August 22, 2025 • 16 mins
This week's show is entitled, "How to Cure a Sick Sales Pipeline" and my guest is Bill Dwoinen, the Chief Revenue Officer at Mural.
Tune in to learn:
- Why Go-to-Market orchestration is crucial for driving predictable sales pipelines.
- The difference between playbooks and systems and why a systematic approach matters.
- How to bridge the Go-to-Market Alignment Gap and improve collaboration within your teams.
Listen Now | Watch the video HERE
Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing. If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to acceleration@heinzmarketing.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Heinz (00:15):
All right, well, welcome everybody to another
episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
Excited to have y'all here.
As we get boy toward the end ofsummer we've got college football
starting this weekend, week zero, theamuse-bouche for the fall season and
baseball playoffs wrapping up, Bill.
And while we're just talking about ourCubbies, excited that they've already
taken three of four in a five game seriesagainst the division rival Brewers.
(00:38):
So, go Cubs.
Just very excited to have you all here.
If you're here live, joiningSales Pipeline Radio in the middle
of your workday and workweek.
Thank you for making us part of your day.
You can be part of the show if you havea comment on LinkedIn or YouTube as
we do this, we will see those, we canbring those on screen, we can reference
those, we can answer your questions live.
And thank you for doing that.
If you're watching or listeningon demand, thank you as well.
(01:00):
Over 500,000 people have downloaded andlistened to Sales Pipeline Radio, and
excited to have you as part of that group.
Every episode past, present, and futureof Sales Pipeline Radio, always available
at Sales Pipeline Radio dot com.
Excited today to have BillDwoinen, who's the Chief Revenue
Officer of Mural join us today.
We're gonna talk about orchestration,go to market efficiency.
We're gonna talk about why pipelineis always important, but is so
(01:25):
different than it's ever been before.
Bill, thanks for joining us.
Bill Dwoinen (01:27):
Yeah, no worries.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it and I appreciateit even more having a discussion
around the Cubs and one of thebest of all time Ryne Sandberg.
So no, thanks for having me.
Matt Heinz (01:36):
Oh my gosh.
I was sitting on my back decklast night watching the end
of that game and thinking, arewe gonna walk in winning runs?
And it was a little more nailbity than I wanted, but I was
very happy with the outcome.
You guys did some really interestingresearch earlier this year, sort of
focused on what, I guess I would callGo-to-Market orchestration and the
real gap for a lot of organizationsand how their Go-to-Market teams
(01:58):
align and how that affects theirability to drive predictable pipeline.
I'd love to have you dig into theresearch and just what you hear from
your customers in terms of the challengesthey're addressing on that front.
Bill Dwoinen (02:10):
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think there's, if you
take a step back and say, Hey, whyall of a sudden is this bubbled up?
You know, why have we, you know, doubleclicked into orchestration or what's
the impact of being misaligned is thata lot of the pain points have bubbled
up, right with it getting harder toretain customers, harder to go find new
(02:30):
pipeline and, you know, I kind of makethis joke is like, I think it's, you
have to move on beyond collaboration.
So, I know I came from a place thattaught me a lot about sales, right?
Salesforce one of the biggest, youknow, sales machines out there.
And it, looking back, I kind of realizedlike, wow, I was at the center of the root
cause of the problem because you wouldhave, you know, 20, 25 people, you know,
(02:54):
in deal calls or, you know, all this workhappening in silos, but nothing really
would happen to move things forward.
And so it wasn't necessarily,we were meeting all the
time, we talked all the time.
Even here we really have started tobe biased towards the action of like,
we are not getting off a call unlessthere's a call to action, because
(03:15):
when you really look at that, we knowthat that really slows teams down.
But Matt, what has reallystood out is what does it mean
for the customer experience?
And so when account teams reallylack action or lack consistency
it really creates this fragmentedexperience for customers.
Right?
And, and one of the biggest pain pointsis always around account transitions.
(03:37):
Like you wanna applaud organizations thatpromote from within or people move on.
But, you know, I feel that probably.
A dozen calls last year around, Hey,this is the fifth rep in two years.
You know, you're not gonna stop that.
What you can stop is just what's theexperience for customers throughout this
process and when teams aren't syncingup and bias to action it's just such a
(03:58):
bad experience for customers, and that'swhere that kind of burnout comes in.
Matt Heinz (04:03):
Can we talk about the difference between playbooks and systems?
Because I think that's really at theheart of doing this consistently, right?
I think a lot of, companieshave, you know, definitions of
what a lead and opportunity is.
Can you talk about just thegap many companies have between
playbooks and systems and why asystem approach is so important?
Bill Dwoinen (04:21):
Yeah, it's great.
I mean, I feel like it, it's sucha powerful question because, you
know, the pipeline playbooks youknow, haven't evolved much, right?
I think it's more about the ways in whichyou go about getting pipeline, and I
think what organizations are doing, whatwe're doing, what other teams are doing.
We just spent a few days inChicago to say, Hey, let's take a
(04:42):
step back and really think aboutsome of the problem statements of
what we're trying to solve for.
And then build systems aroundit, then build plays, right?
Whether it's the ability to measurethe plays or having the right tools.
Like how do you take some of the lift offof, you know ,as A CRO, I get probably
30 prospecting, you know, 30 emails a dayfrom people and like how do you allow more
(05:06):
strategic approaches to that, whether it'sAI automation, so I think companies have
realized, I think two things, Matt, it'slike both sides of it is you can't just
throw a tool at every challenge, right?
You know, you just can't throwsomething on top of something and then
throw something on top of something.
You have to take a step back and say, Hey,what are we truly trying to solve for?
Or what are we truly trying to do?
(05:27):
And for us, a big one is reallybreaking into the different LOBs,
the different lines of business.
Right.
And it's not, you know, talkingto different leaders at companies
like Glean or ServiceNow, you know,Salesforce, Slack, everyone kind of
has the same thing of like, well, wereally need to break into new lines of
business to find new revenue streams.
(05:47):
But you have to take a stepback and say, do we have the
right systems, the right tools?
Do we have the right materials?
You know, do we have the rightmessaging to go create pipeline?
You can't just take something andflip it sideways and say, okay, now
we're gonna do it for the same thing.
And so I think organizations have reallystarted to notice like, wait a minute,
our pipeline efforts aren't working right.
(06:08):
Let's now take a step back and say.
Who are we trying to go after?
What are the systemsthat we need to go do it?
What are the tools we need?
What's the messaging we need?
Then let's activate the playbookversus the other way around.
'cause I do think, Matt, it wasactivate the plays, then put systems
and tools around it when it's too late.
Matt Heinz (06:28):
Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Bill
Dwoinen and the Cubs fan andChief Revenue Officer at Mural.
And I'm looking at the other sideof my screen here at this study
that you guys did in the Spring.
This, Go-to-Market Alignment Gapis what you talked about here.
And there's one stat that I wannapoint out that sort of stands
out to me as sort of this notonly a gap between Go-to-Market
teams, but a gap between leaders.
(06:49):
And people on the frontlines doing the work.
So when you guys ask the question,how often do you experience
misalignment between your Go-to-Marketteams, 31% of decision makers says
that happened on a daily basis.
46% of individual contributors saidthat happened on a daily basis.
So there's a wide gap between what leadersperceive and what those doing the actual
work are facing on a day-to-day basis.
(07:11):
Sometimes I describe this asthe difference between jazz
hands at sales kickoff and whatactually happens Tuesday morning.
Yeah.
Can you talk about that Go-to-MarketAlignment Gap and why it's so
important for leaders to understandat a almost atomic level, the
gaps in how work gets done?
Bill Dwoinen (07:28):
Yeah, it's a great call and I was really blown away by the data
because when you, when the account teamsare out there doing work, you know, they
really are the ones that feel the pain.
And so when marketing andproduct and sales aren't aligned.
It really makes it complicatedto go to a customer.
It makes it complicated toaccelerate deals, but I think
leaders have this belief thatour, hey, our teams are working.
(07:48):
Right.
I see the number of meetings and that'swhy we kind of have this, you know,
me, this kind of inside way of sayingit, of like, I think there's too much
collaboration, it's part of the challenge.
It's that so, from a leader's perspective,I see my teams back to back all day.
I see, you know, I made the example,last year that within any given
deal motion, there was 12 differentdocuments we were collaborating in.
(08:11):
And so I think leaderssee work that's happening.
Yeah, so they assume that,hey, our teams are working.
Right.
How many times have you heard leaderssay like, our teams are out there
grinding, you know, they're with ourcustomers, and the teams are like, I'm
not getting what I want from Product,and Products like our salespeople
aren't out there telling a good storyand the customer is just kind of in the
wings and, and feeling the pain of it.
(08:32):
And so that's where you kindof see some of that numbers.
And I think all, I've been guiltyof that sometimes throughout my
career where you're just like,yeah, my teams are working.
And then what we're trying todo internally is like, how do
we activate that feedback loop?
Yeah, so there's more alignment happening,and so when we show up in front of the
customer, it is aligned, it is consistent.
And then also when you look at,not to pivot away from pipeline,
(08:53):
but just the drain on employees,like the number of repetitive
meetings because of misalignment iswhat's really kind of driving that
burnout people are experiencing,especially in an asynchronous world
where teams are very distributed,whether you're in an office or not.
Teams are very distributed.
Matt Heinz (09:10):
Well, the amount of work is a really terrible way of
measuring, you know, your productivity.
You know, we've seen a lot of examplesof what Gartner calls collaboration drag.
Yeah.
Which is how hard it is toactually get work done, and
it's impacting speed to market.
It's impacting revenue impact.
It's impacting morale.
Right?
Yeah.
And so simply just doing more, I mean,all the investors we talked to, all the PE
(09:33):
firms right now are all do more with lessand they're pointing at AI as a solution,
AI is an ingredient to that, but if youdon't have a systematic way of breaking
down the work that needs to get done, soit gets done effectively and efficiently.
You're not only gonna not hit yournumber, you're gonna reach a, a
constraint in what you can get doneand you are going to lose your best
(09:54):
people, who are getting frustratedand burnt out by having done it.
Talk about the importance of thoseworkflows and systems to that
get more done with less messagethat's so forefront right now.
Bill Dwoinen (10:05):
It's, you know, it's such a, it's such a, a powerful statement
that you made because the drain, theway that you kind of referred to it is
I just feel like, you know, I alwayssay some of my least productive days
are when I'm back to back all day.
You know, like, you actually need time tobe productive and think and move forward.
And so, that drain theimpact that has in employees.
(10:27):
And what I love about what we're doingat Mural is I think there's two things.
Number one, we're using our,you know, what's the saying?
Drinking our own Kool-Aid, right?
Yeah.
Bring the visual component.
to the sales process, right?
There's, if you think about, you know,we started on this journey about, okay,
you know, we can build this cool visual,account discovery template that teams
can use and everyone's in the sameplace, and you can create automation.
(10:50):
They can pull in, you know,information about a customer from
their 10 K so on and so forth.
Then we started to realize that we hadto move away from a moment in time.
Say, collaboration is fractured throughoutevery part of the customer journey.
And so how do you not only surfacethe right information, how do you
make it more visual and clear overwho's owning and taking action, and
(11:11):
then what we've seen in our companies.
That have that kind of that matrix orgmap, where they have seven clouds, you
know, whether it's like a LinkedIn thathas four or five different product lines.
All selling to the same customer oryou know, a Salesforce, Oracle, IBM
that has multiple clouds is when peoplejump into the deal midway through.
(11:32):
That usually is creating more work.
And what we're seeing is whenyou bring in this visual, kind
of actionable way of working.
The teams are able toget caught up sooner.
And so someone joins a deal motion andthere's not seven calls to get them
brought up to speed, or a leader jumps in.
And so that's what we're doing internallyand what we're bringing to our clients
because the retention part is so critical.
(11:53):
And that goes back to the, youknow, how are you impacting
the customer experiences?
And so retaining your top talent ismore, it's always, there's always a
component of can they be successful?
Do they have a great career path?
Do they feel compensated for, youknow, the work that they're doing?
But it's also like, canI get work done here?
Do I feel supported anddo I have alignment?
Matt Heinz (12:15):
Yeah, those are what you just said.
Those three things are socritical to making this work.
Right.
And I think you've seen it.
I've seen it in the work we'vedone the before and afters, right.
Of companies that are really justin fire drill mode all the time.
To becoming more efficient, moreeffective, faster to market.
Employees that feel like they'recontributing better, their
morale is better, their team,their collaboration is better.
For a lot of companies, especially largercompanies that are sort of facing that
(12:38):
collaboration drag challenge right now.
Knowing what to do next canbe kind of intimidating.
There's a lot of moving partsthat have to be addressed here.
Everything from workflow taxonomy,RACI, DACI, like thinking through all
the methodology of getting that right.
Where should people start?
Where's a good place for go to marketleaders to start to chip away at this?
Bill Dwoinen (12:58):
Yeah, it's a great question and it's tough, but I
think if you take a step back, right?
So if I, I'm gonna date myself abit here, but when I first got into
sales, it was like a desktop computer.
Desk, phone, and spreadsheets.
Now we live in a world where theaverage sales person has, you
(13:19):
know, 47 tools at their disposal.
They have Sales Nav, they have, youknow, ZoomInfo, they have Pocus,
they have this, they have that.
They have all these different things.
And I think what got us here, Mattwas never truly taking a step back
to try to solve for the challenge.
And so we were on a call with a CEO ofa pretty notable company a few weeks
(13:41):
ago, and we walked him through kind ofthis idea of more collaborative selling.
And he was like, you know what?
We've been struggling with accountplanning for years, and we kept
throwing stuff on top of it.
You know, we like kept throwinga different solution at it.
Right.
Because you can do accountplanning anywhere, right?
You can do it in a million places,but it's really taking a step back
(14:02):
and saying, what are we trying tosolve for with account planning?
What are the current challengesand how do we truly address it?
And so what I would encourageleaders to do is, and it's hard,
you know, you're closing themonth, you're closing the quarter.
Then you're planning for next year.
Like it is fast, right?
It just, it feels like you, youknow, it's hard to take a step back
and sometimes it's annual plan.
(14:23):
Sometimes it's end of quarter, butthere's gotta be a point in saying, okay,
what do we think are the key moments intime throughout a customer life cycle?
There's the account plan, there's customerdiscovery, there's, you know, team
selling, there's multi-cloud selling.
There's even, you know, we've startedto use Mural for mutual close plans.
You know, how do we bring a morevisual component versus tagging
(14:44):
a client in a static Word doc?
And so my answer, Matt, is like, howwe got here is people kept throwing
tools at the, at the problem versustaking a step back and saying, what
are we truly trying to solve for?
How can we meet our people andcustomers where they are, and
how do we make it frictionless?
(15:04):
How do we pull in AI and workflows?
And I'm not sure if you've seen someof the kind of articles floating
around, but you know, AI for thesake of AI is not helpful, and
so it's how are you intentional?
Like one of the things I love, weshowed this to a customer today,
is like in our account plan, youuse AI to bring in all the top line
things about what a company does.
(15:25):
And so now you're dangerousgoing into a first call,
whether you're an SDR or a CEO.
That I know what just came fromcompany X's 10 K, and so it really is
taking a step back and saying, whatare we truly trying to solve for?
Then comes your point about systems.
Then comes your point about plays.
It just used to be, let's throw abandaid on it, but it's caught up.
(15:46):
It's like running into the windand the wind keeps getting faster.
Matt Heinz (15:49):
Right.
We're gonna have to wrap things up here.
If you wanna learn more about this,I'd highly encourage you to go do a
Google search or even an LLM searchfor Mural Go-to-Market Alignment Gap.
You'll find the research, it'sungated, it's available, there's
even slides to download of the data.
If you want to help your internal teamunderstand the real problem here and the
impact it's having on revenue attainmentfor organizations that are addressing
(16:12):
it today, definitely check that out.
Bill, thanks so much for joining us today.
Bill Dwoinen (16:16):
Thanks, Matt.
I appreciate it.
And and go Cubs.
Matt Heinz (16:18):
Go.
Cubs go.
I tell you what, that is thecheesiest song I've ever heard and
I love listening to it at the endwhen Cubs win games at Wrigley.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Thanks for joining us for anotherepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
Until next week, have a great week.
We'll see you soon.
All right, well, welcome everybody to another
episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
Excited to have y'all here.
As we get boy toward the end ofsummer we've got college football
starting this weekend, week zero, theamuse-bouche for the fall season and
baseball playoffs wrapping up, Bill.
And while we're just talking about ourCubbies, excited that they've already
taken three of four in a five game seriesagainst the division rival Brewers.
(00:38):
So, go Cubs.
Just very excited to have you all here.
If you're here live, joiningSales Pipeline Radio in the middle
of your workday and workweek.
Thank you for making us part of your day.
You can be part of the show if you havea comment on LinkedIn or YouTube as
we do this, we will see those, we canbring those on screen, we can reference
those, we can answer your questions live.
And thank you for doing that.
If you're watching or listeningon demand, thank you as well.
(01:00):
Over 500,000 people have downloaded andlistened to Sales Pipeline Radio, and
excited to have you as part of that group.
Every episode past, present, and futureof Sales Pipeline Radio, always available
at Sales Pipeline Radio dot com.
Excited today to have BillDwoinen, who's the Chief Revenue
Officer of Mural join us today.
We're gonna talk about orchestration,go to market efficiency.
We're gonna talk about why pipelineis always important, but is so
(01:25):
different than it's ever been before.
Bill, thanks for joining us.
Bill Dwoinen (01:27):
Yeah, no worries.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it and I appreciateit even more having a discussion
around the Cubs and one of thebest of all time Ryne Sandberg.
So no, thanks for having me.
Matt Heinz (01:36):
Oh my gosh.
I was sitting on my back decklast night watching the end
of that game and thinking, arewe gonna walk in winning runs?
And it was a little more nailbity than I wanted, but I was
very happy with the outcome.
You guys did some really interestingresearch earlier this year, sort of
focused on what, I guess I would callGo-to-Market orchestration and the
real gap for a lot of organizationsand how their Go-to-Market teams
(01:58):
align and how that affects theirability to drive predictable pipeline.
I'd love to have you dig into theresearch and just what you hear from
your customers in terms of the challengesthey're addressing on that front.
Bill Dwoinen (02:10):
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think there's, if you
take a step back and say, Hey, whyall of a sudden is this bubbled up?
You know, why have we, you know, doubleclicked into orchestration or what's
the impact of being misaligned is thata lot of the pain points have bubbled
up, right with it getting harder toretain customers, harder to go find new
(02:30):
pipeline and, you know, I kind of makethis joke is like, I think it's, you
have to move on beyond collaboration.
So, I know I came from a place thattaught me a lot about sales, right?
Salesforce one of the biggest, youknow, sales machines out there.
And it, looking back, I kind of realizedlike, wow, I was at the center of the root
cause of the problem because you wouldhave, you know, 20, 25 people, you know,
(02:54):
in deal calls or, you know, all this workhappening in silos, but nothing really
would happen to move things forward.
And so it wasn't necessarily,we were meeting all the
time, we talked all the time.
Even here we really have started tobe biased towards the action of like,
we are not getting off a call unlessthere's a call to action, because
(03:15):
when you really look at that, we knowthat that really slows teams down.
But Matt, what has reallystood out is what does it mean
for the customer experience?
And so when account teams reallylack action or lack consistency
it really creates this fragmentedexperience for customers.
Right?
And, and one of the biggest pain pointsis always around account transitions.
(03:37):
Like you wanna applaud organizations thatpromote from within or people move on.
But, you know, I feel that probably.
A dozen calls last year around, Hey,this is the fifth rep in two years.
You know, you're not gonna stop that.
What you can stop is just what's theexperience for customers throughout this
process and when teams aren't syncingup and bias to action it's just such a
(03:58):
bad experience for customers, and that'swhere that kind of burnout comes in.
Matt Heinz (04:03):
Can we talk about the difference between playbooks and systems?
Because I think that's really at theheart of doing this consistently, right?
I think a lot of, companieshave, you know, definitions of
what a lead and opportunity is.
Can you talk about just thegap many companies have between
playbooks and systems and why asystem approach is so important?
Bill Dwoinen (04:21):
Yeah, it's great.
I mean, I feel like it, it's sucha powerful question because, you
know, the pipeline playbooks youknow, haven't evolved much, right?
I think it's more about the ways in whichyou go about getting pipeline, and I
think what organizations are doing, whatwe're doing, what other teams are doing.
We just spent a few days inChicago to say, Hey, let's take a
(04:42):
step back and really think aboutsome of the problem statements of
what we're trying to solve for.
And then build systems aroundit, then build plays, right?
Whether it's the ability to measurethe plays or having the right tools.
Like how do you take some of the lift offof, you know ,as A CRO, I get probably
30 prospecting, you know, 30 emails a dayfrom people and like how do you allow more
(05:06):
strategic approaches to that, whether it'sAI automation, so I think companies have
realized, I think two things, Matt, it'slike both sides of it is you can't just
throw a tool at every challenge, right?
You know, you just can't throwsomething on top of something and then
throw something on top of something.
You have to take a step back and say, Hey,what are we truly trying to solve for?
Or what are we truly trying to do?
(05:27):
And for us, a big one is reallybreaking into the different LOBs,
the different lines of business.
Right.
And it's not, you know, talkingto different leaders at companies
like Glean or ServiceNow, you know,Salesforce, Slack, everyone kind of
has the same thing of like, well, wereally need to break into new lines of
business to find new revenue streams.
(05:47):
But you have to take a stepback and say, do we have the
right systems, the right tools?
Do we have the right materials?
You know, do we have the rightmessaging to go create pipeline?
You can't just take something andflip it sideways and say, okay, now
we're gonna do it for the same thing.
And so I think organizations have reallystarted to notice like, wait a minute,
our pipeline efforts aren't working right.
(06:08):
Let's now take a step back and say.
Who are we trying to go after?
What are the systemsthat we need to go do it?
What are the tools we need?
What's the messaging we need?
Then let's activate the playbookversus the other way around.
'cause I do think, Matt, it wasactivate the plays, then put systems
and tools around it when it's too late.
Matt Heinz (06:28):
Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Bill
Dwoinen and the Cubs fan andChief Revenue Officer at Mural.
And I'm looking at the other sideof my screen here at this study
that you guys did in the Spring.
This, Go-to-Market Alignment Gapis what you talked about here.
And there's one stat that I wannapoint out that sort of stands
out to me as sort of this notonly a gap between Go-to-Market
teams, but a gap between leaders.
(06:49):
And people on the frontlines doing the work.
So when you guys ask the question,how often do you experience
misalignment between your Go-to-Marketteams, 31% of decision makers says
that happened on a daily basis.
46% of individual contributors saidthat happened on a daily basis.
So there's a wide gap between what leadersperceive and what those doing the actual
work are facing on a day-to-day basis.
(07:11):
Sometimes I describe this asthe difference between jazz
hands at sales kickoff and whatactually happens Tuesday morning.
Yeah.
Can you talk about that Go-to-MarketAlignment Gap and why it's so
important for leaders to understandat a almost atomic level, the
gaps in how work gets done?
Bill Dwoinen (07:28):
Yeah, it's a great call and I was really blown away by the data
because when you, when the account teamsare out there doing work, you know, they
really are the ones that feel the pain.
And so when marketing andproduct and sales aren't aligned.
It really makes it complicatedto go to a customer.
It makes it complicated toaccelerate deals, but I think
leaders have this belief thatour, hey, our teams are working.
(07:48):
Right.
I see the number of meetings and that'swhy we kind of have this, you know,
me, this kind of inside way of sayingit, of like, I think there's too much
collaboration, it's part of the challenge.
It's that so, from a leader's perspective,I see my teams back to back all day.
I see, you know, I made the example,last year that within any given
deal motion, there was 12 differentdocuments we were collaborating in.
(08:11):
And so I think leaderssee work that's happening.
Yeah, so they assume that,hey, our teams are working.
Right.
How many times have you heard leaderssay like, our teams are out there
grinding, you know, they're with ourcustomers, and the teams are like, I'm
not getting what I want from Product,and Products like our salespeople
aren't out there telling a good storyand the customer is just kind of in the
wings and, and feeling the pain of it.
(08:32):
And so that's where you kindof see some of that numbers.
And I think all, I've been guiltyof that sometimes throughout my
career where you're just like,yeah, my teams are working.
And then what we're trying todo internally is like, how do
we activate that feedback loop?
Yeah, so there's more alignment happening,and so when we show up in front of the
customer, it is aligned, it is consistent.
And then also when you look at,not to pivot away from pipeline,
(08:53):
but just the drain on employees,like the number of repetitive
meetings because of misalignment iswhat's really kind of driving that
burnout people are experiencing,especially in an asynchronous world
where teams are very distributed,whether you're in an office or not.
Teams are very distributed.
Matt Heinz (09:10):
Well, the amount of work is a really terrible way of
measuring, you know, your productivity.
You know, we've seen a lot of examplesof what Gartner calls collaboration drag.
Yeah.
Which is how hard it is toactually get work done, and
it's impacting speed to market.
It's impacting revenue impact.
It's impacting morale.
Right?
Yeah.
And so simply just doing more, I mean,all the investors we talked to, all the PE
(09:33):
firms right now are all do more with lessand they're pointing at AI as a solution,
AI is an ingredient to that, but if youdon't have a systematic way of breaking
down the work that needs to get done, soit gets done effectively and efficiently.
You're not only gonna not hit yournumber, you're gonna reach a, a
constraint in what you can get doneand you are going to lose your best
(09:54):
people, who are getting frustratedand burnt out by having done it.
Talk about the importance of thoseworkflows and systems to that
get more done with less messagethat's so forefront right now.
Bill Dwoinen (10:05):
It's, you know, it's such a, it's such a, a powerful statement
that you made because the drain, theway that you kind of referred to it is
I just feel like, you know, I alwayssay some of my least productive days
are when I'm back to back all day.
You know, like, you actually need time tobe productive and think and move forward.
And so, that drain theimpact that has in employees.
(10:27):
And what I love about what we're doingat Mural is I think there's two things.
Number one, we're using our,you know, what's the saying?
Drinking our own Kool-Aid, right?
Yeah.
Bring the visual component.
to the sales process, right?
There's, if you think about, you know,we started on this journey about, okay,
you know, we can build this cool visual,account discovery template that teams
can use and everyone's in the sameplace, and you can create automation.
(10:50):
They can pull in, you know,information about a customer from
their 10 K so on and so forth.
Then we started to realize that we hadto move away from a moment in time.
Say, collaboration is fractured throughoutevery part of the customer journey.
And so how do you not only surfacethe right information, how do you
make it more visual and clear overwho's owning and taking action, and
(11:11):
then what we've seen in our companies.
That have that kind of that matrix orgmap, where they have seven clouds, you
know, whether it's like a LinkedIn thathas four or five different product lines.
All selling to the same customer oryou know, a Salesforce, Oracle, IBM
that has multiple clouds is when peoplejump into the deal midway through.
(11:32):
That usually is creating more work.
And what we're seeing is whenyou bring in this visual, kind
of actionable way of working.
The teams are able toget caught up sooner.
And so someone joins a deal motion andthere's not seven calls to get them
brought up to speed, or a leader jumps in.
And so that's what we're doing internallyand what we're bringing to our clients
because the retention part is so critical.
(11:53):
And that goes back to the, youknow, how are you impacting
the customer experiences?
And so retaining your top talent ismore, it's always, there's always a
component of can they be successful?
Do they have a great career path?
Do they feel compensated for, youknow, the work that they're doing?
But it's also like, canI get work done here?
Do I feel supported anddo I have alignment?
Matt Heinz (12:15):
Yeah, those are what you just said.
Those three things are socritical to making this work.
Right.
And I think you've seen it.
I've seen it in the work we'vedone the before and afters, right.
Of companies that are really justin fire drill mode all the time.
To becoming more efficient, moreeffective, faster to market.
Employees that feel like they'recontributing better, their
morale is better, their team,their collaboration is better.
For a lot of companies, especially largercompanies that are sort of facing that
(12:38):
collaboration drag challenge right now.
Knowing what to do next canbe kind of intimidating.
There's a lot of moving partsthat have to be addressed here.
Everything from workflow taxonomy,RACI, DACI, like thinking through all
the methodology of getting that right.
Where should people start?
Where's a good place for go to marketleaders to start to chip away at this?
Bill Dwoinen (12:58):
Yeah, it's a great question and it's tough, but I
think if you take a step back, right?
So if I, I'm gonna date myself abit here, but when I first got into
sales, it was like a desktop computer.
Desk, phone, and spreadsheets.
Now we live in a world where theaverage sales person has, you
(13:19):
know, 47 tools at their disposal.
They have Sales Nav, they have, youknow, ZoomInfo, they have Pocus,
they have this, they have that.
They have all these different things.
And I think what got us here, Mattwas never truly taking a step back
to try to solve for the challenge.
And so we were on a call with a CEO ofa pretty notable company a few weeks
(13:41):
ago, and we walked him through kind ofthis idea of more collaborative selling.
And he was like, you know what?
We've been struggling with accountplanning for years, and we kept
throwing stuff on top of it.
You know, we like kept throwinga different solution at it.
Right.
Because you can do accountplanning anywhere, right?
You can do it in a million places,but it's really taking a step back
(14:02):
and saying, what are we trying tosolve for with account planning?
What are the current challengesand how do we truly address it?
And so what I would encourageleaders to do is, and it's hard,
you know, you're closing themonth, you're closing the quarter.
Then you're planning for next year.
Like it is fast, right?
It just, it feels like you, youknow, it's hard to take a step back
and sometimes it's annual plan.
(14:23):
Sometimes it's end of quarter, butthere's gotta be a point in saying, okay,
what do we think are the key moments intime throughout a customer life cycle?
There's the account plan, there's customerdiscovery, there's, you know, team
selling, there's multi-cloud selling.
There's even, you know, we've startedto use Mural for mutual close plans.
You know, how do we bring a morevisual component versus tagging
(14:44):
a client in a static Word doc?
And so my answer, Matt, is like, howwe got here is people kept throwing
tools at the, at the problem versustaking a step back and saying, what
are we truly trying to solve for?
How can we meet our people andcustomers where they are, and
how do we make it frictionless?
(15:04):
How do we pull in AI and workflows?
And I'm not sure if you've seen someof the kind of articles floating
around, but you know, AI for thesake of AI is not helpful, and
so it's how are you intentional?
Like one of the things I love, weshowed this to a customer today,
is like in our account plan, youuse AI to bring in all the top line
things about what a company does.
(15:25):
And so now you're dangerousgoing into a first call,
whether you're an SDR or a CEO.
That I know what just came fromcompany X's 10 K, and so it really is
taking a step back and saying, whatare we truly trying to solve for?
Then comes your point about systems.
Then comes your point about plays.
It just used to be, let's throw abandaid on it, but it's caught up.
(15:46):
It's like running into the windand the wind keeps getting faster.
Matt Heinz (15:49):
Right.
We're gonna have to wrap things up here.
If you wanna learn more about this,I'd highly encourage you to go do a
Google search or even an LLM searchfor Mural Go-to-Market Alignment Gap.
You'll find the research, it'sungated, it's available, there's
even slides to download of the data.
If you want to help your internal teamunderstand the real problem here and the
impact it's having on revenue attainmentfor organizations that are addressing
(16:12):
it today, definitely check that out.
Bill, thanks so much for joining us today.
Bill Dwoinen (16:16):
Thanks, Matt.
I appreciate it.
And and go Cubs.
Matt Heinz (16:18):
Go.
Cubs go.
I tell you what, that is thecheesiest song I've ever heard and
I love listening to it at the endwhen Cubs win games at Wrigley.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Thanks for joining us for anotherepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
Until next week, have a great week.
We'll see you soon.
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