Transcript: Aligning Your Teams Around a

Unified Revenue Goal

Video 1: The Importance of Having a Vision and Setting Goals

Ross Brockman: We used to say, "If I had a million dollars, what could we do with that?" We were like, that's the
wrong way to approach it. It's not like, "Oh if I had this money, what could we do with it?" But more like, "Oh, we
need X dollars because we want to accomplish this." And that's kind of how we've approached it. Instead of, “Oh, give
me this money, and then we'll figure out what to do with it.”

Nicole Sahin: We have goals together as a company rather than each department being compensated based on what
they alone achieved. At each quarter, we go back and review how are we doing against those goals. I think the
company will be totally transformed by the end of the year.

Hey, it’s Kyle from HubSpot Academy. The first step to implementing a sales enablement strategy at your company is figuring
out what you want to achieve. The purpose of sales enablement is to help your company make more sales, but that shouldn’t
be the end result. You need a vision of what you hope those additional sales will help you do.

Now, it’s important to distinguish a vision from a goal. You need both in order to succeed, but they play different roles.

A goal is a metric outcome you can check off a list. Your goal for implementing a sales enablement strategy might be to
increase your company’s monthly revenue from $3 million to $5 million by the end of the year. So if your company hasn’t $5
million by the time December ends, then you know you haven’t achieved your goal.

A vision is a state of affairs you want to bring into being. John Kotter, who is arguably the world’s foremost expert on change
management, has said, “In every successful transformation effort that I have seen, the guiding coalition develops a picture of
the future that is relatively easy to communicate. [...] Without a sensible vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into
a list of confusing and incompatible projects that can take the organization in the wrong direction or nowhere at all. [...] In
failed transformations, you often find plenty of plans, directives, and programs but no vision.”

Laura Poggi of People Doc saw this firsthand:

Laura Poggi: I think this isn't a story just around marketing and sales alignment but it's really around aligning your
whole organization around a similar goal. If you can't get the whole organization aligned around something like that,
then you have some other work to do. Once everyone's aligned around that goal, things fit together really nicely, as
well.

For your company, the vision might be moving to a nicer location or being able to offer employees better benefits or hiring a
larger team. Here’s an example from Ross Brockman of Downeast Cider House — a hard cider company that’s one of the
fastest growing private companies in America:

Ross Brockman: We want to be the largest hard cider company in the U.S. That's the goal. That might be a 50-year
goal, maybe it's a multi-generational goal, I don't know. But that's the goal.

That’s fantastic. Your vision should be as audacious and long-term as what Ross just described. If you want to be the biggest
player in your space, you can’t just set a static goal, because your existing competitors will also be growing and new
competitors will surely come along. But if that’s your vision, it will give you a clear direction for all of the metric goals you set
along the way.

In order to make a big initiative like sales enablement work at your company, you have to have goals and a vision. The vision is
what’s going to motivate your teams. Selling them on that fancy new office space or on being the best or biggest company in
your industry is how you’re going to get them onboard in the first place, and it’s also how you’re going to keep them moving
forward when challenges arise. But if you don’t also have measurable goals in place, you’ll never know if you’re making any
progress. The goals are how you’ll make sure you’re on a path that has the potential to fulfill your vision.
 Transcript: Aligning Your Teams Around a
Unified Revenue Goal

There’s also another reason you need both a big vision and achievable goals. Remember that Ross said his vision might take
multiple generations to realize, and something that audacious can be hard to get people to buy into. Here’s another quote
from John Kotter: “Real transformation takes time, and [it] risks losing momentum if there are no short-term goals to meet
and celebrate. Most people won’t go on the long march unless they see compelling evidence in 12 to 24 months that the
journey is producing expected results. Without short-term wins, too many people give up or actively join the ranks of those
people who have been resisting change.”

Good goals can give you regular reasons to celebrate legitimate success. As your team members see that their hard work is
bringing about desired results, they’ll renew their efforts toward achieving that big vision.

So start by figuring out your vision — what is it you want to achieve? And once you have that, you’ll be able to use sales
enablement as the vehicle to get there.

Video 2: Creating a Revenue Goal

Now that you understand the importance of having a vision and developing goals, let’s talk about how to go about putting
that knowledge to good use.

In the context of sales enablement, your goals are going to focus on revenue. Ultimately, that’s how you’re going to measure
whether your sales enablement efforts are effective, and it’s also the metric that will be most meaningful to your company’s
leadership team. Here's Bertrand Hazard, Vice President of Marketing at TrustRadius:

Bertrand Hazard: When, ultimately, you're at the board and you're presenting marketing results and you're
presenting and asking for marketing investment, the revenue lens is the one that the CEO and rest of the executives
understand. The rest is nice, but it's not understood.

The tricky thing about revenue goals is that they can feel completely arbitrary if they aren’t tied to something more concrete,
and that’s where your grand vision is going to come into play. If you can come up with a vision that marketing and sales will be
equally excited about and then calculate how much that vision would cost to achieve, that’ll give you a revenue goal both
teams will be invested in achieving. Here’s an example from Josh Harcus, founder of Huify and author of A Closing Culture:

Josh Harcus: At first we said, “We want a team of 12 by the end of this year.” We had three full-time employees at the
beginning of that year, and then we’re like, “What do ... What does this look like? How much do we want to grow?
We had figured out a lot of operating things and we had about 15 contractors that we were using at that time on a
monthly basis. We had a pretty good team set up and we're like, “No, we really think we want to be at 12 full-time
employees.” That was really the only thing we could put our finger on. What came out of that was we realized, doing
a lot of number crunching, it didn’t equal just multiplying it by 100,000. We basically realized we needed $1.2 million
in ARR by the end of that year to have 12 full-time employees, to have the office we have, to have all expenses, and
operate with a profit margin that we wanted.

See how nicely that vision translated into a revenue goal? That’s the sort of process you need to go through. So start by
developing a vision both marketing and sales can buy into. And don’t rush this part — talk to people on both teams, talk to
company leaders, see what it is people want. And revise the vision until you’ve got it perfect. As John Kotter says, “If you can’t
communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest,
you are not yet done with this phase of the transformation process.”

Once you have that vision, start figuring out how much it would cost. If the vision involves relocating to a new location, look at
the cost of office space in that location. If it involves hiring more people, check Glassdoor or other online resources to see
what the going salaries of such people are. Remember, you live in the age of the empowered buyer — use that to your
advantage and don’t stop researching until you’ve found the information you’re looking for.
 Transcript: Aligning Your Teams Around a
Unified Revenue Goal
Once you have the cost of the vision figured out, you’ll be ready to turn it into goals for each team. The mechanics of doing
that are covered in depth in “The Sales and Marketing SLA” class, but here’s an important thing to keep in mind: Once you’ve
figured out the goals for each team, you need to ask yourself how achievable those goals are. Audacious goals can inspire
people and teams to accomplish things they never thought possible, but ridiculous goals can crush a team’s morale. Here's
Steve Bookbinder, CEO and head trainer at DM Training:

Steve Bookbinder: You are presented with that new goal in the beginning of the year. The very first thing is, do you
believe you can do it? Because if you don't believe it, you know what you're gonna start to do? That's the manager's
goal. If somebody comes to you during the year, "You hitting a goal?" "Well, what do you mean by goal? I mean, their
goal is unrealistic, so I'm going for a lower, more modest goal that I think I could hit." Well, that's because you don't
believe you could hit the bigger goal.

Sales enablement will empower your sales team to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible, but you’ve got to
make sure they’re fully bought into what is possible. In the early days of your sales enablement efforts, you won’t know
what’s possible, and that’s okay. As you get your processes and content in place, and as you add technology to the mix, you’ll
gradually figure out a new baseline that you’ll be able to use to set future goals — and to ultimately realize that big vision.