You can have the perfect product with the perfect strategy… and still fail because your internal stakeholders don’t understand, don’t buy in and aren’t aligned. Companies fail because their leaders can’t agree on a direction.
Alignment is the key that unlocks product, company, and career success, but it’s not easy. Bruce and Melissa have spent decades learning from their mistakes and the mistakes of others, and they will share their hard-won tips and techniques. They’ll share a proven framework for stakeholder management and then coach audience members through some of their toughest stakeholder challenges, live and unscripted.
There is coaching, role playing, and interaction for the whole audience. It is fun and you’ll come away with something actionable to manage your stakeholders better to keep your organization aligned and moving in the direction you want it to.
You’ll learn:
- Why getting a “yes” from stakeholders doesn’t always mean commitment — and how to get both.
- How to uncover hidden misalignment using techniques like stakeholder interviews and challenge rounds.
- Ways to reframe tough conversations to reveal personal motivations and foster buy-in.
- How role clarity (like using DACI) prevents teams from spiraling into blame games.
- What to do when stakeholders are smiling in meetings but sabotaging change behind the scenes.
Slides
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Transcript
Bruce McCarthy
All right, chaos and conflict as promised. I’m sure we can work that out. We’re going to do something a little unconventional, inspired by Bob Moesta, thank you, Bob.
We’re going to do a little improv. We’re going to ask three people up from the audience. People who, as Bob said earlier today, we’ve only met today. And we’re going to help them, we hope, with their stakeholder challenges, with the challenging people inside and maybe even outside their organization who make their lives miserable and chaotic.
Everything we’re going to talk about is based on things that Melissa and I wrote about in this book Aligned. It’s called Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders.
So we wrote this book, just as a quick introduction, about the techniques and the skills and the frameworks and the tools for getting alignment. That is agreement and commitment from your stakeholders, because honestly, that’s the only way to get anything done.
You can have a brilliant idea and a perfect strategy, but if your team is not bought in, nothing’s going to happen.
Somebody else talked about to me this morning about I tell everyone what we’re going to do, I say we’re making a pivot. And they all say yes sir, and then they all go back to their day jobs as though I hadn’t said anything. Sure, that’s never happened to any of you.
So we wrote this book about how to overcome that, because it’s the difference between life and death for a lot of companies, and a lot of products, and a lot of teams. So let’s get on with it.
Live Stakeholder Troubleshooting
We’re gonna bring people up in order from our extensively researched list of people with stakeholder challenges, which should be all of you probably, but we don’t have that much time. And the first person is, we’re going to bring up Dominik. And then, so Dominik, are you still here and still willing? Yeah, okay, great. And Rute, are you right? Great. And if we have time, we’re going to bring up Richard also. So we probably take about 20 minutes per person and see how we do.
CEO with CPO vs. CRO tension: Dominik Pinter, CEO at Kentico
Bruce McCarthy
All right, so Dominik, please join us. Melissa is going to talk to you about your challenges. I’m just going to listen for now.
Melissa Appel
So the way this is going to work is I’m going to interview you a little bit about the challenges that you’re having, and then I’m going to suggest some things that you might do to manage these stakeholders. And then Bruce and I are going to switch and we’re going to do a little role play, where you and Bruce are going to act like you and a stakeholder and maybe try out something that I’ve mentioned.
So tell me just a little bit about your role and the challenge that you’re having.
Dominik Pinter
Yes. So I’m CEO of the company. We are over 200 people. We are based in Europe, in Czech Republic, where we have 150 people or so. We have 30 people here in US. Our revenue grossly mostly goes from US, about 60%.
Now my challenge is dispute between CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, who runs sales and marketing, and our CPO, Chief Product Officer, who runs engineering, product management and so on. And so I’m not the Founder of the company. I joined the company in 2020, took over a company as a CEO more than three years back from the founder. And I picked one person internally who was at the time, 15 years with the company, as a CPO. We’ve been always great, actually, at building solid product, but our go-to-market wasn’t the best. So I decided to bring external CRO. So I hired person here in US, and he joined us about a year ago.
Now, what you need to know is that our culture in the past was that everything was really driven by the engineering. They were really the ones who were making decisions at the company and commercial team, or go-to-market team was, I would call them really necessary evil. And so when CRO joined, and I had finally like a strong leader for that part of the company, he naturally wanted to get on the same level with CPO, like be the partner in the discussion. So actually, the decisions are not just driven by R&D teams. And that really made our CPO very frustrated, because in the past, when things weren’t happening according to R&D, the commercial leadership just got replaced by somebody else. And on NL basis, really, the company kept changing the leaders in the commercial team, whether it was like sales leader or marketing leader. So we really got this culture.
Now I don’t want to really replace CPO. He knows what he’s doing. He’s a great person building very great product. I just need these two guys to start work together and collaborate, because right now they both kind of coming to me, escalating things to me, and I’m ultimately always the judge who needs to decide, like, who’s right and who’s wrong. So that’s my challenge.
Melissa Appel
All right, a few follow up questions. So what do you know about the kind of motivations of the CPO and why he’s maybe objecting to certain things that the CRO is doing.
Dominik Pinter
Yeah, great question. So he’s definitely strong in building the product, and he really cares deeply about that, but he also cares deeply about, I would say, collaboration with the other people, but he doesn’t necessarily care about how much company grows or not. That never was his motivation in the first place.
Melissa Appel
Do you have OKRs at the at the upper level, or some sort of goals that everybody is using?
Dominik Pinter
Yes. We don’t use OKRs in particular. We have something what we call strategic objectives. So every year, leadership team picks three key objectives and then everybody, like full company, aligns around those.
Melissa Appel
Do you believe that the CPO is actually aligned? Because you mentioned he didn’t really concern himself so much about the corporate success, that it was kind of more the product.
Dominik Pinter
Yes, that’s a great question. I think that at the end of the day, he really cares a lot about the company. But I think that where he might be a little bit misaligned is that the growth of the company going forward. Because when I started, the company wasn’t really growing rapidly. I mean, the growth at that time was less than 5% year over year, but everybody was sort of comfortable with that. Right now, the last year, our growth was 30% and my goal is to repeat that and repeat that again, or even make it faster. And that’s why I brought CRO because spit out really like leader, strong leader in that area, we wouldn’t achieve that.
And that’s really the part where they don’t necessarily share the same vision.
Melissa Appel
So it’s my understanding that the CPO has been around for a while.
Dominik Pinter
Yes, 17 years.
Melissa Appel
Okay, long time. So the company was a lot smaller back then?
Dominik Pinter
Yes.
Melissa Appel
And it wasn’t as big and maybe you’ve entered a new phase of growth of scale. And one thing that you could do is kind of just have that open conversation with the CPO like this isn’t the same company as you were at before, right? It’s a lot bigger. We need to do some different things for scale, but rather than sort of dictate to them, here’s what you need to do, being curious and getting their perspective.
How do you feel about this new phase of growth that we’re in? Like, what’s different now versus when you started? What are you frustrated about? And we have a tool that we talk about in the book of stakeholder interviews. Which is, I’m sure you’re a very empathetic person, but certain questions that you can ask people and just kind of making sure they feel heard, and making sure Hey, are you interested in continuing with this phase of growth? Like, is there anything that that concerns you about moving forward from here? So I don’t know how, like, what your conversations have been with with the CPO so far.
Dominik Pinter
Yes, so I definitely tried to open this topic multiple times, and even to the point where I said, look, the CRO could even be replaced but what’s the benefit of that? Because the company was doing that many times, and it didn’t really make any difference. So I was very clear saying, okay, you know that’s not the way. The only way is that you guys actually figure out how to collaborate. And I guess that the response for most of the times is exactly what Bruce said at the very beginning. Like, I get the kind of like agreement, but then not much actually happens. And few weeks after that conversation again, another escalation comes. How, like, commercial team misbehaved in that or…
Melissa Appel
I wonder we can take a page from it, from an earlier talk today, which is how are you going to help us reach our goals. What are you going to do? So asking your CPO to say, how are you going to help us reach these goals that we’ve collectively agreed on? And the answer could be, well I don’t actually agree with the goal, or it could be, I don’t know, or it could be a plan that then you have a chance to review.
Dominik Pinter
Yes, I totally agree. I got a lot of inspiration from the discussions today about how I can solve that. And yeah, it might be really down to the fact asking, Hey, do you really want to be part of this? And how are you going to really contribute to this? Because this is the direction we are going. And like you can make a choice, either work with us on that or figure out the alternative part.
Melissa Appel
Yeah. I think before you get to the sort of ultimatum, working with this and saying, like, I really want us all to succeed together. These are the goals. If you have any concerns about the goals, I would like to hear them. And saying, like, Okay, well, how, how do you think your department can help us get to the goals? How do you think you can help us to get to the goals? How do you think that the product organization, the sales organization, can work together? And maybe it will get him starting to think about, oh, actually, I can help decide what we’re all going to do, as opposed to people are shoving these things in my face. So it depends kind of how this person is thinking about it, what their motivations are, as far as corporate incentives, but also, like, personal incentives.
Dominik Pinter
Yeah, that’s very great point. And just while you were speaking, I was thinking about that little bit. And just to not make it really sound like black and white, it’s not that he wouldn’t be trying or anything like that. But, the commercial team is not always helping as well because there are certain cases where commercial team really doesn’t act as they should. Because they are really driven by just, like, what’s gonna be the result, like, this month. Like, or the squatter, not necessarily, like how the company is going to be doing three years from now. So there is also this conflict between long term and short term thinking. So it’s not just one sided.
Melissa Appel
Maybe the incentives aren’t quite aligned between the two teams either.
Dominik Pinter
I mean, we are all on same incentive scheme when it comes to how our compensation works, but that itself probably is not enough.
Melissa Appel
Yeah, so I think we’re going to switch over. So you’re going to do some role playing with Bruce.
Bruce McCarthy
Yeah, what we’ll do is this – Dominik, this was your thought that this would work is, I will pretend to be you. And you will pretend to be your recalcitrant CPO. What’s their name?
Dominik Pinter
Anthony.
Bruce McCarthy
So I’m you Dominik. And Anthony, thanks so much for meeting me after work for a beer.
Dominik Pinter
Yes, that’s what we like to do.
Bruce McCarthy
I appreciate the opportunity for us to just talk one-on-one, just casually outside of the usual like status meetings and without anybody else around, because we need to talk about this misalignment between you and the CRO. But before we get into that, let’s just talk to you and me.
We’ve worked together a long time and the company’s gone through a lot of changes in all that time. We used to grow much slower. Now we’re growing a whole lot faster, and the company’s bigger now, and obviously some things have changed and will continue to change. I guess my question for you is, what do you want out of all of this? What’s your what’s your what does success really look like for you personally, Anthony?
Dominik Pinter
Yes. So for me, few things are very important. I really want to build great products. I really want to build products which help to solve real problems to the client. And I want to work with the people are I admire, and which are collaborative, and which are on the same page with me. That’s really important.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, that’s terrific. I agree with you. I want all of that for the company too. And I think we all do what, what is most frustrating for you right now about trying to to meet those goals, to make great product, to work collaboratively with people who want the same thing that you do.
Dominik Pinter
Well, I would say it really goes down to the people in the commercial team. Because we, for example, make some agreement and they never honor that agreement, or I give them some task to do something and they never deliver on that. So that really what frustrates me, and we really trying, we bringing them the insights from win loss analysis and other stuff, and they just don’t care. They just do care about their individual deals, but not about like the big picture.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay now, to be fair, your incentives and their incentives are not necessarily the same. We do pay them to try to close business this quarter, so it’s kind of natural that they are paying attention to the deal they have on the table right now. What would you want them to do differently?
Dominik Pinter
Well, I would love them to really care more about the big picture, and not just about the deals, but also about the long term success of the company, and really how they can change the things in the midterm or long term to ultimately succeed and not just be focused only on that short term and on individual deals and be really blinded to anything else.
Bruce McCarthy
I think it’s probably unrealistic to be completely honest, to get the average sales person to think longer term than their numbers this quarter or maybe this year at the most. On the other hand, I do expect a certain amount of maturity and responsibility from our CRO who is, after all, like you and me, a member of the executive team, so maybe we can work with the CRO on that level to set up the incentive program for the sales people to be a little bit more longer term. Do you think that would work, Anthony?
Dominik Pinter
I think this could work, for sure. Yeah, why not? Like, let’s give it a try.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, you all saw right through that, didn’t you?
Dominik Pinter
But that would be his real reaction too, right?
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, so just for the sake of argument, suppose that we did ask him. What could go wrong?
Dominik Pinter
What could go wrong? That’s a great question. I think that they would just try to figure out how to make situation more comfortable, meaning the commercial team. And yeah, that would be their primary objective, not really the success of the of the company. So I think that they would be pushing us to make goals so they are easily achievable.
Bruce McCarthy
They want to push the goal down and not have to stretch. But also to make it short term, and also probably not worry about, like, whether company customers churn. They just want to bring in the logos. So all of these are issues, and I think we could work these out. But I think you’re maybe missing a piece of the picture when you talk about the long term success of the company, that depends on growth. And since we hired this new CRO, we are growing faster, and so that’s good for the company and the long term success of the company. And to be honest, I’m worried that if we stay at our old growth rate of 5%, that our competition will just blow right past us and we will be out of business at some point. I know we’ve been doing this a long time, but nothing lasts forever. I think now is our time to grow. What do you think about that?
Dominik Pinter
Well, can I be right now me?
Bruce McCarthy
Yeah, go ahead.
Dominik Pinter
So I think that this is really killer, killer argument. And I think that this could work very well, like, if I present this point like this, yeah, exactly what you said. I think that this could really convince him, not just giving me some sort of a fake agreement.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, so let’s play it out. What would he say? You say what I said. And then he would say…
Dominick Reed
First of all, I do understand that. I understand what is our cost that actually, in order to be able to hire new product people, new engineers, people I do care about, we actually need to get money for that somewhere. So was I too honest? So I really understand that actually this is what we need to do. Let’s work on that together, and let’s figure out how we can really get to better result. So actually, I really get what I need out of that.
Bruce McCarthy
I’m going to hold you to that. And the way I’m going to hold you to that is that I’m going to ask you to go to the CRO and the two of you together to come up with an agreement about how you can cooperate and collaborate on continuing the growth that we’re now experiencing, while protecting the long term, the supportability of what we sell. So his concerns about growth and making the numbers every quarter that I’m going to hold him to, and your concerns about quality, a good product, sustainable, etc. I’m not an expert in sales or product. That’s you guys. I need you guys to work it out together, and I want you to come to me with something you’ve worked out together written down, and we’re going to build that into your objectives, and I’m going to hold you each responsible for it. So don’t write anything down that you don’t mean, because I’m going to measure you on that stuff. Fair enough?
Dominik Pinter
Yes, that’s fair enough. That sounds great.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, what do you think 50% shot having it work? What are you going to do if your CPO doesn’t play ball?
Dominik Pinter
Well then what I would do is to ask why? I mean, I really believe and somebody mentioned that today in that concept of expectations versus agreements and if actually we agree on something, and it’s not me who necessarily comes with that as a CEO, but they would come up with that. I would just try to figure out, okay, so why you couldn’t hold to your commitment, and then if this repeats, then I wouldn’t have any other chance than just make the hard decision.
Bruce McCarthy
So the last bit of role play that we’ll do then here is you told me that there’s another executive that you’re letting go. The way you frame that to this person is, I don’t want that to happen with you, because I see the value you bring to this organization. But the reason that this other person is leaving is that they just really couldn’t buy in to the change we need to make in the company. And that’s enough threat right there, I think, to make clear the level of expectation you’re setting.
Dominik Pinter
Yeah, I agree. And this is the part which I’ve already done, actually. And we’ve done that on that beer. So that scene was over a beer.
Bruce McCarthy
Oh, I didn’t know that part. Cool. Yeah. Thank you, Dominik. Let’s give Dominik a hand. It was great.
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Sales vs. Marketing misalignment: Rute Ablum, Chief Management Officer at PHC Software
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, super now we’re going to bring up Rute, if you’re available.
Melissa Appel
Rute, so nice to have you here. Thank you for joining us. So tell me a little bit about what your role is in the company and the issue you’re having with your stakeholders.
Rute Ablum
Okay, so I am the Chief Management Officer of our company. We run an ERP software. The CEO is right over there. I think the pressure is on because of him. The issue that we’re facing right now is between, no shocker, sales and marketing. I think it resonates with everyone.
Bruce McCarthy
The other one was with sales and product. Now it’s sales and marketing.
Rute Ablum
Yeah, always sales, right? So we kind of restructured our marketing team, and we’re on that process. So we have, like, really young teams, and the sales are sales.
The head of sales and the head of marketing have been with the company for years and years so, and they have, like, a mindset, a sales mindset, because marketing, for a long time in the past, used to be like doing something fun, whatever that means.
We sell ERP, it’s not sexy, so we had to kind of shift, pivot their mindsets. But they still don’t work together. And I think there’s an issue. We have, like, it’s not a new product, it’s our youngest product, cloud native, and we were working with April Dunford that has been here for so many times.
So we got our positioning, we got our pitch, and we needed, this isn’t a specific example. We needed, like a deck for the sales representatives show their clients and test on that. And the marketing team took long enough to have the deck ready so they can use, so the sales team did their own – which was not that right. It was ok, but it wasn’t that right, and we needed to be testing on the right deck and not under the wrong deck. So that’s one thing that happened. And we don’t really get them together and involved and working together. This is only one minor example, because it happens like every day.
Melissa Appel
So, what do you do when something happens like that and you find out about it?
Rute Ablum
I mostly talk to especially my marketing director because she’s under my scope, and the sales people are under another exact scope, and try to have her work together with her peer. But they always answer me, uh, oh, but we are kind of aligned. But our teams, don’t we? They are not aligned. They are not okay. And because we asked them that it looks like like a couples discussion. You didn’t pick up the laundry, and now I’m not picking you know, it’s like that. They always pointing fingers to each other so they don’t really get to a solution. Yeah, that works out.
Melissa Appel
Have you talked with the other executive that owns sales about this problem?
Rute Ablum
Yes.
Melissa Appel
What was that conversation like?
Rute Ablum
He was pretty much aligned with me. I’m not sure that he did what he needed to do.
Melissa Appel
So he agrees there’s a problem?
Rute Ablum
Yeah.
Melissa Appel
But so far, neither of you have sort of figured out how to solve it?
Rute Ablum
Well, I went to talk to his director directly and asked him for help. And please, you are a person, a people person. She’s not, she’s brilliant in terms of marketing, but she’s not a people’s person, and he is, because he’s a sales director. Can you use that so you can figure it out, and you must be aligned with each other so that your teams see that and have no excuse to do their jobs. And it’s starting to I can see some changes right now. They’re thinking about next year, so I think that they’re aligning their strategy and when they need to be together, and aligning their governance as well.
Melissa Appel
But I bet these problems are going to happen again.
Rute Ablum
Yes. Because it’s people.
Melissa Appel
So one thing that that we talked about in the book is workshopping, which I mentioned when we spoke earlier. But the the idea is to have some sort of third party facilitator in the room with these two folks, or maybe even some people on their teams, and you can do a number of different types of workshops, and they have to have a goal, right? Sometimes it’s to set an objective. It sounds like you already have objectives. Sometimes it’s to come up with a plan. Sometimes it’s just to identify a problem.
And so this might be a situation where you can bring one or a few members from sales and from marketing and have a sort of airing of grievances, even, right? I don’t know if anybody gets a Seinfeld rep, but so have have members of both teams come in and say, Hey, we can see that there’s some misalignment here. Everybody can anonymously put on a virtual or a real sticky note like, what do you think some of the problems are right? And if you work through with both the teams to try to figure out what the problems are, it’s possible that each team thinks is a different problem.
So, sometimes you can’t come up with a solution until you figure out what the problem is. And an exercise like this, can also get each team to see things from each other’s perspectives. To say, Oh, I didn’t realize that was a problem for you. And sometimes just kind of talking things out, can help the teams understand each other more. Can help them see each other as kind of real people with real issues. And sometimes that can help bring them together.
Rute Ablum
Okay, that’s a good advice.
Melissa Appel
There’s also another. Okay, we’ll go with this. So it’s possible that one of the problems is that certain decisions don’t necessarily have a named decision maker, right? And so, for example, with the sales deck, the marketing team was coming up with the sales deck, and the sales team is like, it’s too slow. We’re going to make it ourselves. But who actually has the final decision of what the positioning is going to be? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Do they know? Do they agree on who the decision maker is going to be?
Rute Ablum
It’s marketing. I thought that they know.
Melissa Appel
So sometimes making things like that explicit, like, hey, sales team, the marketing team is the one who is deciding on what the positioning is. They will involve you in the process.
We have a model that we call DACI – driver, approver, contributed, informed.
So we have one driver and that might be the head of marketing. But there are a number of contributors, and if they involve sales in that process, then sales feels a little bit of an ownership over it, right? It’s not just like, Oh, we’re we’re waiting for the marketing team. They’re taking so long. It’s like, oh, I actually understand this process now, and I know why it takes so long, and I feel like I’ve contributed, and I’m going to be bought into the outcome, but that’s only if we sort of know whose roles they are. And then for approver, you’d probably be the approver, right? That the marketing team comes up with something they’re going to buy you. You’re like, well, let’s tweak this over here, right? So you’re not necessarily a decision maker, but you have some say. And so if these roles are known and agreed on, sometimes that can help with who’s responsible for what.
Rute Ablum
Good. Thank you.
Melissa Appel
See that do we want to do the role play bit?
We could have her be the salesperson, since she owns marketing. And then you could play essentially her or her proxy on marketing.
Bruce McCarthy
We are working with world renowned expert. I mean, she spoke at BoS, April Dunford on positioning, we’re going to provide you the most incredible sales deck. It’s going to take care of all of your objection handling. It’s going to take care it’s going to position the pricing so you can jack up the pricing as high as you want. You’re going to love it. Just give us six months.
Rute Ablum
Oh, my God, we don’t have six months. The clients are there right now, and I have to meet the numbers.
Bruce McCarthy
Well, look, I appreciate your situation, and now I’m going to try to be a little bit more conciliatory. It is going to take a little while for us to get the complete deck together. But what if we had some of your team involved in putting the deck together? You can sit in on our sessions with April. Part of our discipline is going to be customer interviews. So actually, your sales team would be really helpful in that. And they’ll you’ll be able to extract sort of insights along the way, and if you need to do a few tactical things, because you’ve got a deal in progress at a critical point, then you’d have early access to the material.
Rute Ablum
Can I use it?
Bruce McCarthy
Well, because we follow the DACI process, you would need to get approval for anything you’re going to put in front of a customer. But yes.
Rute Ablum
Okay, then we should do it as early as you as you can, because what I feel is that you don’t have that sense of urgency that we feel because we meet the customers, and your team doesn’t meet the customers, and they should. Because if they’re if they were in the front line, they would feel that sense of urgency. Because Rita, does it take six months? Don’t you think it’s too much?
Bruce McCarthy
Actually, maybe we could pay April less if we made it three months. You have a good point. But I really like your idea, though, that my team should get in front of customers, maybe in addition to your team joining our task force with April to put together the perfect positioning deck. A few of my team could come on sales calls with your people, and we could hear directly from the customer what their concerns are and what we need to be able to answer in the deck. And maybe at the same time, we would gain a greater sense of urgency about being done.
Rute Ablum
That sounds lovely, but in the past, my experience says that your team is not available. That they’re not available to meet customers because they always have some other thing to do.
Bruce McCarthy
Yeah, well, it’s my job to set their priorities. So I think I can help you with that.
Rute Ablum
I’m going to trust you.
Bruce McCarthy
So I want to be able to trust you too. So can we make a deal that I’ll send some of my people, if you’ll send some of your people?
Rute Ablum
Yes, I’m on board with that. As long as as you at the first moment that you see a problem, please talk to me so I can manage my people and do I will do the same with you.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, that’s fair. We just also need agreement on the rules of the road. So if you’re going to put some material, branded material, a deck in front of the customer, you need to run it by marketing first. I’ll give you an SLA. We’ll get it back to you within three days. So if you’ve got a deal and you need you set up a meeting, we just need three days notice. At the same time, maybe you have some requirements for me.
Rute Ablum
Okay, can we do it like in 48 hours?
Bruce McCarthy
48 business hours?
Rute Ablum
Yes.
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, all right. Deal. Deal.
Rute Ablum
It’s a deal. Thank you, Rita.
Bruce McCarthy
Would something like that really work? Would you expect your people to be able to come to a cooperative agreement like that?
Rute Ablum
I think that we should go a little bit further and have things on their diaries. Because when we’re talking about sales people, they’re not driven by having one more meeting or inside meeting, internal meeting with a co fellow, because we need to close business. If we go that road and we commit with each other. Well, let’s touch point in every week so we see that our teams are working together so we can resolve our issues and talk to each other. I think it could be okay.
Bruce McCarthy
Think there’s one other thing that I might say as the marketing person, and that is, that Rute, she is such a pain in my neck. She is really demanding that we fix this problem, and I know she can make trouble for you with your manager too. So let’s team up against our common enemy and see if we can report to her regularly about our cooperation here. How does that sound?
Rute Ablum
That is nice. You are working my roots perception, so it’s good. Okay, terrific.
Rute Ablum
Can I ask a question, though? Do you think that this usually works because the thing that you were saying in the beginning, people commit with each other, but they don’t really commit because they don’t, they don’t do the work.
Bruce McCarthy
I think there’s a couple of things that I would do in addition to the conversation we just had to really make sure. One is I would ask the same question that I asked in the first session, which was, let’s pressure test this. What could possibly go wrong? This is a method for testing for whether you have any doubts you haven’t expressed. Because then maybe if I say what might go wrong? You were like, Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but, and now we have something out on the table. We can talk about.
Another thing I would do that I mentioned in the earlier session is I would try to understand their personal motivations in the situation.
Now here, this is a sales situation. Their motivation is pretty understandable. They have deals they need to make in order to make their numbers. They can’t wait six months or even one month, probably. If they have a deal, they’ve got to go meet with tomorrow. But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there is also personal rivalry between these departments. Maybe these people, I don’t know, they support different football teams. I don’t know. And it might be worth trying to find out what, what personal things are going on there too. Maybe those two need to go out for coffee sometime and just talk about family and hobbies and maybe some things that they do or don’t agree on would turn up.
Melissa Appel
And I think sometimes you need to facilitate that, right? Because you can’t, you said, before you two go make up, and they’re like, I don’t want to do that.
Rute Ablum
So someone should jump in and be there.
Melissa Appel
So I think you and your counterpart in sales, right? And then your head of marketing and the head of sales, maybe the four of you could just kind of have an open, honest conversation, right? Where you’re encouraging the your team members to kind of speak up about. So you and your counterpart, maybe start the conversation and get them involved, because this role play was great, but you weren’t in it, right? It was your head of marketing and the head of sales. So you can’t expect them to, like, want to get along. So sometimes, hopefully you can kind of jump start that conversation in some way, so that they can kind of take it from there. But you told me earlier, you told them to get together so they have a meeting, and they present at each other, and then they go home.
Rute Ablum
So, we actually tried with our HR director, to be there and to facilitate. Sometimes we don’t jump in because there’s too much politics with maybe what my counterparts, the sales C level. Sometimes we use the HR to do that to facilitate.
Melissa Appel
So sometimes, when people say they agree, they don’t really agree. And how do you know that? So you have to kind of dig in a little bit more.
So there’s this illustration here. I’m glad we all agree, and they just have completely different things in their heads. So mining for conflict is a technique that you might use to ask certain questions or do certain activities to confirm that everybody is in alignment, or that everybody is going to do what they say they going to do.
So one of the things you could do is a challenge round, where you go around to everybody, you say, you know, give me a reason why this might not work, or tell me about the biggest risk you see. And so if everybody at the table is forced to come up with something, then you might actually get people’s real objections out there. And it’s not just like you, Why won’t this? Oh, it’ll be fine. But if everybody sort of has to do it together, then it’s kind of a group activity. And some of those risks, you know, are totally valid. It doesn’t mean they don’t they’re not aligned. It just means like, oh, we have to figure out what a mitigation might be for this.
And there’s also a fist of five. So how confident are you that this decision we’ve just made is going to work with zero being no confidence and five being I’m totally confident. You get a whole bunch of fours and a two, and you’re like, Okay, you know, let’s try to figure out why you’re hesitant. And so some of these things can help if you get a yes, but, like, you’re not totally sure if it’s really a yes or you’ve gotten a yes before, and then they go and change their mind later. So these are, these are some things that you can do to kind of confirm that everybody’s actually aligned.
Rute Ablum
Out in the open, not anonymously.
Melissa Appel
So some of these can be out in the open. So if somebody comes back with the two and they don’t want to answer it, right then you can meet up with them later and be like, Okay, I know you didn’t want to say in front of everybody, but like, what’s holding you back? Why? Why are you not confident? So sometimes people don’t want to talk in front of a group, but the things like the challenge round are helpful, because people are more willing to say something if somebody else has already said something.
But I’m also a firm believer in this kind of shuttle diplomacy, right? You go and you talk to people one on one, and they’re much more likely to be honest with you.
Rute Ablum
Nice.
Bruce McCarthy
Thank you very much, Rute.
Rute Ablum
Thank you.
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Visionary CEO pushing AI-led growth: Richard Alberg, Founder at Aptem
Bruce McCarthy
Okay, we have one more person to come up and it’s Richard.
Melissa Appel
Hello. Nice to see you. So why don’t you tell me about what your role is and what the problem that you are dealing with?
Richard Alberg
So, my name is Richard, and I’m CEO of a B2B SaaS company. Probably about three to four years ago, we got to 40 to 50 persons in a business, and had to start addressing some of the chaos of being an entrepreneurial, plucky start up that had achieved now some success, and we started bringing in more organized people, procedure, process, few more industry experts, etc. We’re now over double the size, head count now, and it works well about nice growth rate. Everything’s going okay.
About two years ago, GPT came along, and the opportunity to take those kind of capabilities. And put them in our platform transformed our opportunities. I’m an entrepreneurial CEO. I see the vision. This is how it’s going to change everything be brilliant for us, for our customers, etc, and I feel that quite and in doing so, we represent, typically, 2 to 3% of our customers income they spend in license fees in our platform. I think we can double or triple that.
Quite a few of my colleagues, particularly areas like customer success, implementation, etc, don’t quite buy into that vision. And you know, yeah, yeah, big picture, sure, sure, but the reality of talking to customers about the profound changes that are, in my view, inevitably going to take place. In reality, a lot of people don’t take do change very well, and I feel like pushing in it doesn’t really change.
Melissa Appel
Yeah. Do you have an idea of what kinds of hesitations people have?
Richard Alberg
Painful discussions. The reality that the capabilities that we are providing to our customers essentially will involve job losses. You know, there will be few, which is not a nice thing. Those, you know, efficiency is a nice euphemism. And the difficult conversations about the changes that are necessary, that’s one half of it from a commercial perspective, the difficult discussion looking a customer in the eye and saying, we’re going to charge you double or three times what you’re used to paying, which I feel confident turning around saying yes, but look at the value you’re getting. It’s a fair trade. But I think many of my colleagues find that just a difficult conversation to be had, so I’m trying to turbo charge and really go for more growth. And I think a lot of people are quite comfortable we’re doing okay. Why rock the boat?
Melissa Appel
So do you feel like the people who are having these conversations with the customers are well equipped to have those conversations? Do they have kind of the rationale? Do they have the story behind it?
Richard Alberg
We certainly provided training and workshops. We have the meetings. The problem is, I think when the reality of the one to one conversation that takes place between that team member and a customer, or possibly when those teams have a little chat amongst themselves, they kind of say, well, that’s just exuberance from Richard. But the reality is, yeah, business as usual.
Melissa Appel
So, one thing that I would think about is that different people make decisions in different ways, and different people are persuaded by different things. You’re clearly like a visionary, and that does it for you, that you’re like, oh, that’s going to be amazing. I’m all in on that direction. But some people make decisions based on data, and some people make decisions based on knowing that everybody is in agreement. And some people make decisions on, you know, let’s figure out how to try it and see what happens. And so I think here’s, this is based on the DISC profile, which maybe some people have heard of. And so I think sometimes people tell everybody, we all do it like we tend to try to convince somebody in a way that we would be convinced, right? But some people need something different.
Melissa Appel
So for example, the the conscientiousness profile. They might want some data. They might want to say, Oh, well, actually, we’ve sold it at this higher price to a couple of customers, and they’re actually really happy about it. That might be something that would convince them to do it. And so thinking about, OK, well, who are the people we’re trying to convince and what style are they? So that I know how to message differently to different people. If it’s like a big group thing, you might try all of them. All the reasons and certain things might resonate with certain people.
Richard Alberg
That makes a lot of sense. I have the additional wrinkle that the people that I think are most affected by this are probably two or three levels away from where I sit. If I might, I’ve been told more than once when I get into a conversation with people, you’re stepping on toes. You’re the CEO. When you message someone two levels below saying, can we have a one quick chat? Got five minutes? is a bloody hell. What have I done? What’s good? Yeah, it’s quite hard to have this.
Melissa Appel
Can you delegate this? Can you have your kind of department leads, or even their managers, have these conversations with the individual contributors, kind of figure out what the hesitations are, maybe report back up to you. Here are the hesitations that I see on my team. Here’s the reason why they don’t want to do this and then give those people the tools to to try to convince people.
Richard Alberg
Yes, to an extent. It’s difficult, you know, to an extent, I am an unusual person. You don’t want too many entrepreneurs in a business. You need people who ask data, rational, structured, etc, but you also need someone who’s going to say, Hey, this is where we’re going, and yesterday, please. But it’s trying to bring the other thing is, we’re a remote organization. Since COVID, you’re in the office.
Melissa Appel
Yeah. I wonder what the what the trainings were like, and whether, maybe you got feedback from the trainings on what people thought of it, or, I don’t know.
Richard Alberg
That’s good point.
Melissa Appel
And there’s also what we brought up with root, which is the mining for conflict. So you could get all your VPS or directors, or whoever in a room and say, like, hey, I need you all to figure out a way to convince the people on your team. Here’s some data that I have, here’s some this, like, but I need you to do that, because I can’t do it directly, because they’re scared of me, or whatever, to say, like, make sure all those people are on board. Because you may have somebody in your senior leadership team who’s like, yeah, he’s saying this, but like, I’m not going to force it on my team. And you might find that they’re somebody saying yes, yes, yes, but really they’re like, I’ll just say yes, and then I’m not going to do anything.
Richard Alberg
Yeah, fair part. I mean, at the most senior level, there are some incentives in place that I think create a lot of alignment around the urgency. It is a mechanism. I mean, the very characteristics of the people we’ve hired, I get it. I get why they’re risk averse. I get it why they want to work in a particular way. Just that’s not what I want.
Melissa Appel
Well, and then how do we convince them, based on their particular style of understanding the world, or of making decisions, or of being.
Richard Alberg
That’s a very good point.
Melissa Appel
Should we do some role play?
Bruce McCarthy
Yeah, we can do a little bit. I could play you, and you could play one of your departmental managers who’s just Yes in you to death and nothing’s happening.
Richard Alberg
I’ll do that, but it’s not the managers, it’s the individuals, level below.
Bruce McCarthy
All right, so if I’m you, then I’m going to say we’ve had this change in direction, and we had the big meeting where it was all announced, and you’ve had the workshopping and so on. But to be honest with you, it doesn’t feel like you’re following through. It feels like you’re not completely on board. And I’m not here to tell you that you’re fired. Actually, we need you. You’re a valuable member of this team, and I want to understand what’s going on. I’m genuinely curious, because it’s important to me that we come to some understanding. So I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about what your job is day to day, what success looks like to you, and if any of what we’ve been talking about presents you with some obstacles that we can work on.
Richard Alberg
So I totally agree with everything we’re doing. I think it’s brilliant. I agree with, I think it’s all great, but my job is day to day, you’re helping our customers deal with today’s issues, and today they have all sorts of pressing problems, and that’s what they’re talking to me about, and not necessarily talking about where they’re going, not that I disagree about where it’s going to go. Just right now, that’s not today’s priority.
Bruce McCarthy
So you’re saying, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the kinds of things that we talked about in the workshopping and so on are just not on the mind of the customer today? They’ve got other things that are more immediate? And you’re, you’re helping them with those things?
Richard Alberg
Correct, and I think that given a number of problems, they’ve got additional change is the last thing they need. They don’t have the bandwidth to even more change.
Bruce McCarthy
But what would happen to those customers if change came to their doorstep and they were unprepared. What if their competition made the kind of changes that you’re going to have to help them through, instead of them or before them, and their business started to suffer as a result?
Richard Alberg
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Bruce McCarthy
I’m suggesting that maybe you could proactively reach out to some of the customers who are likely to be affected by this change in the world and help them make plans ahead of that change, which we can help them with. That’s what our solution does, right? Yeah, whatever. If they’re calling you up because they’ve got an emergency and they need something fixed right now, of course you’re going to help them with that, but while you’re on the call with them, you could say, and next week or next month, could we have a talk about the longer term?
Richard Alberg
I agree that’s good. I mean, I am slightly reluctant about conversations that essentially involve people’s jobs. These are people I get on with. Almost they’re almost friends. Some of them are friends and we are talking about their jobs.
Bruce McCarthy
Right, but is it doing them a favor to not talk about something that’s going to come up anyway.
Richard Alberg
You’re correct.
Bruce McCarthy
I totally respect that. It’s hard to be the bearer of bad tidings, and maybe some of them, this hasn’t occurred to them at all, and so they may even be shocked. But the doctor doesn’t just tell you all good news, right? The doctor tells you what you need to know for your health, and you still go. Actually, lots of people don’t go because they’re afraid of hearing bad news.
Richard Alberg
I don’t know whether an individual would at this point look for Plan B as an excuse. As in what if the technology isn’t as good as everyone says?
Bruce McCarthy
Yeah. So they might throw out doubts, right? So now this is good. They are starting to be cut because you’ve made a compelling argument that it is actually in their customers best interest for them to have this con, this admittedly uncomfortable conversation with them. They’ll look for other excuses. And so you can actually invite them to say, This is great. This is useful information about the concerns that you believe the customer will have, because you’re probably right about all of them. Give me more. I want to make a list, and I want us to de risk all of those things, we’ll take them to the product team, we’ll take them to the marketing and the rest of the support team, and we’ll work out a way to allay their concerns.
Richard Alberg
I really like, by the way, that approach of the customer’s interests is to face up to the reality, right? I think that’s for very customer focused personnel who are very aligned to our customers and their needs, that I think will resonate. I like that.
Bruce McCarthy
And I really want you to have a conversation with Davina, because she had just this problem with a customer. She foresaw that this customer was probably in the next six to 18 months, going to run into this problem of automation. Maybe causing the need for layoffs, but it’s a competitive necessity, and so she bit the bullet and had the conversation with the customer and the customer, it took them a little while to absorb it, but they came back and they said, Thank you so much, Davina for for helping us to see what we needed to do. Yeah, it was painful, but the company’s in a much better place.
Richard Alberg
Now I have one other concern. Is it right that we should charge them so much more for this. Why are we doing that?
Bruce McCarthy
Good question. Everything we’ve always done has been in return for value proportionately. We don’t charge them more than our product is worth. We don’t charge them more than they are seeing a return on investment for. So if we charge them x, and they get 10x and we triple that to 30x is it so bad that we charge them three times as much if they’re getting still getting 10x the total? Really, it’s just resetting the playing field.
Now, that would work with somebody who’s good with sort of theory and math and so on. That wouldn’t necessarily work with somebody who’s more emotionally driven, because they might say, Well, yeah, but triple the price. I mean, they’re just going to be shocked. They’re going, I’ll be I’m embarrassed to even bring it up, right?
So again, you might say, All right, we’re going to help you with an ROI calculator. Also, we’re going to help you with a transition plan. So if you don’t really want to go to the advanced version of the product that costs more or not right away or there are tears or something, we’ll give them choice. We’ll say you can keep it the way it was, or you can go to the advanced and here’s all the reasons, here’s all the return on investment you’re going to get, but you still have the old option if you want it to make them feel like they’re in some control. And just one more thing, and then maybe, maybe there’s also a salesperson who has been successful in getting the customer to upgrade.
Melissa Appel
Can I just say one more thing? So one other idea is you want to reward your customers for being loyal customers. And you might charge 3x for a new customer, but maybe for an existing customer, you tell them the price is going to be 3x but you’re giving them something and only charging them one and a half x for the next year, or something like that. So they feel like they’re getting a benefit. And it’s better than nothing. Because right now they’re just not charging them anymore.
So you could do something like that, where it might ease the fears of the people selling it and get you a little bit more and make your customers happy, like kind of getting creative with how you might meet them halfway.
Richard Alberg
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Bruce McCarthy
Thank you, Richard.
Bruce McCarthy, Product Culture
Bruce and his team help companies like NewStore, Camunda, hyperexponential, Socure, and Toast achieve their product visions through Advising, Accelerator programs, and the Product Culture Community. Bruce founded Product Culture in 2017. He literally wrote the book on roadmapping: Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty. His next book, Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders, was just released. He is President Emeritus of the Boston Product Management Association and a head judge at the annual Harvard Business School New Venture Competition.
Website: www.productculture.org
Nano-letter: www.productculture.org/one-thing
Book: Product Roadmaps Relaunched
Book: Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders
Twitter: @d8a_driven
Instagram: Productculture
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/brucemccarthy/
Melissa Appel, Product Culture
Melissa Appel coaches product management leaders, helping them build and manage effective teams and improve stakeholder relationships. She previously spent 20 years in product management at companies of various sizes and stages. She has worked in industries such as manufacturing, energy conservation, food sustainability, and supply chain. She recently co-wrote a book with Bruce McCarthy called Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/melappel/
Consulting: www.productculture.com
Book on Amazon: Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders
Book website: alignedthebook.com
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