All right, you guys, I'm really excited about today's guest. I've got Joelle Kaufman here, the CEO of GTM Flow. Joelle, how are you doing today? I'm great.
How are you? Super, super excited. So let's start, I want to hear all about you and how you became the CEO, but let's start with GTM Flow. What is it and how did we get here? Sure.
So GTM Flow is a revenue catalyst consultancy, but what does that mean? So what I have discovered after 25 years in Silicon Valley, launching companies, creating categories as a CMO and CRO is that we all want growth, we all want revenue, that's oxygen. Right? And there are, and I've listened to some of your podcasts and looked at what you do, there are lots of strategies for generating demand, generating opportunities, but what it all comes down to at the core are really two things. One, you must have a product people want and know which people really need it.
That's number one. And number two is you must be intentional about how you lead people because all the work to create all of that demand, close it, serve those customers and delight them is actually going to come down to people. Even if your product is very, very techie, ultimately people have a question, they're dealing with people.
Ultimately people have other needs, other requirements, they're dealing with people. And more often than not, we are not deliberate about how we lead people. So that's been my 30 year passion and really the secret of my success was I could mobilize and build teams that could do amazing things and generate qualified, quality opportunities and build brands.
And that led to growth and really good outcomes and exits. So what I decided to do in the last four years was create a consultancy where I work with leaders, usually CEOs or heads of sales or heads of marketing, on how they lead and how they are ensuring they are delivering the right product to the right people and those people are positively delighted. Okay.
I've got, I've got a lot of followups. I'm really excited by this. So as a leader myself and one who's looking to get into the product game pretty soon, I think this is, I might be, this might be like too inside baseball for me.
I might be just asking questions just for me, but I think the audience will get a lot out of it as well. When you talk about helping leaders lead a specific way, is that, is there a structure to that? Is it more of like leaning into who they are earnestly, a little combination of both, you know, without, you know, giving away the secret sauce, can you... Oh, I'll give away the secret sauce. I don't mind.
If that's all it took is telling you, it'd be easy. So first off, let me answer your second part first. Every leader is most effective when they are authentically themselves and there is no best way to be a leader.
I was asked by the president of a very well-known tech company. His natural style is very, and connected and, you know, what you might say is soft, right? He's what we call a harmonizer in the world of process communication, right? He cares about how people are connected. And he said to me like, Joelle, am I the wrong profile to be the president of this company? And I said, no, it's your superpower.
And the reason it's your superpower is people work for you and they stay with you because they know you care about them. They know you will do right by them. And that is awesome.
But there are downsides. So however we lead, we have to be authentic to ourselves, but we have to be very aware of how we manage our own emotions and our own stress. So that's the, if you will, put on your mask first, right? That you have to understand if you're stressed, if you're triggered and you will be triggered, you'll be triggered three times in this conversation.
You're all through the day, it just happens. If you don't know how to manage that, then you're not leading at the best you possibly can be. So number one, know how you naturally communicate and lead and use that, cultivate the superpower and manage the stress indicators.
Okay. Number two, part of your question was, there are actually, I have a gift for your listeners if they want. I have a PDF, I call it the five levers leaders must pull every day for growth.
So I'll tell you what the five levers are and then I put it, I'll put it up at GTM flow slash scaling through structure with a dash between all. So it's just for your listeners. So you're welcome.
So the five levers are number one, focus on alignment. One could argue that the entire job, I can argue why it's not, but the entire job of you leading your organization is alignment. Are we all focused on the same goal, the same outcomes? Because if we're not, we're actually competing with each other rather than with the market.
So number one, what's important? I can ask, and I run this as part of my service, my consultancy, I will do a survey and in the instrument that people are filling out, the first questions are about what are the top three most important goals for the company and what are the top three most important goals for your team? Nobody gets it right. Nobody is always aligned. So that is the job of the leader.
There's nobody else who gets to do that work except you. Number two, clarity. We must make it clear.
That often means we put it in writing. If we put it into a notion, a coda, a slack, it doesn't matter to me, but it's much clearer if we put it in words and people say, wait, Austin, did you mean that? And we can dive into it. Jeff Bezos is actually infamous for the six-page memo.
He won't have a conversation about a strategic initiative, or he wouldn't when he was CEO, without a six-page memo that detailed it and everyone in the meeting was expected to have already read it and he spent the first opening of the meeting rereading it. Because when we write, we clarify our thinking. So after alignment comes clarity.
Lever number three, you got to be ambitious. Not insane, but ambitious because we're all here to play and if we hire the right people, we're playing to win. Well, what does that look like and how fun could that be? So we set the ambition, we set the tenor.
Number four is we tell them why winning matters. We set the purpose. You run an agency, great.
Why is that helpful? We talked when I listened to your podcast about helping thousands of clients build big pipelines. Why does that matter? Well, because pipeline leads to revenue and revenue is oxygen. So you're in the business of helping companies thrive and that matters.
You've got to keep reminding people. And the fifth is your job is to help them have a growth mindset. And a growth mindset is very commonly talked about in education, but it matters a ton in work.
For example, I made a mistake. I didn't handle that negotiation well and we're not going to get that deal. Okay.
The growth mindset says, I just had an opportunity to learn something that doesn't work and I got an opportunity to try some different techniques and next time I'm going to learn from that and this is what I'm going to do differently. So rather than just beating myself up after, oh yeah, I feel bad, I didn't get the deal. That sucks.
Maybe I don't get a commission. That really sucks. But what can I use it? I tell people, never waste a failure.
Never waste a mistake, right? Like what a waste. What gold is in those five levers, my goodness. Wow.
And I love all of those things and obviously when you hear somebody explaining it like that, you're kind of like self-evaluating, right? Like, oh, I'm okay at this. We use EOS. So like some of that stuff is good, especially for a personality like mine.
I'm whatever they call the visionary archetype, which sounds awful to call yourself. But that's their words, not mine. And I was reading the book that kind of talks through it the other day and I realized that it had something on there I'd missed the first time, which was that oftentimes ADHD, which I have big time ADHD.
And so I always look at my leadership and get excited about my ability to motivate and get people excited and do all of that. But when it comes on to like the hands-on day-to-day management, I am horrible. Like I'm the worst manager.
I only have three people report to me. They are all super high performers and I just trust them completely. But I always kind of start like, you know, self-evaluating.
Well, oh my gosh, how about, should I be in their lives more? Should I be in other people's lives more? And it's into that thing where you start kind of recognizing that maybe time doesn't equal impact. So, you know, I, I tend to kind of look at it like where, where I can win and I know that I can be most of value. And then I realized that leadership isn't this like one person does it thing.
And so it's kind of helping other leaders lead in their way and lean into them. That's what I found is like even just like the most like thrilling thing when you watch people utilize some techniques you maybe taught them and like make change, like watching like your lead, the people under you lead, I feel like is one of the, it was just, it's just riveting. It's, it's amazing.
I agree. And so how do you, how do you get, how do you kind of get that trickle effect? Obviously it starts with the CEO, starts with the head of sales and then kind of goes down. How do you get like that, that alignment, I guess, across the board? So I'm a big believer in a predictable cadence for that.
So there is a time. So you, you're very creative. My guess is the knock on you is Austin's always got another idea and we can't finish one thing because Austin's got another one.
Yeah. Right. And then the three people who work for you act a little bit like buffers, like, okay, that was a real idea we need to consider.
And these were things to just put in the idea bucket and we'll come back to. So let's talk about time. When I ran teams and when I work with people who are running teams, I say, look, I want you to set a calendar for the year.
The calendar is going to look like this every year, at least once, maybe twice, we're going to slow everything down. We're going to reflect and we are going to do the visionary thing. Where are we? Where do we want to go? Great.
And we are going to refine that to no more than five possible goals. I prefer three, but if you five and they are ambitious and they are inspiring and each of the five, we can call them an objective, you can call them a goal, you can call it a V2 mom, I don't care, is going to have measurable results and an owner for each of those results. And that's how we're going to know if we're making progress towards our goal.
Okay. Once a year, maybe twice, once a quarter, we are going to sit down and look at how we did for the whole quarter, reflect what went well, what could we learn and do better, that growth mindset and reset our metrics and maybe our goals for the next quarter. Okay.
So now we have a quarterly meeting and an annual meeting. Every six weeks, we're going to have a very extended check-in. Have we learned something that down-prioritizes something and up-prioritizes something else, something from the market, something from our customers, something from the mind of Austin, and we're going to make a deliberate choice.
But we do that at six weeks. And then every week at our staff meetings, we have a dashboard and we are going to look at how we are progressing on those metrics. And what we want to talk about is what exceeded expectations, it's moved, it's green, that's awesome.
How do we do that? And what's red? Because what's red unlocks the most powerful thing a leader can ever say. You ready? How can I help? That's the most powerful thing. How can I help? What do you need to succeed? My job as a leader and as a leader of leaders is to ensure you have the full opportunity to succeed.
And if things are getting in your way from succeeding, and Austin, that can mean personal things, right? Sometimes people are like, I have an issue with my kid. It's thoroughly distracting me. And I can't actually work at the level I want.
Okay. That's really awful. I really feel for you and your kid.
And I know why that would be really distracting. I've been there. So either we need to shift the importance of what it is you own, or we need to get more resources to pick up what you can't do right now, because once this tempest passes, I know you'll be back.
So let's support you, right? How can I help? What's going on? The worst thing a leader can do is when things are going to the red, say, Austin, I expected more. What, what is the problem here? Because then you're just going to hide stuff, right? Like, let me just make sure we don't know. I'm going to hide everything.
Now that doesn't mean you don't hold people accountable. I'll share another secret that I do is with people. When we do that goal setting and people commit to a goal that I want to be ambitious, I do it publicly.
Yeah. They want to succeed. And for me to think they look good, they really want to look good in front of their peers.
So your name's on it, Austin, you owned it. You took it on and you're the one who's going to tell us about it. Good or bad, bad.
We're here to help. Good. We're here to celebrate, but it's on you.
There's a team sport. We'll support you, but you're the owner. What I do is I create that culture at the top and I ensure that the managers below me or the leaders below me, whichever, they are also running on the schedule.
So we do the vision thing all together. We do the big goals and then they do the same thing with their teams. What is our team's goal and how does it contribute to which of these bigger goals? And we ladder it throughout the organization.
Now that doesn't mean that a high level metric is suddenly your goal. That doesn't work because you're not in the business of making me successful. But the high level metric, we say, what are you doing? What are the goals you have and how do they contribute to that metric? So it sounds like a lot of overhead.
I've done it on a Google doc. I've done it on a spreadsheet. I've done it with Airtable.
I've done it with Wrike or with WorkBoard. It doesn't matter. The tool is irrelevant, but when it's on the calendar and everybody knows that this is going to happen every week and every six weeks and every quarter and every year, they actually work towards it.
Everyone does better with a deadline. So it's like the silliest little thing and it probably took me too long to explain. But if you do that and just put it in the calendar and you as the leader set the tone and do it, alignment starts to happen because in all of those meetings, the six week ones, the quarterly and the annual, you will have disagreement.
Misalignment will be obvious and you can't try to sweep it under the rug. You want it. You want it to surface.
You want to have needy, deep conversations where people advocate for different priorities and then you have to choose. You can choose to make that a democracy if that's your thing. You can do it autocracy if that's your thing.
I don't care how you do it. But you got to choose. You can't leave the room without having chosen.
Wow. I, um, well, what does, I mean, you're, you're talking to my language. Our, our company, our first core value is I am a problem.
I am the solution. And so it's anytime something goes wrong, it's here, here's how I screwed up and here's how I'm going to make it right. And I have to do that from the top.
So anytime there's bad news, you know, I mean, I feel like even, you know, in unfortunate situation where you have to let somebody go, you know, the first thing to say is, listen, I'm going to go back. I'm going to look through my hiring process. I'm going to see how this happened.
Um, and where maybe I could have missed something because I didn't want, I don't want to do this to other people. That's right. Um, and so, and then when you do it and you see everybody else get on board, it becomes really easy.
Now that's an example of me patting myself on the back and the opposite side where sometimes I am foolish and I'll jump into a project, um, which I should never ever do. Um, I slack and I email and I ask everybody to do these things for me. And there's this beautiful project management system that is super, super organized and right.
And if I just went from the top and did everything the way I was supposed to, it would get everybody else to be able to do it as well. I'm not very good at that. So I do recognize the difference in, you know, in, in how things work when everybody like sees you doing the thing that you want them to do.
And then when they see you not do it, uh, it feels terrible. Right. Cause like you know it when you're so at least when you're self aware.
Right. Um, and you're just like, Oh my gosh. So I, I mean my, you know, some people would say, well, get in there and learn.
Right. No, my answer is to just run to the hills and never get involved in the middle of projects again. I don't want to screw up.
So maybe there's something in between. Right. Because so you're not a Reich and process and structure guy.
Okay. I need it. I know that I need it, but you're not that guy.
Okay. You're a creative idea guy. The energy hits you.
So what I would coach you is say, again, I want you to be truly you. So all those ideas rule lever to clarity, write it, refine it, think about it. Take all that energy.
And I don't care if you write it neatly the first time, like just pour it out. Talk to an AI. I don't care how you do it.
I have all these thoughts. What did I just say? There you go, Austin. Okay.
Let me refine that. What did I mean? What are the issues? Now I have a doc. However long it is now.
I know I suck at Reich. I'm so excited about this. Now I need a partner, a teammate where I can say, look, I just had all these ideas, I want to do this the right way, but I'm not going to be inputting stuff into Reich, I'm not good at it.
I didn't learn it. It's just not my thing. I guarantee there's someone in your company who loves Reich.
There's somebody for whom it is their love language, right? And so that person might be a good partner for you to say, hey, can we partner on this and can you help me introduce this to the team in a way that could be productive? And great. Now we have, and they may say like, I'm not putting all that in. Okay, great.
But how do we introduce it to the team in a way that's productive? So now we get the benefit of your creative energy. You've clarified. So you've tightened it up.
And then you're like, look, I'm weak here. It's just a weakness that somebody else is strong. So can we partner? Nice.
I like that. I really like that. Cause I definitely think there's those times where it just naturally I can go in and help with what I do.
And I mean, just even turn the tables on somebody and say, can you help me? All right. Really impact. So this is all fantastic.
So if I, I've got, you know, my audience is a lot of leaders out there, entrepreneurs. And if they're hearing you and going, my gosh, this is great. The way that I am, I guess my, my question is like it, somebody engages you to work together.
How does that, how do you structure that engagement? How, how does that work? So I have really two different ways, but I'm going to focus on one because the other is a subset. I believe that all work is done best by teams and that most of the problems we have come from the dysfunctions of teams. And every team seems to have a bunch of dysfunctions.
So what I have is a six month program called the Team Performance Amplifier. And through it, every team will be extraordinarily successful if you follow it, because leading people is complicated and frustrating, but I have an approach that lets you be you, but it will help you continuously get the best out of your team. Here's how it works.
There is a diagnostic. It's called the Team Performance Assessment. You and your directs all do it.
It's confidential. It's very short. From that, we also sit down, you and me, Austin, and we talk about your goals, your aspirations for this team and the company, as well as the challenges.
I take that, I take the performance to goals that you're going to share with me and the assessment, and I create a six month roadmap called the Team Performance Amplification Plan. Now you have a written plan. Cause by the way, I eat my own dog food.
Right? You have a written plan. There will be too much in there for you to do. So we're going to sit down and prioritize and align on what, how ambitious you are, how much time you have, and what singular thing you are going to do first.
And we're going to meet you and me every two weeks to see how that's going. You tried it. What happened? What'd we see? What's next in the plan? What are we learning? Right? Every month, I'm going to sit down with your team and you.
Now I'm mostly going to watch what's happening because that is great information, but you and I made plan that, Hey, the team has some communication issues. There's a lot of just baggage and we really want to clear the, clear the baggage. So you and I will talk and I'll do a workshop during your team meeting that will clear baggage and then we'll assess how it went.
So we do that at three months, we do another team performance diagnostic, see how we're going. Meanwhile, you can take advantage. I have a weekly, um, web-based learning.
So you can say, look, go over that goal thing with me again. Well, great. I'm going to attend that.
Or let's talk about who I am as a leader and, you know, how do I lean into what comes naturally and deal with what doesn't because I'm a human and therefore I am imperfect. So you get the plan, you get the coaching and you get the online learning and you have, I'll call it 24 seven access to me, but it's actually within 24 hours. I'll respond.
So you can't call me in the middle of the night. Um, I have a chat bot you can talk to. I have email texts because if you're working with me, I am 100% committed to you making this team extraordinary and seeing a dramatic difference from when you started to where you are.
And sometimes Austin, that means dealing with some of the people are coming in and out. People leave, people come. The team must have the integrity to persist even as its members change.
For example, the New York Yankees is the New York Yankees. Even after Derek Jeter and A-Rod retired, they're still Yankees. So that's the kind of team you need to have.
Does that make sense? Oh, a hundred percent makes sense. I there's this great book that I probably not even, I think I've only listed some of the cliff notes, but everything about it made sense. Uh, it's called the captain class to, to go on with the sports analogy.
And it's essentially this guy. He went to all the great teams in the history of the sports and kind of tried to bring it to business. And the one thing he found was there's always this manager who had a good vision, who could, you know, who's just a good coach and knew what he was doing.
And then there was a star player who bought into that vision and, and led and followed the way. And those two connecting is what made the team. And then, you know, the team great.
And then obviously to your, you know, to your, uh, what you were saying with Jeter, you know, then all of a sudden Jeter's gone. And maybe they don't really have as good of a captain and maybe they don't win as many world series. And so that to me is like that, like Lieutenant, uh, um, I guess, uh, I guess stage of, uh, of, of business to me is like absolutely the most important.
And when I find the right people and I'm so lucky to have three of them right now, um, I'm just like, I'm going to treat you like gold because you set the tone that gets everybody else to buy in. And if you're buying into what I'm selling, everyone's going to buy into you and we're going to be able to be so much more productive, uh, because we're all rowing in the same direction. So that's right.
Number one lever. Yeah. I get, I get it completely.
Um, it is. All right. Uh, I always like to ask this question.
It's kind of a last question. Um, and everybody's different, right? I talked to some people and I like, you know, how do you, uh, how do you do your work-life balance? So that's, Oh, hard five o'clock. I never missed a game.
Other people, I'm a workaholic. I like being a workaholic, but how do you, you know, as you've built this career and you've got this great consultancy and how do you structure just you as a person and all the things that you want, uh, out of, out of a day to week, month. That's a great question, Austin.
I really like it. Um, so first off I have three children and I worked all through their lives. So, um, in fact, I joke, I, uh, got a new job four times in three pregnancies.
That's probably a different podcast topic. Yes, it is possible. And one of those times I was seven months pregnant.
It wasn't like I hid the pregnancy. I'm a little person when I'm seven months pregnant, it's not hideable. So, um, and I was very committed to two things, having extraordinary impact on the companies I joined and being a very present parent.
But I also was aware for myself that, um, I'm very achievement oriented. If you think of the, you know, what are your motivations, the triangle achievement, affinity, or power. Achievement's my back.
And I did not want to, uh, realize my achievement needs through my children. That seems pretty toxic. So how did I do me? When they were little, I said, you know, daycare closes at six.
So I have to leave and I have to pick them up and I'm going to be with them for dinner and for bath and maybe stories. But until my kids were in middle school, they went to bed by seven 30 or eight o'clock at night. And then, you know, I'd get back on and make sure whatever I had left undone was done.
Now that focus and alignment and clarity, I got really good at it. Like what's important, what's not. Filter, filter.
Now I was transparent. So I wasn't going to tell you, yeah, Austin, that's important. I'll get that done.
And then, you know, mothball it. I'd actually say, so Austin, I got these three other things. They're higher pressure, higher priority, higher impact.
I just can't get to that thing yet. Can we, we're going to push it off for a few weeks and come back to it. Okay.
Like, I wasn't someone who would have ghosted you. I actually would have said, no, I don't want to go out with you again. Right.
That's just my thing. Um, so, um, so I set these boundaries that I was going to leave and I was going to do bedtime. And if I had to travel, I traveled, but I needed to know in advance.
And then my kids got older and we actually had an au pair because school ended at three 30 and work did.