Episode #275:

Tracy Hansen, Chief Marketing Officer at SBI, The Growth Advisory, explains why executive alignment is the top barrier to sustainable growth. She describes how leadership teams often approach the same problem from different functional lenses. She shares why this creates friction across departments and slows execution. She also outlines practical ways leaders can align around shared outcomes and operate as one team.

“Alignment is possible. It is not an impossible goal. It takes time, it takes trust, it takes accountability, and it takes clarity. Alignment is absolutely possible, and everybody should be striving to achieve it.” – Tracy Hansen

In this conversation, Tracy explains why executive alignment is the most overlooked barrier to revenue growth. She outlines how functional thinking creates friction, why leadership teams unintentionally work against each other, and how structured alignment around shared outcomes improves execution speed, decision-making, and long-term growth performance across the organization.

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[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and I have to tell you, I am more personally excited about the conversation we are about to have here with Tracy Hansen than I have been in a long time. Because we are going to take on some of the biggest challenges, as B2B C-suite executives, we have to create long-term, sustainable growth in the business.

[00:00:29] Steve MacDonald: We are going to not only identify what those challenges are, why they are there, but maybe a few tips on what we could be doing, because that is exactly what Tracy does every single day. In fact, you have spent the last five years specifically working with hundreds of companies, B2B companies, on their go-to-market strategy, right?

[00:00:49] Steve MacDonald: You are also a three-time B2B CMO. You have been a former president of a company, so you have held executive positions where you have not just been a consultant. You have been responsible. You have been accountable, right? So the two sides of that table, I think, are very important. You are also a little bit of an adventure junkie.

[00:01:09] Steve MacDonald: You are traveling, you have gone to all the 50 states, all the national parks. You are now hitting every single continent. But you do everything from snowmobiling to hiking to rock climbing in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, but it gave you a lot of time to reflect, you broke both feet and spent months in bed this last year. Please tell us a bit more about Tracy and your background, and then we will dig right in.

[00:01:33] Tracy Hansen: So nice to be here, and I am delighted to be with you today. Indeed, I broke both my feet, but I will tell you that story after I share a little bit about my role as a partner at SBI. So I have been at SBI Growth Advisory for about five years. Before that, I was a client of theirs, and before that, I was on their advisory board. I have seen it from all different angles, and having been an operator gives me a very strong perspective about what it means to actually take go-to-market strategies and implement them. So it has been fantastic.

[00:02:02] Tracy Hansen: SBI has been around for about 20 years. We focus on helping companies make their number. That can take any number of different approaches, and whether it is a small $20 million company all the way up to a $6 billion, $7 billion company, we have seen it all, and I am delighted to share some of the big learnings I have had and to talk to you about the research.

[00:02:24] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, we are going to jump right in there, because you and I first started talking, we realized that we both had a lot of the same passions about going to market, and what are the biggest challenges? It came out of working with hundreds and hundreds of B2B organizations, and I interviewed on this podcast. We are getting ready to conduct 300 interviews with B2B C-suite executives within a month.

[00:02:49] Steve MacDonald: I have asked the last hundred plus the question on what you feel, for a B2B ABM go-to-market strategy, what do you think are the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth? We are going to talk about the top three. I am going to preface it as one thing. They are all internal challenges.

[00:03:09] Steve MacDonald: In fact, out of the top 10 challenges, nine out of the 10 were 100 percent internal or internal-external hybrid. But step number one to addressing them was internal. So, however we want to politically say it, we are our own greatest barrier to long-term sustainable growth.

[00:03:31] Steve MacDonald: Right?

[00:03:32] Tracy Hansen: And we see it over and over again.

[00:03:34] Steve MacDonald: Every time. So I want to take the number one. This was 72 percent of the people I talked to. The C-suite executives said that internal alignment was the number one challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth, and I would love to just hear from your experience and wisdom about that. How do you frame it? How do you think about solving it?

[00:03:52] Tracy Hansen: Absolutely. So when we go into client businesses, we often are given the problem. They tell us this is the problem, whether it is that we do not have the right quota, we do not have the right top of funnel, we are missing territory alignment, or the quotas are wrong. Whatever challenge they give to us, one of the very first things we do is ask the executive team to take an alignment study. It is very quick, but it allows us to understand across the C-suite whether they are seeing things the same way. Similar to the results you see, we see the exact same thing.

[00:04:24] Tracy Hansen: 72 to 74 percent of companies are not aligned across the C-suite. It is not that they are not thinking along the same lines; it is often that they are not thinking about the same way to approach it, or they are looking at it through their own lens. As CFO, I am looking at it from a finance perspective. If I am a CRO, I am looking at it through a sales perspective, and so on down the C-suite. So when they come to the table with their point of view, their metrics, their data, and they are trying to have a conversation about it, they are talking about the same problem, but they are not talking about it from a holistic or company viewpoint, which then creates misalignment.

[00:05:05] Tracy Hansen: Even though they can all nod their head at the table, when they go back to their respective functions, they are still solving for their function, which then creates even more misalignment deeper into the organization. It is almost universal.

[00:05:19] Steve MacDonald: So you said a number of things that were really important there, but you nodded to the fact that you leave the meeting, you go back, and we are all in our own different departments. If we are heads of sales with the CRO, we most likely have a short-term quota over our heads. If we are the CMO, we are looking for long-term sustainability of the business and the brand, which is a trust mark, and building that, as well as short pipeline development. If I am the CPO, I am looking at the product I am creating and what it will do, and I am listening to sales.

[00:05:49] Steve MacDonald: They are saying, if we could just have this, we could just have this. Everybody has their own point of view. How do we bring it together? Because I know you have worked on solving alignment problems and not just identifying them. Give us tips on how, if I am the CEO or anybody in the C-suite, we can solve this. How do we solve this challenge, this problem?

[00:06:08] Tracy Hansen: Oh, I am going to share a couple of ideas, and I hope that we will get some comments from the listeners here who might add to them. But one of the things that is super important, especially at the CEO level, is to treat the team, to treat the executive team like a team, not a collection of function heads.

[00:06:27] Tracy Hansen: As soon as everybody comes to the table thinking specifically about their function versus thinking about it as a team and as a collective group trying to solve for the business problem, you end up with this misalignment problem. Treat the team like a team, not function heads, and as a team member come to the table as a team member, not a function head.

[00:06:50] Tracy Hansen: It does not mean that you do not have expertise in your function. You absolutely do. The team analogy plays out here. Everybody knows their role, but the best teams know how to interoperate together and what needs to happen as a collective. The second thing, Steve, that we recommend and we often help our companies implement are building management operating systems, not cadences of meetings.

[00:07:14] Tracy Hansen: All too frequently, we will go into the company, and they will say, well, we meet once a month and we have these weekly get-togethers and so forth. That is interesting. But a well-built system defines how priorities are set, how decisions are made, where accountability lies, and where leaders need to scale to drive the business forward.

[00:07:35] Tracy Hansen: So think less about meeting cadence and more about operating systems. And then the third thing that is really interesting, and I am super excited, I am going onsite to a client next week who has this exact problem. The leadership team is actually bringing in the extended leaders into this conversation.

[00:07:54] Tracy Hansen: The real influence on how things get executed in the field and in different departments happens one or two levels down. So by embracing more than just the six or seven C-suite executives into conversations, but pulling in the expertise and the thinking of the extended leadership team can broaden and deepen alignment faster than almost anything else.

[00:08:18] Steve MacDonald: So first off, I love the way that you started there, the team analogy. We have heard it in many applications, but here is what I took away from it. I am not like the biggest sports fan or anything, but it made me think of the C-suite is not like a football team. It is not 40, 50, 70, 80 people on the roster. The C-suite team is usually five to six members. It made me think of the NBA, right?

[00:08:38] Steve MacDonald: Where somebody is the guard, somebody is the center, somebody is the forward, they have very defined roles, but if they are not playing well together, that is why assists are one of the key stats. How do you get the team to assist each other? Because without that, it won’t be a team.

[00:08:58] Tracy Hansen: That is a great question and a million dollar question, and actually I think it comes up with one of the other things we are going to talk about, and that is building trust. Trust often comes with the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand their perspective. It is the ability to see beyond your own NVOs and own KPIs to know how your activities will affect downstream the next person.

[00:09:23] Tracy Hansen: You actually said something that clicks for me and I see all the time as well. Sales is working on a quarterly goal. Marketing activities typically take months, quarters, even years to have impact, and if you are not able to see both of those, and you have expectations about in-quarter activities from a team that takes months to stand something up, even with AI, it still takes time for things to resonate in market, you are not going to have trust and you are not going to have alignment. So being able to understand what role each person has, the constraints they are working in, and how your expectations can be best met and served by that other person is incredibly powerful in creating team alignment and driving team behavior.

[00:10:12] Tracy Hansen: I’m terrible with basketball, so I can’t, I don’t know all the positions. I do know baseball really well, so if you’ll award me that, I know that when you’re running certain plays, the first baseman can cover second base, or the shortstop can cover second base. The pitcher can cover the catcher because they know the mechanics of what needs to be done in each position, practice for it, and understand it.

[00:10:37] Tracy Hansen: And that’s what I think about what needs to happen at the C-Suite to gain alignment. I need to understand, as a CMO, the constraints, pressures, and challenges my CRO is facing, and likewise, the CRO-to-CMO.

[00:10:51] Tracy Hansen: Oftentimes, Steve, I see it work really well when companies are growing fast and they’re executing well. Everybody forgives everything. But when you’re missing your number, when we’re not sure why things aren’t going as smoothly as we thought they would, people start to demand more from others when they can’t possibly deliver it. So, clarity upfront, clear expectation setting, understanding what the other person’s constraints are. It are the things that I would suggest are super critical.

[00:11:21] Steve MacDonald: So you told me a short story before we started recording about a CFO that you had just met with. Not going to have to name any names or anything like that, but what was the issue that the CFO brought up to you that eroded alignment, like very quickly, very easily?

[00:11:37] Tracy Hansen: Yeah. Super great company and I excited to be working with them. They have clear goals and objectives, and they are super attracted to the shiny object. So even when they think they all know what they’re going to go do, something pops up, a new product feature, a company that’s not necessarily in their ideal customer profile set, a new business opportunity that hadn’t even existed six months ago when they came up with their annual strategy.

[00:12:03] Tracy Hansen: The team will student body right to whatever that shiny object is, leaving their agreed upon strategy in the dust, and then when they realize that shiny object maybe didn’t quite work out the way they thought it was, they come back to their strategy, but now they’re that much further delayed, and in the process that created chaos and confusion with the execution teams below them.

[00:12:26] Tracy Hansen: So it is one of the things that we’re going to be talking about next week. We’re bringing in the whole group, including the extended leaders I mentioned, to address this problem directly. What are the mechanics that we can put in place to avoid chasing the shiny object as a complete company, while staying focused on the agreed upon strategy, leaving room for new opportunities, leaving room for things that just simply didn’t exist.

[00:12:53] Steve MacDonald: Oh, not the shiny object. We’ve all, we’ve all chased that, right? I have to ask this question. Where does accountability come into the picture in terms of gaining and keeping and despite shiny objects and all the other things, our own POVs and mandates in our own departments, where does accountability come into this, and who holds that accountability?

[00:13:19] Tracy Hansen: I think each leader holds some level of accountability, but at the end of the day, it is the CEO who has the ultimate accountability. It sounds very easy. So a CEO is the general manager, the coach, the person that is making sure that every player knows where they need to be at all times. The designing for a team, not just assembling a group of people is what I see most successful CEOs doing.

[00:13:46] Tracy Hansen: So, when CEOs are thinking about, I need a team of people who can operate together, who can work together, who can mediate any challenges that may present themselves amongst the team members, it’s a game changer. It is literally saying instead of, I’m hiring that person for that skill and I’m hiring that person for that skill. I’m hiring these people because together we are better and can operate as one. At the end of the day, who’s accountable to me? It’s the CEO or president, whatever that title is for a particular business.

[00:14:20] Tracy Hansen: Below the CEO though, each member has to be accountable for their KPIs for driving the outcomes that they’ve agreed to, but they first need to be aligned to driving the outcomes for the business and then their function. Accountability when done that way, results in transformative companies.

[00:14:40] Steve MacDonald: Well, I, I think we could probably spend two hours on the alignment topic here, but I want to move on because there are the top three, they’re so important. So another one that came out that you live with every single day too. Number two challenge that the C-Suite executive voice was a lack of deep understanding of the voice of the customer, and part of the reason why it came out as the number two is that by having a sales function and a customer success function and product, talking to customers, we’re talking to them. Those aren’t siloed, and somehow they magically roll up into the true understanding, and so absolutely we’re customer-first. We’re customer driven, right? But McKinsey came out with a study a few years back and said that only 15 percent of companies actually execute well on a voice-of-customer program.

[00:15:30] Steve MacDonald: Voice of the customer can be one of the most important ways that we align, because that’s the North Star, that’s the highest voice of authority in the business. How do you see the challenge of voice of the customer impact on the business, and how do we solve for that? How do we actually feel like we actually have the true voice of the customer and execute on it? That’s a big question.

[00:15:54] Tracy Hansen: If we could spend two hours talking about alignment, we could probably talk four hours about voice of customer. All right, so this is another thing that we see all the time, and we’re often called in to assist with the voice of customer. The thing about the voice of the customer is, and McKinsey’s, I think they nailed the research there, it’s often done as a research project by a group that is the most disconnected from the strategy of the business, right?

[00:16:21] Tracy Hansen: It’s NPS dashboards, it’s quick usability studies on one feature because of somebody’s pet project, right? It’s not a strategic asset that the company can use to drive the overall business approach. Okay, so let me break this down. What I see is four things that the best companies do. The first one is executives own the customer conversation directly. They don’t outsource customer conversations to a group in the organization. They’re out there talking to the customer, living in and understanding what their customers are experiencing, and it raises the bar and for the culture of a company when the whole company sees the CEO and the CRO and the CMO out in front of customers.

[00:17:13] Tracy Hansen: I can’t tell you see how many SKOs I’ve been to, SPO sales kickoff meetings I’ve been to where no customer is invited to go on stage and talk about their experience with the brand. Bringing the customer in the conversation just isn’t part of the DNA of so many companies. There’s one thing for you. Get your next SKO, get your customer on stage, talking about their experiences with you.

[00:17:38] Tracy Hansen: The next thing is win loss input is often treated as a sales function, but when you do and structure win loss conversations in an effective way, what you hear, what you learn is why somebody chose you. What was it about your message, your product, their interactions with your sales force during their customer buying journey becomes really interesting and insightful data for the team to act on. It’s, yes, it’s in celebration if you win, but more importantly, the nuggets of information about the why become critical data sets for you to act upon. Equally important, the loss data. Why did you lose? Why did they pick the competitor? There are so many things that can come out of that. It’s not an afterthought. It’s not a nice to have, it’s an integral part in creating a voice of customer as a input to what you’re trying to do.

[00:18:34] Tracy Hansen: The other thing that I see the best company is doing is moving from satisfaction metrics to buying behavior signals. NPS tells you what a customer feels, typically in the context of a customer interaction, such as a support ticket. It doesn’t tell you why they expanded their purchases with you, why they churned their purchases with you, and it doesn’t tell you how you can actually correlate their experiences to NRR growth, net retention growth. There’s something about just moving away from “I’m satisfied with you” to really understanding their behavior. That changes how voice of customer can drive change in the organization.

[00:19:16] Tracy Hansen: And then the last thing that I think people need to think about as voice of customer is change as voice of customer, as a change management tool. When you are driving the conversation and you’re listening to what the customer is doing, it can help the company determine, do we need to change our product? Do we need to change our customer support? Do we need to change our marketing and messaging or being told, the customer is telling me this versus the leadership wants me to change it. Using voice of customer as a tool to make changes to your strategy, to your company direction is very powerful. So I’ll stop there. Those are the four things I see the best companies.

[00:19:58] Steve MacDonald: As you can tell, I’m writing down notes and I got the transcript. I’m so excited about this. So, a couple of things. First off, underpinning all of this is a dedication to gathering the voice of the customer. I’ll give you an example. I talk to a lot of CMOs when they come onto a new job, almost all of them, they pick up the phone, they do a Zoom call and they’ll say, hey, I’m the new CMO here. It’s not a sales conversation. I’m literally just trying to learn, and they’ll learn and they’ll learn and they’ll learn and then they will stop, and then they don’t do it anymore. Why?

[00:20:36] Steve MacDonald: They’re the chief marketing officer. They got 128 percent of what they can do in any day to do. The thing that is going to be critical to answering that board question that came in, the mandate the CEO gave you, alignment with the CRO, building the right team, you name it, right? We have so much to do whatever C-Suite position, so we don’t do it.

[00:21:00] Steve MacDonald: I didn’t mean to make this like a sports analogy thing, but remember the tagline from Nike, just do it? It has to rise to the level, just like alignment. Everything you were saying there has to rise to the level of importance is what I’m taking away from the conversation here. When you’re laying out your strategic plan, alignment has to be one of the top points. How are we going to guarantee it? How are we really going to get a true, deep understanding of the voice of the customer.

[00:21:28] Steve MacDonald: If we’re not talking about these two things in our strategic. What’s our plan for next year? How are we on track? If those aren’t part of the conversation, we’ve already lost the war on our strategic plan. Okay. That was one of my biggest takeaways from there.

[00:21:42] Tracy Hansen: Something that you said struck me, and I feel it, and I know what’s happening. I’m a new CMO. I’ve done this, like I’ve literally done it. I want to talk to as many customers as I can. The problem I had with myself, and what I’ve seen my peers do, is we’re doing it for us. We’re doing it for, I’m new to my job, and I want to understand the customer. I want to make sure I know what to build into my 90 day, six month plan. That’s not voice of the customer, that’s me going to talk to some people to learn something.

[00:22:14] Tracy Hansen: Voice of the customer has to be a structured, dedicated program that the company invests in. It being able to come into a board meeting and really share to the investors and to the business leaders what is happening on the street with our customers that’s creating growth, churn, it could even be causing retention issues with our own employees, as the employees have some kind of disconnect with what’s happening with the customers. We see that all the time too.

[00:22:43] Tracy Hansen: CMOs who are listening, I think that’s great. Keep doing that. Go learn as much as you can about the customer, but that’s not voice of the customer. That voice of the customer is a strategic asset for a business. That’s what I think you and I are talking about when we talk about it being the second most important thing for businesses to be thinking about.

[00:23:01] Steve MacDonald: So, I have to say this. You and I were talking about this, I loaded up a hundred plus different transcripts of C-Suite executives that were talking about their top two challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth, put it in a Claude project, and started doing the analysis. I asked it a couple of questions, and I said, come at this please from the point of view of the top ABM experts in the industry, and I gave some names, and I said, act as if you were the chief strategy officer at Sixsense or Demandbase. Like really evaluate this.

[00:23:32] Steve MacDonald: One of the things that came out of it around voice of the customer, what they called insight decay. We can learn everything that you’re talking about here. Those CMO conversations, the CAB calls, the NPS surveys do, it is a data point. The transcripts that come out of Gong or some from sales conversations. What happens is lots of times it lives in our heads. It might even make it into a strategy deck. But then what happens, where is it all together? We learned a long time ago that digital transformation was, Deloitte called it The Difference Between the business of today and tomorrow. Today, we still deal with siloed, fragmented data, and even when we bring it together, if it’s not brought together in the right way, it decays over time.

[00:24:19] Steve MacDonald: Those insights are what drives the change management. Those insights are what drive strategic decision-making. They drive product development, they drive our entire unique go to market strategy. How do we not lose, once we do this, once we invest in this, how do we not lose it?

[00:24:40] Tracy Hansen: So brilliant. The insight decay is real. Actually, one of the other things I’ve seen is that reflecting back on a client that I worked with where we did a voice of the customer initiative to get the program going, and the executives didn’t like what we came back with. They didn’t like what their customers were saying. We collect a lot of information and we don’t necessarily know what to do with it because we don’t have to structure it and analyze it and put it forward to that team that can make the decisions around what next, or we don’t like what the customer says, ’cause it flies in the face of what we think we should be going to do, and that we’re not open to having challenging, critical conversations that might change the strategic direction of the company.

[00:25:23] Tracy Hansen: So the voice of the customer done right should cause a little stress. It should cause a conversation to occur that might make people uncomfortable, but that uncomfortable conversation could unlock something that is completely brand new to the market that could blow the top off of whatever numbers you’re trying to reach, because you’ve made a breakthrough that you would never have thought of by yourself.

[00:25:51] Tracy Hansen: So a voice of the customer is super interesting. Insight decay, in my opinion, comes from, I have too much and I don’t know what to do with it, or I got it and I don’t like it, so I’m going to ignore it. If you had both of those things, imagine what you would find.

[00:26:07] Steve MacDonald: You know, I got to tell you, if we’re not interested in the good, the bad, and the ugly and understand what that means and what we need to do about it. We all have great ideas about moving our company forward. The last thing that we want to hear is that may not be the right way to go. That we may need to rethink what we’re doing.

[00:26:27] Tracy Hansen: You can listen to it. You can have the critical conversation. You might not change your mind, you might not change the direction of your company, but at least you’ve really thought through that data. I encourage everybody to push on that. Let’s actually look at this information and have it tell us what we can’t see.

[00:26:41] Steve MacDonald: Yes. Oh, I love it. Okay. We spent a lot of time talking. There’s one area that I still really want to make sure we at least touch on here: the third challenge that came out of the report was that trust, both internally and externally, was among the top three challenges to creating long-term sustainable growth. What does trust mean to you and why do you think that was in the top three?

[00:27:06] Tracy Hansen: That’s not fair because I asked you that question earlier.

[00:27:09] Steve MacDonald: Right back at you.

[00:27:15] Tracy Hansen: So what trust means to me is really understanding where the other person is coming from and believing that they understand me. Trust is often freely given but quickly lost, and brands, people, all of us need to understand that trust is a mechanism to drive activity, alignment, so quickly.

[00:27:39] Tracy Hansen: The more trust you have, both in the process and the people and the goal, the quicker everybody can move together towards whatever the outcome is. Trust to me is the absolute belief that we’re all in it together, and that is internal, so across that C-suite, also externally with my clients, them with us, me with the brands I choose to do business with. There is a belief that I know what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, and that you’re going to do it to the best of your ability to support our common goals.

[00:28:13] Steve MacDonald: That’s not usually a sales conversation where you’re being sold to. There’s a reason why, and a lack of trust, and I always say this stat, which came out of the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer. 32,000 respondents worldwide, 68 percent of them thought that business leaders, like you and I, are being intentionally misleading. That is about the opposite of trust. Sales conversations have to be trust building conversations. We deliver and go back and forth on contracts and the contract negotiations and contract renewals, that’s part of trust. Everything that we do, our brands are trust marks, we learned that in Marketing 101 in the first year of college, if that’s what we were doing.

[00:29:00] Steve MacDonald: I love what you’re doing here is you’re framing it as, I trust that you have my better interest in mind and we’re in this together and we’re going to figure it out. We are collectively, internally and externally, some pretty smart people, and when we all put our heads together, we’re going to do great things. That’s kind of my takeaway.

[00:29:20] Steve MacDonald: I would like to ask you a one minute takeaway, which is we just covered so much territory here, so much territory. There’s an entire series that comes out of this and we only tackled the top three of the top 10 challenges. But if there was one thing that you wanted the C-Suite executives that will be consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation, if nothing else, what would that be?

[00:29:46] Tracy Hansen: Oh man, Steve, one thing for this whole conversation. Alignment is possible. Alignment is possible. It is not an impossible goal. It takes time, it takes trust, it takes accountability, and it takes clarity. Alignment is absolutely possible and everybody should be striving to achieve it.

[00:30:09] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you that I’m so excited about this conversation. The mission of this podcast was to bring C-Suite executive perspectives and insights and experiences together all around B2B ABM, and how do we learn from each other. How do we glom that idea, this idea, and that idea, and how do we put them together and learn from each other? If we can do that, that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats.

[00:30:32] Steve MacDonald: You were a super critical part of that rising tide today, and I just wanted to say thank you for coming on. You were amazing.

[00:30:40] Tracy Hansen: It’s been fantastic. I hope that your listeners get some nugget out of this and I hope that we get a chance to talk again.