Chapter 71Building Your Influence Internally

To succeed as a CBDO, you'll need to work effectively with all functional executives to set long‐term goals, based on your knowledge and insight of the ecosystem, and you'll have to help them understand the connection between their long‐term goals and how they influence short‐term decisions. These conversations are not always easy since your CBDO perspective often equates to being the counterpoint or counterargument in many conversations/decisions. And at a minimum, your voice is one that will advocate a change from the status quo. For example, at Return Path, working with others on the Executive Committee (EC), I spent most of my time within the EC's GTM subcommittee, which included the Head of Sales and Head of Marketing, and I had to ensure that our short‐term decisions did not negatively impact our long‐term outlook. Sales is often compensated on quarterly goals (making the numbers) and there is no penalty to those quarterly commissions if the deal is detrimental down the road. Channel conflict is a topic I will explore more deeply later on but I will cover a bit of it here. There's a tension between how salespeople get compensated and what is best for the company valuation in the long term and I've had situations where we negotiated a “winning” deal behind the back of a partner, but in doing that we ended up creating a large roadblock for quarters and years ahead. Short‐term win, long‐term consequences. So, having those tough ...

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