Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
Our guest for Episode 45 is Kevin McIntyre, CRO at Dealfront. Kevin brings over a decade of leadership experience to the conversation. Kevin's unique path to CRO came from his experience in RevOps, SalesOps, Enablement and more.
In this episode, Ross and Kevin discuss why it’s imperative to foster a culture of collaboration, build a solid management system, and define and strengthen your GTM motions.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Foster a culture of collaboration & communication
When you’re leading a team, it’s important to remember that openness builds trust. People need to feel empowered to share ideas, raise concerns, and work together to find solutions. If they don’t, they’ll be afraid to take risks, which can lead to missed opportunities, reduced engagement, and a lack of forward momentum.
To build a culture of collaboration and communication, implement the right systems. You can use communication platforms like Slack for specific topics, hold monthly revenue all-hands calls to review results, and schedule things such as regular cross-functional workshops for team alignment.
“On a weekly basis, I communicate what our goals are for the week and talk about what success looks like,” says Kevin. “More importantly, we discuss the mistakes and failures we’re experiencing so we can grow and learn from them.”
Being able to have an open dialogue when things aren’t going well, and have accountability, empowers your team to address challenges quickly and drives continuous improvement. It also creates a culture where everyone can measure their impact, which creates a sense of ownership and motivates each individual to contribute their best.
Build a solid management system
Building a solid management system involves everything from setting goals to effectively communicating them to the team.
Key questions to consider include:
- How are we communicating?
- Where are we communicating?
- What’s the cadence of our communication in different types of meetings — within specific teams, across broad groups, and organization-wide?
“What I’ve learned in the CRO role is the sheer number of projects being run at any given time. Whether it’s a major project with a code name or an initiative focused on sales or retention, there are always multiple efforts underway. It’s essential to stay on top of them, ensuring they’re progressing correctly and that people know how to set an agenda, establish goals, determine milestones, and manage tasks,” says Kevin.
The main takeaway here is that it’s important to define how you want your organization to function. To achieve this, you need to clearly define what success looks like, how to reach it, and how to learn and adapt along the way.
Define & strengthen your GTM motions
The prospect and customer experience is what builds a successful business. It’s more than just a series of interactions; it’s how you demonstrate your value, build trust, and earn the right to their business.
When creating this experience, be crystal clear about what the journey looks like. How does each touchpoint shape a prospect’s perception of your brand? From the initial contact to the post-purchase follow-up, every step should be intentionally designed to meet their needs and exceed their expectations.
Kevin is a strong advocate of Winning by Design, drawing inspiration from their revenue bowtie framework to shape his team's GTM motions. “It’s so important to understand how you’re driving demand and engagement with your brand. Being actively involved in proving value and securing mutual commitment with prospects sets the foundation for success. From there, focusing on effective onboarding is essential to ensure not only immediate success but also long-term expansion and renewal.”
You can use this model to figure out what’s best for your business based on its current stage. Consider what key interactions need to happen between you and a prospect or customer after you’ve closed an opportunity to drive their progression.
Be intentional about how the sales cycles and customer journeys should advance. And listen to your customer-facing professionals — they have valuable insights to offer. Zoom out of your business, and look across different teams to understand what’s working well and why, as well as what isn’t working so you can dissect it and learn more about your business. This is essential because, as Kevin puts it, “in this subscription economy, if you’re not driving value, you’re out.”
About Kevin
Kevin is an experienced sales professional who has worked with sales organizations in both small and large company environments, domestically and internationally. Before joining Dealfront as the CRO, he held leadership roles at EnterpriseDB, ZoomInfo, and IBM.
