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Women Revenue Leaders Forum Executive Summary
On April 30 through May 1 Alexander Group convened the 5th annual Women in Revenue Leaders Forum at the Chicago St. Regis Hotel. The theme was Growth Through Convergence…how leading companies are breaking down organizational barriers to converge marketing, sales, service, operations, human resources and technology to deliver excellence. There are two areas necessary for enduring revenue growth:
Customer experience
Employee experience
Speakers and panelists shared their wisdom on how they are converging these functions and creating a more fluid environment that can deliver superior experiences in both areas.
Convergence Brings Enduring Leadership Principles to Life
Previous research conducted by Alexander Group established that companies consistently outgrew their industry peers between 2000 and 2020 when their leaders focused on three things:
Creating Missions that Matter
Missions that go beyond the financial and seek bigger impact on customers, employees, society. Moreover, mission is actively used to attract and engage the right talent while guiding investment decisions. Mission provides a benchmark of success over years and decades not just quarters.
Creating Cultures that Care
When people look out for one another, up, down and across the organization, trust follows. In such environments teams thrive, accountability is organic and innovation is fueled.
Becoming a Talent Magnet
The right mission and culture attract top notch talent. With attention to development, mentoring and investment in the right tools and training, community and loyalty are sustained.
Talent is the common denominator in each of these enduring growth foundations. Enduring leaders know that talent…attracting it and leveraging it…is the key to serving customers and delivering long term growth. Which explains why convergence is so critical to:
Customer experience
Convergence unlocks talent to serve customers better by making functional boundaries more transparent. The customer touching functions (Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations) work together more seamlessly as processes, jobs and metrics are designed with the customer in mind.
Employee experience
Convergence builds talent to serve customers better by bringing operations, training and technology into closer collaboration and alignment with the revenue team to create the skills needed to leverage automation, analytics and AI…not fear it.
What follows are observations from speakers and panelists at the Forum who shared their convergence story and how it is helping them deliver excellence in both customer and employee experience.
Convergence for a Better Customer Experience
Eliabeth Zornes, chief customer officer at Autodesk, explained how Autodesk engineers the marketing/sales/service continuum using a process called “customer experience design.” This enables the company to map out a) desirable customer journeys, b) impacts on select personas, and c) jobs to be done along the way. Such detailed process engineering ensures “alignment of the people, processes and tools to deliver the best possible experience.” Zornes said the ultimate goal is to “create signature experiences that exceed the customer expectations and delight them in ways they did not anticipate.”
Marketing, sales and service need to speak the same language.
To serve customers better, the convergence of Sales, Marketing and Service functions has begun to erode hard organizational boundaries in favor of a broader “customer organization.” Underneath the customer organization structure, the emphasis is on “defining the competencies that need to be delivered and ensuring that the customer receives the right message at the right time.” The emphasis is more on roles and how they impact the customer experience than on departments and structure.
To build this customer organization, “marketing, sales and service need to speak the same language.” This means knowing the customer segments, customer personas and what each persona expects. Once teams speak the same language, they require a digital thread that ties them together. Zornes offered an example; “using the same data to orchestrate the customer journey so that the different teams can come in and out at different times.” Such use of data is also an excellent opportunity to leverage AI.
Zornes shared that her organization uses joint planning, goal setting and collaboration across sales, marketing and customer success to create a customer organization that delivers enhanced outcomes and value to the customers.
Convergence for a Better Employee Experience
Keeping up with or exceeding customer expectations means companies are restructuring, introducing new processes and implementing new technologies. Enduring leaders know that to stand still is to lose share. Amidst all this, enduring leaders shine in their ability to navigate change by ensuring that their workforces can adapt. They do this by delivering the right tools and training. Today this is particularly true as regards the deployment of AI. This is where revenue operations leaders engineer convergence between the tech team with the revenue team to maximize the AI impact.
Alan Love, VP of Global Revenue Operations at Cisco, offered examples of teaming across functions to leverage AI in three ways: help Cisco customers with their AI use cases, embed AI in their product portfolio, and enable Cisco employees with AI capabilities.
Cisco’s use of AI to enable revenue employees (marketing, sales, service) is impressive. According to Love, AI “improves the productivity, effectiveness and impact of the customer facing teams, by automating, augmenting and personalizing their tasks and interactions.”
Powerful use cases for AI
In each of these cases, AI improves the productivity, effectiveness and impact of the customer facing teams by automating, augmenting, and personalizing their tasks and interactions. In short, it improves the employee experience and, in the process, the customer experience as well.
Deploying all this technology takes a balancing act between agility and trust. Employees can internalize a lot of change in a short period of time if they trust that the executive team has their back. The Executive Panel on “How Chaos Can Help Modernize the Workforce” articulated how to strike this balance:
Be clear and consistent on vision.
Cultivate a culture of candor, accountability and ownership; encourage constructive debate and disagreement.
When the debate is over, run the play; no second guessing.
Seek and provide feedback.
Foster innovation and risk taking, and reward learning from failures and successes.
Consistently invest in tools and programs that help employees leverage technology.
Leading in the Era of Convergence
In the era of AI and rapid change, a new leadership model is emerging that balances…
The need to move quickly but never rashly
The need to drive change but not at the expense of trust
Here are the leadership characteristics that speakers and panelists cited most frequently:
Fearlessness
Cate Gutowski, CEO of Quantis.ai, characterized ‘fearlessness’ as an essential quality at multiple points in a career.
Early in your career, you need to be fearless to be successful. Having positive thoughts and a firm belief that you can do anything can shape your reality and ability to get things done. As you gain achievements, it enables you to gain sponsors that can serve as a force multiplier throughout your career.
The quality of fearlessness extends into the middle of your career. This is the time to make bold decisions and trust your intuition.
As your career develops and you get into more senior leadership roles, fearlessness offers the perfect opportunity to begin thinking about how you can make the world a better place.
Personal growth mindset
“Never get stale” was the advice from the Modernize the Workforce panel. Gutowski advised accomplishing this with “experience diversity:” taking jobs in multiple functions and geographies (including international). Per the Modernize Your Workforce panel, “be innovative, take considered risks and learn from both failures and successes.” But always be learning. Said Dana Warren, partner at Canaan Partners, “seek direct feedback and coaching from great leaders and don’t be afraid to bet on yourself. Be curious, learn new technologies and always understand what you are uniquely positioned to do. Be bold and seek out the intersect between opportunities and your differential advantage.”
Transparency through communication
At the heart of all great culture is trust. To paraphrase several executives at the forum, “if you want trust, you need transparency.” The Modernize Your Workforce panel made these recommendations on how transparency can be fostered:
Stewardship
Great leaders always keep the long term in mind even in the midst of constant change. Chaos is never an excuse for shortsightedness. Elisabeth Zornes put it nicely; “you have to want to leave the business better than when you started.” Theresa Anania, SVP of Global Customer Experience at Zendesk built on that thought; “you’ve got to ensure a company is ready for the future. Instead of prioritizing growth at any cost, you need to seek a sustainable growth model. Companies that grow too fast risk forgetting to build the right foundation and infrastructure needed to scale.” A stewardship mentality extends accountability into the future. Good stewards do not mortgage the business of tomorrow to deliver short term success.
Concluding Remarks
Convergence of the functions that directly drive or support revenue growth (Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations, Human Resources, Training, Technology) to create a more fluid revenue “ecosystem” looks like a necessary step towards delivering what both customers and employees demand. In an era when technologies like deep analytics and AI are available to all, companies that can embrace change will develop the most productive revenue ecosystems more quickly…and exert their advantage with customers and talent more successfully. Join us at our next leadership event.
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About Alexander Group
Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.