In this episode, Marcus speaks with Avner Baruch about the invisible costs of misalignment in go-to-market functions and why focusing on traditional sales metrics like ARR and conversion rates often misses the point.
Avner shares his journey into sales enablement and how it led him to develop a methodology called Project Moneyball, which digs beneath surface metrics to uncover the real issues. By factoring in soft skills, time management, and process adoption, this approach helps teams identify problems much earlier, often during onboarding, rather than waiting months for reports to catch up.
Key Themes Explored:
🔸 The Real Cost of Misalignment
Misalignment across sales, marketing, and customer success leads to noisy pipelines, stalled deals, wasted effort, and poor customer experiences. Avner explains how one company saved over $1 million a year by fixing inefficiencies at the top of the funnel. Marcus adds that leaving customer success out of the GTM strategy is a massive oversight that leads to direct and indirect waste.
🔸 Outdated Metrics and Misplaced Incentives
They challenge the use of legacy metrics like booked meetings and conversion rates for SDRs, which often encourage the wrong behaviours. Instead, the focus should be on quality meetings with Ideal Customer Profiles who are a genuine long-term fit.
🔸 Smarter ICP Design
Avner recommends using customer success data to define what a great customer actually looks like, then feeding that back to marketing. This creates a more focused ICP, a cleaner pipeline, and a more effective use of resources.
🔸 Leadership in Uncertain Times
When things get tough, leaders often make panic moves like reshuffling teams or jumping on automation tools without fixing broken processes. They also tend to reuse job descriptions from failed roles, which sets up new hires to fail. Avner argues for proper job design based on desired outcomes, with hiring managers involved from the start.
🔸 Managers as Multipliers
Managers should be hiring well, removing friction, building systems that work, and actively coaching. Enablement is not just a department, it’s a mindset. Research shows that operational coaching by frontline managers delivers strong ROI and better outcomes.
🔸 Cultural and Structural Blind Spots
They dig into leadership behaviours that hold teams back, including ego, resistance to feedback, fear of hiring strong people, and a desire to avoid conflict. These behaviours lead to bloated pipelines, poor handovers, low trust, and declining performance.
🔸 Spotting and Fixing the Gaps
Leaders need to put a number on the cost of the current way of working. That includes symptoms like pipeline bloat, poor onboarding, high churn, CS teams carrying too much weight, and inconsistent sales performance. Avner and Marcus outline practical steps like watching early-stage calls, examining handoffs, and separating SDR and BDR roles to allow for real skill development.
🔸 CRM and Forecasting
They question the value of traditional weekly forecasting meetings, which often provide little insight and lots of theatre. Tech should be used to provide real-time, actionable data, not just serve management dashboards. CRMs should make selling easier, not add friction.
🔸 The Human-Centric Leadership Advantage
The conversation ends with advice to listen, seek feedback, hire well, and drop the armour. Vulnerability and trust are not weaknesses. They’re essential for building teams that are resilient, motivated, and capable of delivering sustainable growth.
📚 Avner’s books The Top Sales Enablement Challenges and The Multiplier explore these topics in more detail. He and Marcus also talk about a potential collaboration to help private equity firms measure "alpha drift" caused by inefficiencies in go-to-market execution.
If you’re a sales or revenue leader tired of vanity metrics and poor alignment, this episode gives you clear, practical ideas on how to fix what’s broken and build a go-to-market function th
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