural champions, and we love showcasing how you are being able to solve, you know, your challenges by doing that. I think what we want, to share too is we at Mural have become so intimately interested in the real life I mean, these are long long standing challenges of the go to market function. And as we've heard from our users and our customers, there are ways that we can conserve, you know, with not only the technology but also insights. That's how anytime we can use what we know to help people, you know, do their jobs at a higher level, that that's what we really wanna do. So appreciate both of you sincerely, incredible insights for our listeners for them to maybe put into action or even ask some more questions. So we will wrap that up for today. As I said, this will be available, on demand at mural.co. The research is also on our blog, so check that out. And just again, thank you to our guests, and we'll see you all again soon. Bye, everybody.