Yesterday, I was privileged to sit in a discussion with a number of SaaS founders and sales executives. We were talking about organizing the GTM functions to maximize performance. It was a fascinating discussion. It’s also like so many discussions I see, with all sorts of organizations.
These discussions focus on how we structure and organize to drive higher levels of performance. Over the years, we’ve seen the development of different organizational models on the GTM side of organizations. There were the traditional silos of sales, marketing, customer service, and others. And within each of those silos were subsilos, for example, field sales, inside sales, SDR/BDR, sales ops, sales enablement, and so forth.
New models emerge, we have models in which there is a CRO, combining the previously separate silos of sales, marketing, customer experience as subsilos in the CRO organization. And there are some models emerging around the GTM structure, and other structures.
In each discussion, people earnestly talk about the structure, whether showing new org charts, or rearranging organizational blocks. They talk about each function and subfunction, the goals and metrics for each of those.
But these discussions miss something important.
In yesterday’s discussion, I asked,”How would you reimagine this model based on workflow? How does the work actually get done?” There was silence, confused looks. “What do you mean, Dave?”
I responded, “You are talking about models of the organization, they are very interesting, but what is the workflow? How do they work with each other, how do they interact with parts of the organization outside of them? How do you assure alignment across these functions, who do they depend on to be able to to their jobs, who depends on them? Where do things fall through the cracks?”
We do have to build organizational structures, particularly the bigger and more complex the organization. But I’ve seen all sorts of organization charts and models. And every one of those can work, and every one of those can fail miserably. Yet we spend a huge amount of time rearranging the silos. It’s often analogous to “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
While we have to develop our organizational structures, it’s absolutely useless without understanding the workflow within each organization and across the organizations. Without this, we don’t understand how the organization works, how work gets done, where the holes are, where the overlaps and conflicts are.
Without this analysis, we never confront the questions, “Is there a better way to do this workflow? Do we even need it? Is there something we’ve missed? How do we improve it? Where do the bottlenecks occur? Where do we have failures?”
What is critical in organizational performance/effectiveness is alignment across the organization and across the workflows. We talk about the importance of collaboration, within and across the organization, but until we understand how the work gets done and how we need to collaborate, we can’t put meaning to what it is to collaborate.
The traditional way we look at organizational design and structure tend to miss these. We tend to focus on what each group does, what they are accountable for. We tend to focus on reporting structures and how we escalate the importance of our function or our jobs. We tend to look at the work we do within our silo, but seldom look across blocks/silos.
Any organizational structure can work! Any organizational structure can fail! We don’t address the issues of performance by rearranging the deck chairs.
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