As the title of her presentation suggests, Sakina Najmi used her session to outline how to lead in the era of digital transformation.
More specifically, Sakina discussed two main things: the fundamental leadership qualities that are of utmost importance for success in the digital age; and 'How can we use marketing as a catalyst for growth and digital transformation?'
With Covid-19 acting a catalyst for every company's digital transformation, leadership in marketing is more important than ever. In order to help attendees become the best leaders that they can be, therefore, Sakina outlined three critical leadership qualities:
Leading yourself Leading others Leading the organisation
Clearly, leadership is not just a case of leading your team. It is far more encompassing.
Jay Famico began his session on revenue operations by making a fascinating comparison between modern day B2B organisations and the shipping and transportation industry of the 1950s.
This may seem like an odd comparison to make at first, but the parallels are undeniable.
Setting the scene, Jay began: "It's the 1950s. We're moving things from point A to B, and everything's 100% manual. And I want you to think about how inefficient that was."
Essentially, the process wasn't costly because of the long distance transportation; it was costly because of the time and effort required to sort and move the cargo from trains, to trucks, to ships, back to trucks, etc.
In short, there was no standardisation of process, and so the entire journey from point A to point B was inefficient. But then, one company developed a standardised shipping container, which could be loaded and unloaded faster and cheaper. The result was huge savings and faster operations.
In the same way as those transportation companies of the 1950s, the operations teams of most B2B organisations today are siloed. There's a sales ops team, a marketing ops team, etc. Each individual team has their own objectives and targets, and often they aren't aligned with the other teams. The result is an non-optimal process from point A to be point B.
Walk the talk. If marketing, sales and customer successes are not operationally aligned, they're not aligned.
Centralisation. The more centralised your operations functions are, the tighter aligned your marketing, sales and customer success teams will become.
Boil a pot, not the ocean. If you don't have RevOps currently, start with incremental steps to bring the functions towards operational alignment.
Be inquisitive. Most of the reports on RevOps are skewed. They don't break it out by company size, type of sale, type of offering, etc.