Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 369 Q & A with Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone

Summary

In this episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, Matt Heinz and guest Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone from Gartner discuss 'collaboration drag,' it's impact and practical solutions like RACIs and DACIs to improve workflows and reduce inefficiencies.

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “Eliminate “Collaboration Drag” to Drive Growth“ and my guest is Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, Senior Director at Gartner.

Tune in to:

1. Learn about the concept of ‘collaboration drag,’ and its impact on organizations as revealed through Gartner’s extensive research.
2. Hear about the 4 group dysfunctions to look for: Ready, Fire, Aim Dynamic, Control Freaks, Naysayers, and Dictatorships.
3. Discover practical solutions like RACIs and DACIs to clearly define roles, responsibilities, and workflows to combat inefficiencies.
4. Understand the tangible effects of high collaboration drag, including reduced revenue potential and increased employee burnout and turnover.
5. Gain insights into the role of AI in managing collaboration drag and why effective workflow processes and talent development are crucial for success.

Promised Resources:

Gartner’s CMO Guide to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration
Heinz Marketing’s CMO Guide to Marketing Orchestration

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW:

[00:00:15] Matt: All right, Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I’m your host, Matt Heinz. So excited to have you all here joining us. I am really, really excited about this episode. I’m excited about all the episodes we do, but this topic and our guest today, I’m just so excited to get into this conversation.

If you’re listening, watching, subscribing on demand. Thank you so much for continuing to download and listen and watch every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio is available at salespipelineradio.com Super excited to have joining us today from Gartner, Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone. Kristina, welcome.

[00:00:46] Kristina: Thank you. What a warm welcome. Thanks so much for having me today.

[00:00:49] Matt: Oh my God. I’ve been looking, I seriously been looking forward to this. Cause I geek out on something and I think you geek out on as well.

And so we’re going to talk today about collaboration drag.We’ve been working with clients a lot on what we call go to market orchestration, just helping to coordinate better how the work gets done. And one day I get an email from Gartner saying here’s the three priorities for CMOs for 2024, and one of them is eliminating collaboration drag.

And it was the first time I’d really seen someone name the problem and quantify the problem. So maybe start from there, the origins of this research and how and where you found this problem.

[00:01:24] Kristina: Yeah. This research is 18 months or two years or more in the making.

And I remember when it started. We’ve run a study every year, asking chief marketing officers and other executives what they’re working on for the year ahead. What are their challenges? What are their priorities? What do they think is it going to get in the way of achieving those priorities?

We started to hear from chief marketing officers, primarily, that they were struggling with doing more and more cross functional work. And we brought it to a meeting. We had a multi client meeting and we opened it up to the group. We said, is this true?

How are you feeling about this? What does it look like for you? And we got this emphatic round of head nods and some collective pain in the rooms. We said, okay, let’s go out and take a look at what this is. So we ran a survey. We studied over 600 marketers and over 300 marketing leaders.

So a mix of executives and marketeers or marketing practitioners. And we interviewed a bunch of them as well. So we did surveys, we did interviews, we did qual, we did quant. We were asking people, What is cross functional work like at your organization? Describe it to us. Tell us what it’s like.

And what we heard back was this thing that we’ve named collaboration drag, which means there are too many meetings. There are too many processes. There is too much feedback. There are too many stakeholders, and it takes too long to get their buy in. And it’s unclear how decisions should be made or where decision accountability lies.

[00:02:55] Matt: And something like 84 percent of the enterprises that we surveyed and interviewed said that they had high rates of collaboration drag. So it was, nigh universal people just saying this sucks at our organization. These things are really hard. Yeah, when you describe the problem and where that comes from, so many people are like, Oh my gosh, I feel that.

And oh my gosh, I assumed it was just here. And I think, what I’ve noticed is that the company’s doing go to market the best sometimes experience this the worst because go to market motions today are complex. You got long buying cycles, you got bigger buying committees. There’s more coordinated efforts across marketing channels that needs to happen, let alone coordinating efforts across go to market teams.

So if you’re just still just flinging out emails and just doing random acts of 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 you’re more likely to have this problem. Have you found that as well?

[00:03:52] Kristina: Yeah, we’ve certainly heard marketing and sales and all kinds of other executives saying, I really thought it was just me.

It’s almost a relief to hear that this happens to everybody. I had one chief marketing officer tell me that she thinks her team has meetings FOMO. Far from trying to encourage people to collaborate, she was like, I wish they would collaborate less. Everybody just wants to be so involved.

And it comes from this great place. And really what you describe, we understand that buying journeys are complex and go to market motions are complex. And in a lot of organizations, a lot of commercial organizations, I think have really bought into the idea that in order to go to market successfully, we need great internal alignment.

We need marketing and sales and maybe service to be working in lockstep. And we want to have A Revenue Council, a Lead Council. We want to do better ABM. And we understand that all of those things require partnership. Earlier we were talking about organizations buying a tool like an Asana and saying, Oh, that’ll fix it.

We’ve got it. I think to that point, one of the things we discovered is that, It’s not enough to set a mandate for collaboration. It’s not enough to buy a tool. It is not enough to get more meetings on the calendar. It’s maybe not even enough to be more rigorous about who’s in those meetings.

If you are not also paying such stringent, rigorous, disciplined attention to things like workflows, operations, processes, handoffs, even talent development. A lot of the stuff that is maybe a little less sexy than buying a technology solution collaboration drag is gonna run rampant.

[00:05:30] Matt: It is. Oh man, talking to today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.

She’s a Senior Director at Gartner and authored research about a year ago around collaboration drag. You mentioned this concept of meeting FOMO, which I think is super interesting. And I think in some cases, whether it’s meeting FOMO or I wasn’t on the email thread or it’s something’s in Slack and everyone has to chime in…

There’s a lot of different ways to go about fighting collaboration drag. One of the most important tools I’ve seen is RACI which is an acronym and it stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. And it’s a really powerful way of designating who needs to chime in on what, and who needs to be involved where, so that across a complex project, the right people are in the room on the thread at the right time. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with, RACI, DACI, I know there’s lots of different formats around that, but like, why that’s so valuable?

[00:06:22] Kristina: Yeah, RACIs and DACIs. So DACIs, for those who might be unfamiliar because I feel it’s a bit of a newer acronym, it’s a decision making chart.

So who is the Decider and who is Accountable and Contributing and Informed. They’re terrific tools for combatting collaboration drag because they help to define handoffs and they help tell people when they need to lean in and when they need to lean back. I have seen marketing teams use these and sales teams use these really effectively in partnerships with one another across, for example, a go to market process to be able to identify the places where the marketing team is going to take more responsibility and then also identify the places where that marketing team is going to step back and hand some of those activities off to sales and let sales lean in.

I’ve also seen things like RACIS and DACIs work really well for orchestrating global to regional handoffs. So what kinds of things do we want a global team to take responsibility for? And where do we want the regional team to be able to have autonomy and agency and be able to leverage their expertise?

The pivot point there, the thing that makes it work is that it is as much about telling a team when to take their hands off the wheel and step back as it is about telling a team when they need to step forward because in a meetings kind of FOMO environment, the problem that you have is maybe that some of those people should have been in the meeting in the first meeting, in the second meeting, but not the 49th meeting.

There was a point at which it was time for them to go on to the other work that they had to do. And nobody was able to define when that point was. And so those meetings and those processes just become really bloated.

[00:08:03] Matt: Yeah. I think for people that are addressing collaboration drag in the organization, I hear them talk aboutagility, productivity, speed to market on programs.

It’s hard enough to get campaigns out that we’d planned on doing. And then someone has some idea for something new and pivoting to that becomes really hard. When we published earlier this year, our CMOs Guide to Marketing Orchestration, we also talked about two other things in your report: revenue loss and key employee churn that very much happened as a part of this as well.

Can you talk about what you saw there?

[00:08:35] Kristina: Yeah. So as I said, 84 percent of organizations are experiencing high rates of collaboration drag. So that sense that there’s too many meetings, there’s too many processes, there’s too many stakeholders. When organizations experience high rates of collaboration drag, those organizations are 37 percent less likely to achieve their revenue and profit objectives, which is huge.

37 percent less likely to achieve those objectives. And their teams are 15 times more likely to burn out, and they’re 9 times more likely to report that they intend to leave their job. So it’s damaging at all levels of the organization. And I think a good reminder to us, at an executive level, that even though executives often recognize the pain of cross functional collaboration and complex cross functional work, the executives are not necessarily the ones in those working groups actually executing on those processes, right?

And so it’s the people who are in the trenches doing the work that are really affected and ground down by all those kinds of dysfunctional group working behaviors that lead to too many meetings and too many processes. And so you’re not only going to be less likely to achieve your revenue and profit objectives, you’re also going to see probably some of your best people leave you.

[00:09:51] Matt: I’m curious as for those listening and nodding their head vociferously around this, how do we help them take action on it? If I’m a CMO, how should I address this? I know larger organizations tend to have a PMO office as well that has their fingers in this.

So where do you see companies start and who’s championing this to really reduce or eliminate that collaboration drag?

[00:10:12] Kristina: So RACIs and DACIs will help. Defining more clear, more defined roles and responsibilities in a project workflow and defining those handoffs.

That’s huge. We did find that like when it comes to reducing collaboration drag, reducing stress and friction in workflows– so improving workflows. And adding some supportive change management to help people adapt to new workflows– that reduces collaboration drag by 15%. So that’s a great strategy to take.

The other thing that we saw, though, that really is in your purview as an executive, if you’re listening to us today is talent development. When we invest in developing the kind of talent that helps people become stronger collaborators, collaboration drag can be reduced by 23%, which is huge. That’s nothing to sniff at.

I think you can imagine the role of a PMO office in maybe auditing workflows or determining those RACIs and DACIs, setting those mandates, doing governance around how work is scoped, how it’s resourced, how it’s completed. Setting things like stop work criteria that tells us when we have finished a project.

How many deliverables will we do? What will good look like? How many rounds of revision do we do before we say we’re finished with this? That stuff that an executive can own in marketing, a marketing operations leader might own it. Project Management Office, maybe even a Chief of Staff. And then the talent development side, that’s something that any executive can own in their function, that team managers, the people who report into you can start to own.

And that we found was really about developing people’s critical thinking skills, their political judgment, so like trust building, problem solving, systems thinking, all those kinds of skills make people better collaborators.

[00:11:57] Matt: Yeah. I think, if we were having this conversation 10, 15 years ago, B2B marketers, just a lot of media buying, a lot of external coordination, and that still happens, but increasingly we see more and more B2B companies really managing data.

It’s about information. Intent signals, how those get leveraged. And so all of a sudden the people in the organization that are coordinating and managing that, how they work together versus just what money they have to spend externally on a media buy becomes much more important. And it means that addressing this is much more critical.

We have found in our work that once you get to a marketing team of about 20 to 25 people, that’s when you start to really feel collaboration drag.

Take a webinar. You may have had a couple people that could just knock it out, and now you’ve got eight people that have different roles in getting that done. And if you start to feel collaboration drag, it means it’s been there for a while. Are there symptoms or evidence that companies should look for or recognize and say, boy, this is a sign we need to go and do something?

[00:12:53] Kristina: So certainly if you were doing any kinds of internal employee service, and it’s that time of year a lot of organizations are running their end of year employee health, employee sentiment surveys, and if you’re getting anything bad from those surveys where people are saying it feels like process gets in the way of outcomes or it feels like it takes a lot of work and effort to get work done, those are good signs.

But there are some other things that I would look for. There are four other group dysfunctions that we saw. These are observable behaviors. So if you’re seeing them in your organization, there’s symptoms that collaboration drag is probably present. We called one the Ready, Fire, Aim Dynamic. So if you see groups taking action before they have agreed on what they’re trying to achieve, they move to action too quickly…

Ready, Fire, Aim– that’s a sign that collaboration drag could be present. If you see Control Freaks in your organization, and sometimes that might be you if it’s a senior stakeholder who is a bottleneck for decisions– all decisions have to go through just one person and it slows progress down, that creates collaboration drag.

You might also see Naysayers. Those are the folks in the room who chime in with criticisms or complaints and they cause unnecessary delays. And then you might also see Dictatorships, which is where the working group gets overruled by a stakeholder who might never have been part of the core team. Like 90+% of teams say that they have experienced at least one of those things in the last year.

And wherever you see even rare instances of that kind of group dysfunction, collaboration drag shoots right up as a result.

[00:14:33] Matt: That is a phenomenal checklist that we will publish that in the notes. to say, kind of like, Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a redneck… You might have collaboration drag if some of those things exist in your organization. Okay, last question for you.

[00:14:45] Kristina: We talked about project management tools being a great tool, but if just bought and thrown at a team can be counterproductive. What about AI? Is AI going to make this easier or will AI actually add complexity to this problem? I would say in the short term, it may add complexity.

The way that AI allows for the proliferation of content and emails and makes it easier to do more volumes of work in a way that can allow us to become very tempted into throwing spaghetti at the wall.

We’re just executing more. And that kind of focus on more volume, even if the quality is higher, but more volume and more outreach and more messaging and more personalization. All of that more requires more work from teams. And so in the absence of those workflow and process governance that we’ve been talking about, or in the absence of the right kind of talent development, you’re probably going to see more collaboration drag if you’re just using AI to help your teams do more stuff.

It’s possible over time that being able to use AI to take on some execution related tasks and free teams up for more strategic work, that could have a long term effect. But I would lay bets that without good supportive workflows, good supporting talent development, you won’t see AI solve the collaboration drag problem.

[00:16:08] Matt: I think you’re right. And I think we already see evidence of that in other places in the organization as well. Kristina, this has been amazing. We will make sure we’ve got the CMO’s Guide to Go To Market Orchestration in the show notes. But for people that want to follow you learn more about and some of the research I know you’ve got coming up over the next few months, where do people go?

[00:16:25] Kristina: LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. And then you’ll have access to all the stuff that I share about 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

[00:16:38] Matt: Awesome. Awesome.

Thank you so much for doing this. This is amazing. If you’re watching or listening to this and you can think of people that are the Dictators, if you think of people in the organization that are Ready to Fire Aim, you think of people where you’ve had these conversations, feel free to forward this episode to them.

on demand on LinkedIn, as well as shoot them over to SalesPipelineRadio.com and they can get a copy there as well. Amazing. Thank you so much everyone for watching, listening, subscribing. We’ll see you next week. Until then, take care.

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.