Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems Podcast

Companies are racing to deploy copilots, predictive scoring, automated personalization, generative content, and AI agents.

The assumption is that adding intelligence will create better decisions.

But AI does not repair missing context.

It reasons from the information it can access.

Imagine asking an AI assistant to recommend the best walking route for Dusty and Tanner. It suggests a perfectly logical three-mile loop through the park.

The problem is that it does not know Tanner reacts to bicycles, Dusty stops for every squirrel, one trail is closed, the pavement is hot, I only have thirty minutes, and one of the dogs has already walked three miles.

The recommendation may be logical.

It is still wrong.

The problem is not the intelligence.

The problem is the context.

The same issue appears when a company asks AI to identify its best accounts, recommend the next sales action, predict churn, personalize a campaign, or allocate marketing spending.

The system may see CRM data but not sales conversations.

It may see campaign activity but not product usage.

It may see customer behavior but not revenue history.

It may see internal records but not market changes, competitor activity, hiring signals, or organizational events.

That is why AI readiness should begin with the Gauge stage of the Growth Framework.

Before automating a decision, companies need to audit their structured, unstructured, and external data. They need to assess whether the information is complete, accurate, consistent, current, governed, accessible, and connected to business outcomes.

The goal is not perfect data.

The goal is a unified context layer that allows employees and AI systems to work from the same customer reality.

In the newest episode of Walking the Dogs, I explain how to evaluate that context before AI confidently leads your company down the wrong route.

Watch the episode and ask yourself:

What decision are you asking AI to make before checking whether it has the complete customer and revenue context required?

That may be the next dog you need to walk.

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Also, visit the Lisa Schwartz blog for more resources.

Welcome back to Walking the Dogs.

It’s Lisa here, out with Dusty and Tanner, working off some canine energy and thinking through another growth problem.

Today, we are talking about dashboards.

Most companies do not have a shortage of marketing data.

They have campaign reports, attribution tools, CRM dashboards, budget spreadsheets, and quarterly reviews.

What they usually do not have is one trustworthy view of what is working, what is wasting money, what the organization can actually execute, and where the biggest growth gaps sit.

A dashboard tells you what happened.

A Gauge audit tells you why it happened and what to do next.

Dusty and Tanner are giving me a good example right now.

Both dogs are pulling.

If I only looked at the obvious metric, I would conclude that I have a leash-tension problem.

But that does not tell me why the walk is going badly.

Tanner may be reacting to another dog.

Dusty may be following a scent.

One leash may be too long.

A harness may be loose.

Or I may have chosen a route with too many distractions.

The visible result is the same, but the right solution depends on the cause.

I have to stop and inspect the entire walking system.

That is what a 360-degree Gauge audit does for growth.

It looks at four connected areas: performance, spend, technology, and team capability.

First, performance.

How much pipeline are you creating?

How quickly is it progressing?

Where are conversion rates breaking down?

What are your win rates, sales velocity, retention, and expansion rates?

Then break those numbers down by segment, product, channel, motion, and journey stage.

Blended averages often hide the real problem.

Second, spend.

Where is the budget actually going?

What does each channel, agency, platform,

event, content program, and

headcount investment produce?

Not just clicks or impressions.

What does it contribute to qualified demand, pipeline,

revenue, retention, or expansion?

And are you still funding programs that no longer support

the company’s priorities?

Third, technology.

Look at the CRM, marketing automation, intent data,

enrichment, attribution, analytics, and customer-success platforms.

Which tools are redundant?

Which are underused?

Which are disconnected?

Where is data unreliable or being moved manually?

A sophisticated tool on top of a broken process simply creates a more expensive broken process.

Finally, team capability.

Does the team have the strategy, content, creative, media, ABM, lifecycle, RevOps, analytics, data, and AI skills required to execute the plan?

And are roles and ownership clear?

The audit should produce five things:

A KPI scorecard.

A capability assessment.

A marketing-operations audit.

An opportunity heat map.

And a measurable baseline against which improvement can be judged.

Back to Dusty and Tanner.

If I shorten one leash, adjust a harness, and change the route, the walk may improve immediately.

That does not mean the dogs suddenly became better trained.

It means I diagnosed the system instead of blaming the most visible symptom.

Companies often do the opposite.

Pipeline falls, so they launch more campaigns.

Conversion drops, so they redesign the website.

Sales slows, so they buy another tool.

Those actions may be reasonable, but without a baseline, you do not know whether you are fixing the cause or reacting to the symptom.

So here is the question for your walk today:

What part of your growth system have you been trying to fix without first inspecting the entire leash, route, equipment, and walking team?

Until next time, keep walking the dogs.

Most companies say their revenue teams are aligned.

They have shared meetings, dashboards, systems, goals, and planning sessions.

Yet Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success often behave like four separate companies.

Marketing generates the lead.

Sales restarts the conversation.

Product delivers the product.

Customer Success discovers what the customer thought they were buying.

The customer carries the burden of connecting everything.

That is not alignment.

It is a broken operating model.

I see a much simpler version of this problem when I walk Dusty and Tanner.

Dusty may be heading confidently toward the park.

Tanner may be investigating a hedge in the opposite direction.

I may be attempting to keep the entire operation moving toward home.

Announcing that we are aligned does not fix the walk.

I have to adjust the route, manage the leashes, respond to the signals in front of me, and keep everyone moving toward the same destination.

Revenue alignment works the same way.

It requires shared objectives, clear roles, visible customer signals, defined handoffs, service expectations, and a next action when the customer does something nobody predicted.

In the latest Walking the Dogs episode, I introduce the One Revenue Team™ journey map.

The exercise begins with one specific customer segment.

Not the entire market.

One segment. One growth objective. One complete customer journey.

Then map what Marketing, Sales, Product, onboarding, Customer Success, and the expansion team must each do to move that customer forward.

The most important part is not the diagram.

It is identifying where the customer changes hands without a clear owner, readiness trigger, context, or next step.

That is where growth stalls.

It is also where the Gauge stage of the Growth Framework becomes valuable.

Gauge helps you inspect the revenue system you actually have, rather than the one described in the strategy presentation.

The dog to walk this week is simple:

Choose one customer segment and trace its journey from the first sign of interest through adoption and expansion.

At every transition, ask:

Who owns this?

What must be true before ownership changes?

What information moves with the customer?

How quickly must the next team respond?

What happens when the customer takes a different path?

You may discover that your teams are not operating one journey.

They are each managing their own short stretch of sidewalk.

Watch the new episode and consider this question:

Where does your customer journey currently change hands without a clear owner, trigger, or next step?

Read more at Your Revenue Team Is Not a Team If Everyone Is Running a Different Play - Lisa Schwartz One Revenue Team: Fix Broken Marketing and Sales Handoffs

The Revenue Isn’t Missing. It’s Leaking.

Most companies assume that getting more growth requires adding something.

* More campaigns.

* More headcount.

* More technology.

* More outbound.

* More content.

* More pressure.

But sometimes the revenue is not missing because the company lacks activity.

It is missing because the operating system underneath all that activity is leaking.

I was thinking about this while walking Dusty and Tanner. If Dusty pulls toward something in the bushes and I ignore the first small movement, the whole walk can change. Tanner notices. The leashes cross. One of them sees a squirrel. Suddenly, we are not walking in one direction anymore. We are negotiating with two dogs and untangling two leashes.

The original deviation was small. The compound effect was not.

That is the B2B version of the butterfly effect.

A lead receives a late response. An opportunity enters the pipeline too early. A sales handoff loses important context. A customer misses an onboarding milestone. An expansion signal goes unnoticed. None of those moments appears catastrophic by itself. But repeat them across hundreds of leads, dozens of deals, and an entire customer base, and they become material revenue problems.

The late response becomes a lower inbound conversion rate. The early opportunity becomes an inflated forecast. The poor handoff becomes a longer sales cycle. The missed onboarding milestone becomes churn. The ignored usage signal becomes lost expansion ARR.

Companies often respond by adding more speed. But when Dusty and Tanner’s leashes are tangled, walking faster does not solve anything. It makes the knot tighter. You have to stop. Untangle the leashes. Reset the direction. Then start moving again.

That is what good GTM Operations should do. It untangles the operating system before the company attempts to scale it.

The ROI question usually comes too early

Leadership teams understandably ask: “What is the ROI of fixing GTM Operations?”

It sounds like a financially responsible question.

* But what happens when the system is too broken to measure accurately?

* What is the close rate when every seller defines an opportunity differently?

* What is pipeline coverage when stale deals remain open?

* What is marketing conversion when inbound leads sit untouched?

* What is retention performance when onboarding milestones are not tracked?

* What is expansion performance when opportunities live in CSM notes instead of a repeatable process?

When the data is unreliable and the process is inconsistent, the company cannot confidently measure the ROI of fixing GTM. It first has to fix enough of the system to create a credible baseline.

That is why the first stage in my Growth Framework is Gauge.

Gauge is where you stop pretending the dashboard is the business. You establish what is actually happening.

* How quickly are leads followed up?

* When is an opportunity created?

* Where does the sales cycle stall?

* Which pipeline is real?

* Where do customers lose momentum?

* How is renewal risk identified?

* Who owns expansion?

First, you Gauge it. Then you walk the dog. Then you fix the leaks that compound into ARR.

Walking the dog - The Butterfly Effect of GTM: How 1% Improvements Compound Into ARR

The Walking the Dogs GTM ROI Calculator models several modest operational improvements.

* Close rate moves from 15% to 16%.

* Gross retention moves from 85% to 86%.

* The sales cycle moves from 90 days to 75 days.

* Expansion close rate moves from 15% to 16%.

Nothing doubles. There is no heroic forecast. But the changes compound.

In the expected scenario, the ROI example model with example data, I share a view that approximately $3.7 million in additional ARR. after a $1 million GTM investment, can becomes roughly $2.7 million in net ARR gain. The model estimates a 3.7-times gross ARR return and a 273% net ROI. It also shows approximately $311,000 in monthly missed ARR opportunity while the company delays action. Those numbers are illustrative and the calculator is not a magic forecast. It is a decision model.

The purpose of the ROI calculator is to make the invisible cost of operational friction more visible. The example company is already spending the money. Sales and marketing were already working. Customer success was already managing accounts. The additional ARR comes from making that existing investment work better.

The real question: How much are we losing?

The question is not simply: “Can we justify investing in GTM Operations?” The better question is: “How much are we already losing because the system is tangled?”

* How much demand is being wasted through slow routing?

* How much pipeline is unreliable because stage definitions are inconsistent?

* How much revenue is delayed by poor handoffs?

* How much ARR is lost because onboarding risk appears too late?

* How much expansion depends on intuition rather than signals?

The ROI does not come from the spreadsheet. It comes from untangling the system.

So, what dog does your company need to walk?

* Pick one problem.

* Gauge it.

* Map it.

* Bring the right people around the board.

* Assign an owner.

* Choose the metric.

* Make the small correction before it becomes the whole walk.

Because the revenue may not be missing. It may already be there, leaking through the operating system.

Watch the full episode here: The Butterfly Effect of GTM: How 1% Improvements Compound Into ARR - Walking the Dogs E4 ROI

And as always, what dog do you need to walk today?

Most SaaS teams are not struggling because their market is too small.

They are struggling because their market is too unfocused.

In the newest episode of Walking the Dogs, I unpack the “G” in my Growth Framework: Gauge. This is the stage where you establish a clear baseline across your data, tech, spend, systems, and target market before you scale campaigns or apply AI.

The episode focuses on one practical idea: get to SAM quickly.

Your TAM may look exciting on a slide, but your serviceable addressable market is where execution actually happens. A database of 10,000 accounts is not helpful if most of those accounts are wrong-fit, wrong-time, or missing the signals that suggest real buying potential.

The job is to narrow the field.

Use company size, industry, region, installed technology, hiring trends, intent signals, first-party engagement, and customer lookalike data to find the accounts that are budget-ready, tech-aligned, and pain-aware.

That is the dog park.

That is where your team should focus.

I also talk about why AI will not fix a messy go-to-market system. AI amplifies what already exists. If your segmentation, lifecycle stages, CRM data, and system connections are messy, AI will simply help you move faster in the wrong direction.

Before you ramp spend, launch outbound, or ask AI to personalize anything, ask:

Are we walking the right accounts?

Watch the full episode here: Smart Market Sizing: How to Find Budget-Ready SaaS Buyers

And as always, what dog do you need to walk today?