Chapter 3

Moats & Drawbridges, The Current State of Sharing (don’t get your hopes up)

Chapter 3

Moats & Drawbridges, The Current State of Sharing

(don’t get your hopes up)

I’ve been working on this book, this concept, since 2017 when I was CMO for a brilliant SMB tech consultancy, SIG, in Amsterdam. I’ve known “The Current State of Sharing” was a challenge for some time, and the quarantined summer of 2020 seemed like the perfect time to conduct a little research to see what others are experiencing as well.

I asked Product and Marketing leaders in Europe and the U.S. to share their perspective on how well Product, Marketing, Sales, and Success teams shared insights with each other.

We covered as much as possible in 20–30 minutes. Here’s a summation of the study.

Study Question: What kind of insight sharing is happening between functional areas (Product, Marketing, Sales, and Success)?

Interviewees - B2B Marketing and Product Leaders

Interviews: 18 companies encompassing Fortune 100 - 4, F500 - 5, F1000 - 3, Medium/Private 3, Small 3

GEO Remit (interviewees sat in or responsible for) 16 - Europe and/or Global, 2 - exclusively North America

tl;dr | With very few exceptions, there isn't regular insight mining, sharing, or collaboration between functional areas. The human skill/behavior is under-developed, nor are there programs or tools to support.

"Where are we supposed to share, Maureen? Teams, Slack, Confluence, Chatter, attach to WebEx, Pendo...?"

Results:

First, The Outliers (Huge props here for the outliers!):

One F100 I spoke to has a culture of data sharing and collaborating as a part of every meeting, all shared beforehand. The data is discussed, collaborated on, and compared to other data brought from outside the team/functional area.

They do not have a system for structuring, or tools for sharing. It sounds like each team has a repository, and the repository is transparent and open to anyone who wants to access it.

For a different F100, I interviewed leaders of three different divisions. One of the divisions does an exceptional job sharing and collaborating on insights across all four functional areas. The interviewee told me that this was the result of four years of hard work to get to where they are today. It’s clear that this initiative has delivered material ROI back to the business in terms of Product Development, CX, and agile refinement of both marketing and sales plays.

I spoke to leaders in two other divisions of this company where little to no insight sharing is happening between functional areas. How can this be? Well, these are huge multi-nationals; as most of us have experienced with multi-nationals, there might as well be black holes or force fields between functional areas, divisions, and countries. Not to mention, as Box CEO Aaron Levie says, “ There are way too many manual processes in business .” Manual processes will be the death of us.

One of the F500 companies has excellent data and insight sharing on their GTM team (Marketing & Sales), but none at all with (or from) their Product and Engineering teams.

Otherwise, the Recurring Themes:

Tools

No tools to help structure the unstructured. No tools with which to share and collaborate effectively.

Remarkable lack of clarity when it comes to what other teams are doing, their goals, even how/if/when functional area goals align.

"We have a customer experience team but who knows what they do - there are several pockets of them across the company and we don’t know why it’s not one team."
"A lot of journey maps - don’t know where the stuff gets prioritized. Strategy? But the strategy guy never talks to the functional areas."
"Marketing plans seem isolated and not knitted together with the other functional areas."
“Sales only shares when they win.”
"No, we don't do this. At all."

No regular, structured sharing or collaborating to make decisions for the business.

Most importantly from these interviews and my regular conversations with the market, I really don’t perceive any mal intent. There is no sense of “Yeah, we could share our insights but we don’t want to.” Rather, it just doesn't occur to anyone to share, let alone make a habit of it.

A lot of ‘They don't ask for...' or ‘No one’s ever asked the question.’
Widespread: ‘It's there if we want to go find it.’ Or, ‘Gosh, salespeople are happy to sit down and talk, share what's going on, if we ask them to.’
Ad hoc, one-off.

Some good news: It doesn’t appear that people know they could or should share, but deliberately choose not to. Rather, it just doesn’t occur to anyone to share, or make a habit of it. And we certainly don’t have tools at the ready that make it easy to collaborate with data, even if the human behaviors did exist.

Our Own Little Fiefdoms

So, friends, we are, each of us (Product, Marketing, Sales, Success), our own little fiefdoms. With good will and little animus to the other little fiefdoms. Alas, most of the fiefdoms are across a giant moat, and our only way to reach each other is, in the best of cases, a (metaphoric) rickety drawbridge. In other cases, that dilapidated drawbridge has completely collapsed into the moat. Sometimes, no one ever thought to build a drawbridge in the first place!

Which might have worked in the old-timey days when products and markets changed ever so slowly. When customers stayed and stayed and had few options for research, except for what they learned from a salesperson. When companies handed out presents (The ubiquitous Gold Watch!) to employees who stayed for 20, 25, 30, 50 years.

I am not the first to point out that our internal structure is not set up for today’s fast moving modern times. And that’s bad for All The Reasons, but it particularly harms our companies’ ability to compete.

What if:

Product could share the parts of the system getting the most use or the least interest, which would help Success address challenges they encounter with customers.

What if Success sees customer satisfaction in an area that Product is actively considering sunsetting? Then shared that information? That sort of sharing would save a revenue stream in danger of being snuffed out.

What if Sales and Success were both structuring the insights they’re seeing, to determine if there are any trends in upselling? Wouldn’t that also be info that both Product and Marketing would be interested in? Wouldn’t it be cool to feed that into the product roadmap? And I bet Marketing would be delighted to include those topics in the content calendar to drive even more retention and net new interest.

Finally, what if Marketing had regular sessions with Product on the nascent trends they see via Google Analytics, or other systems. Trending topics and competitive market shifts would have an impact on what Product needs to dial up or dial down on.

Yeah, Yeah, There May Be Some Bad Apples

Many of us have worked in a toxic environment or two (or ten!) over the course of our careers. Where siloed departments kept their insights and data close to their chests. But that’s been changing as companies have evolved. Some potential good news, based on this study and my recent experience, is that the moats and drawbridges aren’t due to decades of cross-functional family feuds. So it’s not like we need to unlearn terrible behavior. We just need to sow those seeds I talked about in the previous chapter!

So how did we get to this dysfunctional point?

Read, Watch, Follow

John Hagel , Management Consultant, Author, Change Agent

While I’ve been lightly aware of John for years, he blew me away in this interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick . Serendipity for me, especially as I was deep in the process of writing this book. John’s well-researched position on the value of cross-functional teams, working together, driving change - I’m still a little speechless. It’s such brilliant insight, and just what a world of organizations struggling to transform need to hear.

A couple of compelling notes from his interview with Marshall (but give yourself a treat and listen yourself). I’ve paraphrased, with John’s permission:

Never ever underestimate the power of the immune system in a larger organization and its resistance to change.
People are well-intentioned - they’re not ill-intentioned. They want to do what is best for the company and if what is best for the company is the stuff that got us here, that’s what they’re gonna drive for until they understand the bigger picture.
The most - the most - powerful part of learning is not sharing existing knowledge because that's depreciating at an accelerating rate. The key is creating new knowledge through acting together and then sharing that new knowledge with others.
Inter-departmental working groups on the front-line of organizations are key to driving performance improvement, yet the performance of these working groups is rarely measured.

I was so taken (I mean I was bowled over by these insights) by John, I immediately ordered his book The Power of Pull (co-authored with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison). Friends, I ordered the audio book because I am a walker and love audiobooks for long walks. Mistake. This book is so good that I wanted to take too many notes for a walk, so I then ordered the paperback. Worth it.

These authors detail a life-changing, work-changing new system that goes a long way toward addressing the root cause behind why companies are mired in the legacy muck that stalls their transformation. If you care about driving change, or even just unshackling yourselves from Legacy Mountain, go get this book. Just a few of the gazillion notes I took (my notes in parens):

“Push programs, or standard operating procedure, tend to be restricted in terms of the number and diversity of participants.”
“...tends to make companies rigid and inflexible.” (kinda hard to change when you are rigid and inflexible)
“In The Power of Pull ...the sources of economic value move from “stocks” of knowledge to “flows” of new knowledge.” (← huge huge huge. “Flows” of new knowledge can’t happen between functional areas divided by moats and drawbridges.)
“This means precipitating and participating in a broader range of knowledge flows, which in turn requires finding people … interacting with them, and building reciprocal relationships over time.”

Go get this book.