Our Go‑to‑Market Transformation Summit roadshow continued this past month in Boston, with a strong group of attendees joining us for an afternoon of debating how to build a repeatable, scalable go-to-market and making the shift from ‘random acts’ to perpetual Growth Engines.
The Westin Copley Place was the perfect venue, and we had a curated cross section of marketing, sales and commercial leaders to roll up their sleeves and discuss what it really means to build a Converged Growth go‑to‑market organization.
As in our previous Summit in Atlanta — ANNUITAS CEO Adam Needles sparked a good amount of questions and debate by calling out some of the random acts we all-too-often perform as go‑to‑market leaders. He highlighted the issue that often it is the “accumulation” of these random acts that unfortunately ‘is’ the entirety of the go-to-market program. This set the stage for why we need to embrace a new “Go-to-Market Operating System” that better orchestrates customer engagement and that optimizes what he referred to as Demand Experience (or “DX”) – vs. CX — across the entirety of the pre-and-post sale customer journey.
He also walked through examples of how shifting to a Converged Growth team model may involve some changes in organizational hierarchies and how teams are built — including some heated debate around whether a CMO still ‘fits’ in an integrated Growth organization. At multiple points his ‘spicy’ proposals for re-thinking GTM org charts sparked some heady debate!
I sat down with Michael Donohue, CMO of Lakeside Software, about building a perpetual Growth Engine, digging deeper into how he built out Conversation Track Architectures at multiple firms like ClearDATA to evolve from random acts into a true Growth Engine.
ANNUITAS Chief Growth officer Jessica Jones held a great session with Monotype’s Evan Kent, Global VP Demand Generation, and Rob Levey, VP Revenue Operations. The company shared how they transformed their business into a subscription model and built a full-journey, multi-channel engagement engine that is driving significant Lift for the company. The two also talked about their experiences as part of what is truly an integrated, Converged Growth go‑to‑market organization – reporting to a Chief Revenue Officer.
We ended the day again with a great cross-functional panel aimed at debating the Office of the Chief Growth Officer. We discussed the Why, the Who and some of the How of building a great Chief Growth Officer role or ‘office of.’ Thanks again to our exceptional panelists, who included Jeff Ernst, CEO of SlapFive; Natasha Sekkat, Director of New Customer Acquisition at AWS; Ann Malen, Sr. Director of Revenue Operations at Riverside; and Lee Zucker, VP Global Sales and Partnerships at Drift. The array of perspectives from both pre-and-post sale stages of the journey helped round out the day and got everyone thinking about some new ideas on how to transform their own go‑to‑market organizations and to accelerate the evolution toward Growth Engine, and even contemplate creating a Chief Growth Officer role inside their own organizations.
The audience was — as expected — full of great questions, and open to sharing their experiences and insights regarding how they approach improving Lift for their organizations.
For those looking to get a better idea of the topics and concepts covered at the Summit, you can download the digital version (now in its second edition!) of the Chief Growth Officer’s Handbook. The cornerstone of the dialogue at the event — hard copies of the book were given to all attendees.
We truly cannot thank our speakers and attendees enough for making this such a great event, and we’re not stopping yet!
Our next GTM Transformation Summit – RDU will be held on November 15 at The Umstead in Carey, NC. If you’re in the area, be sure to register today to save your spot for what is sure to be a standing room-only event. As always, the event is free to attend.
Thank you again Boston for an amazing afternoon. And for those of you reading from the RDU area, we hope to see you on November 15th!
