Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist of Gong, joined Tom Alaimo, GM of Pavilion’s Associate community, for an AMA covering doing more with less, measuring team efficiency, and more.
Continue scrolling to read more, or watch the recording here.
Please be aware that the event recap covers the top 3 questions covered and does not provide a full transcript but presents condensed and refined responses for clarity and conciseness.
When you are asked to do more with less, it’s best to understand the true intention of the ask. You might often find that you’re really being asked to do better with less.
Say you ran 20 different programs and channels last year, but this year you have less budget to work with. Don’t try and pull off the same 20 channels and at the same time, attempt to explore new ones because it’s nearly impossible to execute that with less.
It’s wiser to review your existing 20 programs and channels to see which are yielding 80% or more of the pipeline, revenue, or whatever KPI you need to focus on. Put everything else on hold and then put all of your attention on how to reap more from your top-performing programs/channels.
Marketing team efficiency can be measured by dividing the resources invested last quarter by the pipeline created this quarter. Unless you a very transactional business, there is a natural lag between your investment and the outcome. Then you can break down your analysis further by categorizing expenses into payroll and programs.
But how do you improve team efficiency? One classic efficiency killer is too many meetings. And since many of us are remote or hybrid, we have meetings about everything all the time because we don't have those water cooler talks that allow us to discuss projects or challenges in passing.
A good exercise is to clear all recurring meetings and set them up from scratch. You’ll often find that you didn't need all of the previously scheduled meetings, which will allow you to get better at working asynchronously. This practice is also very kind to employees working across different time zones by removing meetings that may happen outside of work hours for some participants.
Something that Gong prides itself on is having practiced good rigor around planning. The way they do planning can be described as a “W”. Think of top-down and bottom-up.
So the first side of the W means that the executive team comes with numeric goals or a draft of the numeric goals for the different functions to operationalize. And then for the second part of the “W”, then marketing, sales, customer success, etc, draft what activities and resources are needed to reach that goal.
A good exercise to try, even if you only do it partially, is “zero-based planning.” Zero-based planning means that you start with a blank spreadsheet, which can be scary and difficult. This ensures that you are looking at your budget with a fresh perspective and that you are not budgeting for anything that has become obsolete from last year. You can probably shout your top three channels in the middle of the night, but ask you build this budget from scratch and you can’t remember your eighth or ninth channel, it's probably not contributing enough that you need or should continue to invest in it.