A lot of “why I joined [company x]” blog posts tend to digress into the philosophical and are too vision quest-y for me to take them seriously. Look, I understand people are excited to start new roles, but let’s take a pragmatic view, or at least a professional one, when we talk about why we take on new roles and challenges in our careers.
For me, it’s all about timing, opportunity, scale and impact.
I recently re-connected with ANNUITAS CEO, Adam Needles, whom I had worked with in my 451 Group days. We caught up on the changing winds in the marketplace and pretty immediately found we were in violent agreement around two things: 1. The tremendous moment to jump in and help so many companies fix their underperforming marketing and sales motions. 2. The potential to collaborate around this opportunity and bring successful solutions and best practices to a broader marketplace in the process.
We are at a unique moment. Macroeconomic issues, combined with fundamental flaws in enterprise marketing and sales operations, are opening up what we call an “arbitrage opportunity” for firms like ANNUITAS. Many companies are short-staffed when it comes to the kind of effective go‑to‑market capabilities they need in house. In addition, so many businesses have placed the customer at the heart of a lot of processes, but strangely NOT at the heart of the go-to-market journey. The result is companies that are going to market ‘inside-out,’ rather than ‘outside-in’ – a proposition that all too-often results in negative ROI for our demand marketing investments.
A recent Salesforce study found that marketers are most concerned with first party data and technology optimization, and not about improving the orchestration of an aligned go‑to‑market that encompasses all aspects of the customer journey. Additionally, recent research found that only 36% of businesses surveyed believed their sales and marketing efforts were aligned with customer success.
ANNUITAS estimates that nearly three out of four businesses still have this type of critical disconnection in departmental alignment. Many otherwise successful companies are still failing to meet their customer engagement potential by still engaging in “random acts” of marketing and sales, and failing to consider essential phases of the customer journey in their go‑to‑market approach.
Here is the fortuitous alignment – which is what ANNUITAS and I share in common; We both want to help these companies build successful, sustainable growth engines that perfectly orchestrate the entire go‑to‑market lifecycle – across digital and live interactions – with the customer journey at the center. An approach that provides end-to-end customer journey stewardship, spans marketing, sales and customer success (so-called “Converged Growth” organizations); and creates a unified and seamless brand experience for some of the best companies in the world.
In my career, I have been lucky enough to work with customer success, product, and executive teams that valued the type of approach ANNUITAS helps clients take. We have built out our engagement and content matrices with an “end-to-end” customer journey concept in mind. I look forward to bringing these experiences and successes to my role at ANNUITAS, and I look forward to collaborating with ANNUITAS strategy teams to scale this approach to a growing group of the (soon-to-be) ‘converted’!
As someone who has worked for and with some of the leading marketing and sales software providers in the marketplace, I can say that the technology stack is finally “ready for prime time” when it comes to supporting a truly Converged Growth mindset. Providers (and practitioners!) have begun to truly make engagement multi (if not “omni”) channel, with great advancements in how chat and AI are merging to create improved nurture models, for example: the ability to consume more types of unstructured customer data and make sense of it faster and with less effort. The cloud is making it easier to put previously disjointed data and process silos together. In short, it is now easier than ever for technology to power people and processes to be truly customer centric. In fact, the challenge then turns to having the right customer-journey-centric GTM strategy – not so much the ‘right’ technology to be successful.
My passion truly revolves around everything go‑to‑market; strategy, process, organization, technology and everything in-between. My goal is to help ANNUITAS clients transform their customer engagement strategies into true growth machines that are repeatable, sustainable and optimizable.
In my new role is as Head of Research for ANNUITAS, I will be focusing on:
- Evangelizing ANNUITAS methodologies across various platforms
- Sharing case studies of go‑to‑market transformations
- Growing ANNUITAS|research as a vehicle to share best practices, benchmarks and support go‑to‑market leader education
It sounds cliche’ at this point, but given my background, I was made for this role.
I have been lucky enough to have spanned both the analyst and internal marketing side of things in my career. I have been on the outside, looking in, so to speak, and have had the luxury of analyzing hundreds of companies and their go‑to‑market success and failures. I have also been “on the inside,” building successful marketing teams and strategies that helped companies see exponential growth.
This role brings my two “past lives” together in a symbiotic way – as part of an organization I seriously respect.
ANNUITAS is a boutique management consultancy, focused on go‑to‑market transformation, with an impressive track record. With more than 100 GTM transformations at enterprise organizations over the past ten years, I’ll have a strong, pre-existing base of best practices and data to leverage as I build out ANNUITAS|research. Plus, ANNUITAS’ deep expertise in financial services, technology, healthcare/life sciences, manufacturing/industrial, media and education means I have an almost horizontal set of data that can help go‑to‑market leaders of all shapes and sizes, across nearly all verticals. Plus, I am joining an AMAZING team of consultants, strategists, architects, designers, developers and data scientists – whose insights are guaranteed to be rich and insightful.
ANNUITAS literally wrote the book on Demand Process and the company has spent a decade refining its approach to go‑to‑market transformation. As we delve deeper into concepts like Converged Growth and the role of the Chief Growth Officer, I am excited to help write the next chapter of their methodology.
I am still immersing myself in all things ANNUITAS, but I am beyond excited about the future and the potential. If you’re an ANNUITAS client, I’d love to connect and learn more about your journey and how I might be able to help. If you’re in my network and want to learn more, reach out as well!
Here’s to the next phase in my professional journey!
