All right, well we're excited to be here. I think this is my third CRO Summit. I've been a member of Pavilion since it was Revenue Collective, so I'm definitely a big believer in the community.
So, you know, go-to-market alignment has been a hot topic in our world for a long time, right? And I think it's always been one of those things that we focused on, we need to just get better at it, right? But we don't… It doesn't need to be perfect, as long as we can get to good enough, it's okay.
But we have a few different market convergences that I think are really driving us to a point where go-to-market alignment is like, it's table stakes. We have to be fully aligned or else we can't win.
And part of that is—thank you, I'll take that, I'll take that—part of that is, we used to think in the way of like, hey, let's optimize each of our channels. We have an inbound channel, we have an outbound channel, maybe we have a partner channel, maybe we have a PLG channel. And everybody's focused on abundance within those channels of how can we get more leads? How can we get more meetings? Whatever, right? It's not really reflective of how buyers buy now, but that was also in the days where funding was abundant.
And we really thought in this idea that our success was centered around how big is our war chest. And how big our war chest was determined how much we could grow our pipeline. So as we grew, maybe cost per opportunity got a little more expensive. Maybe cost per lead got a little more expensive. But we could really just plow through some of those inefficiencies with brute force, each individually do that.
And really, now we're not in that stage anymore. Buyers have changed. The individual silo channels are not reflective of how buyers buy. And we don't have the abundant funding we used to have where we can't plow through it anymore with money. So execution is the currency that works now.
And if we can't execute as a cohesive unit within our commercial teams and our go-to-market units, we just can't scale the way that we need to. Maybe you can make it to a certain point, but then you get bigger growth goals the next year. And as your efficiency degrades, you just can't do it anymore.
Yeah, and I think the other thing the folks before just talked about it—with AI being such a huge disruptive in the market—is really buyers are typically unfocused, right? Companies have been unfocused. Well, AI is making it worse, right? People running around 15 different tools to do the same thing. Some are pre-seed, some are new, some do this.
So I think, you know, from a company perspective, as the competitive advantage, we used to compete against other vendors. Now you're competing against not only other vendors—do nothing—but you're competing for buyer mindshare because there's a lot going on, a lot of noise in the day to day. And I think as organizations, what we can do is we can limit the noise in ours to actually go out and find new customers to help.
I suppose we probably should have started with this—introducing ourselves. I'm Joe McNeil. I'm CRO at Influ2, as Kathleen mentioned. My background is I've been with two primary companies in my career. One grew through a PE exit 100% through outbound. The other one went to an IPO 100% through inbound. So I've kind of seen both sides of it on that side.
Yeah, and Joe and I worked together, if you didn't notice, so he actually invited me up here, which is shocking, because we worked together for seven years, and he still wanted to hang out with me.
But I've also seen some other channels, right? So we worked at Siteimprove together. Last company I worked for was a PLG company, bootstrapped to $100 million. Didn't take a dollar of outside funding, which was PLG, right? That's a different channel. And then prior to Siteimprove, I worked at a supply chain company that was primarily a marketplace. So all of these different channels and all of our different experiences kind of led us to today.
Yeah, and I think the reason we bring this up is like both of us don't really have an allegiance to a channel, right? Like what's right is what works. And in the past a lot of companies would have like—they'd have a superpower. They're an inbound company. They're an outbound company. And I just don't think that that's the way it goes anymore.
The data is clear: alignment drives performance. But achieving it means ditching vanity metrics, embracing shared goals, and meeting buyers where they are.
Pipeline is everyone’s job. When marketing and sales stop operating in silos and start owning outcomes together, revenue follows. That’s the alignment that matters.
