How to Align Stakeholders on Business Strategy

A common partnership snafu is that companies want partnership success, but don’t provide the resources to get there. I heard of a case where a whole marketing team quit, the partnerships team was given no marketing support, and they didn't yet have an integration with product -- and yet, the CEO expected the partnership strategy to deliver instant revenue. Wild. But not uncommon. Partnerships can't thrive in a vacuum. They need cross-functional support—marketing, product integration, sales enablement—all aligned to succeed. Before you set revenue targets for your partnerships, ask yourself: Do we have the resources to support them? If the answer is no, you have to help your leadership teams to reconsider their expectations. To help create the cross-functional support needed for partnerships to thrive, here are four strategies: 1. Involve Cross-Functional Leaders from the Very Beginning Bring key leaders from marketing, sales, and product into the partnership planning phase. Early involvement gives them a sense of ownership and ensures they understand how partnerships align with their own goals. Strategy: Schedule a kick-off meeting with stakeholders from each relevant department. Create a shared roadmap that outlines how partnerships will impact each team and their specific contributions. 2. Tie Partnership Success to Department KPIs To gain buy-in, tie partnership goals directly to the KPIs of each department. Aligning partnership outcomes with what each team is measured on ensures they have skin in the game. Strategy: During planning sessions, ask each department head how partnerships can contribute to their targets. Build specific KPIs for each function into the overall partnership strategy. 3. Create a Resource Exchange Agreement Formalize the support needed from each department with a resource exchange agreement. This sets clear expectations on what each function will contribute—whether it's a dedicated product team member for integrations or marketing resources for co-branded campaigns. It turns vague promises into commitments. Strategy: Draft a simple document that outlines the roles, responsibilities, and deliverables each team will provide, then get sign-off from department heads and the executive team. 4. Demonstrate Early Wins for Buy-In Quick wins go a long way toward securing ongoing resources. Identify a small pilot project with an internal team that shows immediate impact. Whether it's a small co-marketing campaign or a limited integration, these early successes build momentum and demonstrate the value of supporting partnerships. Strategy: Select one or two partners to run a pilot with, focused on delivering measurable outcomes like leads generated or product adoption. Use this success story to demonstrate value to other departments and secure further commitment. Partnership success requires cross-functional alignment. Because partnerships don’t happen in a silo.

You don’t lead strategy by presenting slides. You lead it by making it real. In conversations, decisions, priorities, and actions. If presenting the strategy were enough, execution efforts wouldn’t fail so often. Because if your team doesn’t understand and internalize your strategy with a shared understanding they won’t be able to execute it. I see this happen too often. Here are 5 practices that show what it really takes to lead beyond the slide deck: 1. 🗣️ Alignment is about the conversation, not a presentation. Strategy comes alive when people talk about it, connect it to their role and get clear about what it means for their daily decisions. As a leader, your job is to create the form and forum-where people can ask, “What does this mean for me?” and “How do I connect this in my role?” 2. 🎯 Align every meeting to the strategy. Every meeting you attend should tie directly to advancing your strategy. Stretching to make the connection? Maybe you shouldn’t be in that meeting. Or maybe the meeting shouldn’t be happening at all. As David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard once said, “More companies die of indigestion than starvation.” Strategy requires focus. 3. 🛑 Ruthlessly cut or minimize non-strategic work. This one’s personally hard. Smart, creative people are great at justifying why their project or idea is critical to the company success. But clever doesn’t  equal strategic. Pet projects, zombie initiatives, legacy efforts? If it doesn’t clearly move the strategy forward, cut it. Edinger’s rule: 5 (±2). Big initiatives. That’s your strategic load limit. Focus your resources on advancing the efforts that make the greatest impact. 4. 🗓️ Do a weekly strategy audit for your calendar. Tom Peters said it best: “The calendar never lies.” Look at how you actually spent your time this week. Was the majority of your focused attention on moving strategic priorities forward? Or did you spend too much energy and time on tactical or less valuable activities? Be honest. Where does your time go? Evaluate and adjust. 5. 🤝 Contact one prospect or customer each day. Some may want to start with one per week. No matter your role, stay close to the market. Strategy is useless if you can’t connect it to your prospects and customers. One of the most strategic leaders I ever worked with, Bob Dutkowsky started nearly every day with a customer call. During his time as a CEO of Tech Data, the business grew from $20B to $37B. Pro tip: Don’t just talk to customers who already like you, make sure you engage with prospects who have made the choice to work with competitors. Even one conversation per week can surface insights no dashboard will. Which of these 5 shifts will you focus on this month? Drop your pick in the comments or share how you’re already putting it into practice. 👇 #LIPostingDayJune #TheGrowthLeader #Leadership #StrategyExecution

Marketing Transformation Doesn’t Start With Marketing (It starts with clarity at the top.) We recently met with a company ready to transform their marketing and grow. Bold intentions. Big vision. “Mission-critical,” they said. But when it came time to kick things off, it took over a week just to align on the objective. Was the goal awareness? revenue? sales? Imagine how hard it is for a small internal marketing team to navigate that uncertainty while executing against it. When leadership isn’t clear, teams are left guessing, and guessing kills momentum. This isn’t rare. And it doesn’t mean failure, but it does signal a deeper truth. Here’s what stalls momentum inside high-potential companies: Competing Internal KPIs When every department has different definitions of success, alignment collapses. Marketing feels like a distraction instead of a driver. Lack of Confidence Teams hesitate when the vision isn’t fully owned or when past efforts didn’t stick. That hesitation becomes inertia. Invisible Stakeholders When key voices aren’t in the room early, decisions become fragile. They get revisited, reworked, or reversed. That costs time and credibility. Approval Gridlock If every decision needs cross-departmental consensus, your strategy dies in a loop of waiting. Avoid these traps, hare are five ways to set your marketing transformation up for success: ⚫ Align on a single objective Start by deciding what success looks like. Brand awareness, demand gen, positioning clarity. One clear goal drives faster decisions. ⚫ Get the right stakeholders in early Involve decision-makers from day one, not week four. Early buy-in saves time and rebuilds later. ⚫ Audit your KPIs across departments If marketing is measured on leads but product is focused on NPS, you'll clash. Realign metrics to reinforce shared goals. ⚫ Build confidence with clarity Communicate the “why,” not just the “what.” When teams understand the purpose, they’ll own the process. ⚫ Simplify approvals Create a transformation task force or a fast-track path for key decisions. Fewer hurdles. More momentum.

“Just because you CC’d three stakeholders doesn’t mean you’re multithreaded.” I was reviewing a stalled enterprise deal with a team in Johannesburg. The CRM looked healthy — multiple contacts from different departments logged, emails tracked, even a few meetings booked with adjacent stakeholders. But nothing was moving. We called the champion. He said: “I shared the proposal with finance, but I’m not sure what they thought. Haven’t heard back.” That’s when it hit us: Access was not the issue. Alignment was. ✅ Here’s the difference: – Access means multiple people are involved – Alignment means those people agree on value, urgency, and fit Multithreading isn’t about getting everyone on your calls. It’s about understanding what each stakeholder needs, fears, and prioritizes — and building trust separately with each of them. In this case: – Finance had concerns about switching costs – IT wanted to know about integrations – Ops didn’t want another platform to manage But none of that had been addressed because we treated multithreading like a contact sport, not a strategy. ✅ What we changed: – Mapped each stakeholder’s priorities and blockers – Customized follow-up messages and content for each persona – Crafted responses for possible objections for each persona – Asked our champion who was resisting, not just who was copied 🎯 The behavioral traps: – Vanity Metrics: More contacts ≠ more momentum – False Consensus: Multiple replies can hide silent dissent – Delegation Bias: Assuming your champion is managing alignment behind the scenes Real multithreading is uncomfortable. It forces us to build more relationships, uncover more objections, and personalize more communication. But it’s also how enterprise deals actually close. 📌 If your deal depends on one person forwarding your proposal, you’re one reorg away from dead pipeline. 📥 Follow me for more insights. Repost if this resonated.

Many executives can't answer this question: "What are your customers actually trying to get done?" (And that's why their teams are misaligned) Think I'm wrong? Here's the test: Ask your CMO what customers want. Ask your CPO what customers want. Ask your CTO what customers want. Ask your VP of Sales what customers want. You'll get four different answers. The Real Problem: Your departments aren't misaligned because they don't communicate. They're misaligned because they're talking about different customers. Here's what I mean: - When Marketing says "customer," they mean demographic segments. - When Product says "customer," they mean feature users. - When Sales says "customer," they mean deal closers. - When R&D says "customer," they mean technology adopters. Same word. Four different meanings. The Solution Isn't Communication: You can have all the alignment meetings you want. Until everyone is working from the same understanding of what customers actually need, you're just coordinating confusion. What Actually Works: Create a single source of customer truth. Map what customers are trying to get done—not who they are or what they do. Give every department the same customer insights to inform their strategic decisions. The Result: Teams naturally align when they're optimizing for the same customer outcomes. No forced collaboration required.