BACKGROUND
In my experience, teams that achieve challenging goals often have a common understanding for how “the job” gets done. The “job” could be marketing.

But the same holds true for team sports. Have you seen FC Barcelona play together in the Total Football methodology?

It holds true with musical groups of all types. There’s a reason why groups of musicians that stay tightly in sync as movements shift are held in high regard.

It also holds true with dance troupes. Every choreographed movement has purpose and is timed to the movements of others – and it’s beautiful when the dancers are in flow together.

In my opinion, it’s the leader’s job to provide the playbook by which teams can perform at the highest level.

As I stepped into the CMO role at Talend we had significant challenges, mostly in the form of a non-trivial pipeline issue and a budget reduction exercise that would impact people.

I had strategies in mind for how to handle the pipeline issues. But I needed as clear of a strategy for how I would help my team through a difficult time of change. One way I addressed this challenge was by providing a roadmap for how we would continue working together – and be successful – despite the changes that had happened within the team.

One of my top goals was to create the philosophy of the culture and ask the team to help me create the playbook based on their expertise, knowledge, and experiences across the marketing organization.

To start this internal conversation, I introduced something that was later called the Marketing Flywheel. I hoped to accomplish several things by kicking off this conversation including:

• Increasing consistency in the personas targeted and messages used across Brand, Digital, Demand Generation, and Field Marketing.
• Aligning the entire Marketing team on SEO results so we could reaffirm or adjust our understanding of how prospects were finding our products.
• Ensuring everyone in Marketing knew our joint objectives and KPIs, and supporting my leaders so they would provide regular updates to their own teams on performance and attainment.

Ultimately, I wanted to create a culture where everyone recognized that the path to success would be possible when we work even more closely together (despite the organizational chart lines), and when our biggest priority is to help each other achieve both individual and shared objectives.

After sharing the Marketing Flywheel, I saw leaders emerge within each team to build more clarity in specific cross-functional processes, to take a renewed effort to work alongside colleagues on different teams to document a better way to work together, and to bring our go-to-market (GTM) funnel dashboard into more of their meetings to ensure more people had clarity on where we stood against targets.

My team adopted and refined the simple Marketing Flywheel concept and took it further than I could have on my own. I’m convinced this is one of the reasons that, despite the headwinds we faced as I stepped into the CMO role, we were able to celebrate significant pipeline improvements just 12 months later.