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All right, Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.

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I'm your host, Matt Heinz. So excited to have you all here joining us.

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I am really, really excited about this episode. 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. Thank you.

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What a warm welcome. Thanks so much for having me today.

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Oh my God. 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. 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. 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? What are their priorities? 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. We had a multi client meeting and we opened it up to the group.

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We said, is this true? How are you feeling about this?

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What does it look like for you? And we got this emphatic round of head nods and some

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collective pain in the rooms. We said, okay, let's go out and take a look at what this is.

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So we ran a survey. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Far from trying to encourage people to collaborate, she was like, I

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wish they would collaborate less. Everybody just wants to be so involved.

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And it comes from this great place. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I've also seen things like RACIS and DACIs work really well for orchestrating

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global to regional handoffs. 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. 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. 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. 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? Yeah.

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So as I said, 84 percent of organizations are experiencing

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high rates of collaboration drag. So that sense that there's too many meetings, there's too many processes,

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there's too many stakeholders. 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. 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. 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. So where do you see companies start and who's championing this to really reduce

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or eliminate that collaboration drag? 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. 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. 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. How many deliverables will we do?

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What will good look like? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. There are four other group dysfunctions that we saw.

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These are observable behaviors. So if you're seeing them in your organization, there's symptoms that

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collaboration drag is probably present. 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. 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. 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. 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 exist in your organization.

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Okay, last question for you. 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. 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. 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. And I think we already see evidence of that in other places

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in the organization as well. Kristina, this has been amazing.

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We will make sure we've got the CMO's Guide to Go To Market

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Orchestration in the show notes. But for people that want to follow you learn more about and some of the research

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I know you've got coming up over the next few months, where do people go?

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LinkedIn is the best place to find me. 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

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the research that I'm working on. And then of course, if you happen to be a Gartner client, it's all on Gartner.com

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Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this.

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This is amazing. If you're watching or listening to this and you can think of people that are

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the Dictators, if you think of people in the organization that are Ready to

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Fire Aim, you think of people where you've had these conversations, feel

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free to forward this episode to them. on demand on LinkedIn, as well as shoot them over to SalesPipelineRadio.com

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and they can get a copy there as well. Amazing.

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Thank you so much everyone for watching, listening, subscribing.

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We'll see you next week. Until then, take care.

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We'll see you soon.