Sometimes I leave the house with a very optimistic plan for walking Dusty and Tanner. We will take the longer trail. Stop at the park. Get some exercise. Be home before my next meeting. Then I remember the trail has no shade, I brought the small water bottle, and Tanner considers every intersection an opportunity for public comment.

The destination sounded great. I had not worked through what the trip would require.

Companies do this with growth plans all the time.

Leadership agrees on the goal. Marketing builds a campaign calendar. Sales creates an account list. Product continues with its existing roadmap. Finance asks why everybody suddenly needs more money. The company chose a destination. It never mapped the whole walk.

That brings us to Orchestrate, the O in my G-R-O-W-T-H Framework. In Reframe, leadership chose the outcomes, customers, and growth motions that deserve attention. In Orchestrate, those choices have to become an executable GTM roadmap.

Imagine a B2B software company pursuing three opportunities: complex enterprise sales, a simpler self-service route for smaller companies, and customers who prefer buying through an existing technology partner.

Writing “ABM, PLG, and partners” on a slide makes the plan look complete. It is not. For every route, the company still needs to answer:

🐕 Who qualifies for this segment?

🐕 What problem makes the customer act?

🐕 Who participates in the buying decision?

🐕 What message and evidence does each person need?

🐕 Which channels help the customer make the next decision?

🐕 What people, product, data, technology, and budget does the route require?

🐕 Can we support the customer successfully after the sale?

A real roadmap connects the customer from first interest through evaluation, justification, purchase, onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion. It also gives each channel a job.

An executive event might create access. A technical workshop might reduce risk. A partner might provide credibility and simplify procurement. A customer program might support adoption and reveal expansion opportunities. Before leadership approves the spending plan, unresolved questions need owners and return dates. Someone validates the economics. Someone maps the onboarding gap. Someone checks partner readiness.

Episode 1 of Walking the Dogs explains how to leave Orchestrate with three useful outputs:

🐕 A customer-journey blueprint

🐕 A channel priority grid

🐕 A roadmap leadership can actually resource

Watch the episode here:

Then choose one growth priority and walk the entire route. Can your team explain how the customer gets from first interest to lasting value?

Dusty and Tanner are ready for the long trail. This time, I have checked the route, packed enough water, and made sure we can get everyone home.

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Check out the episode here Go-to-Market Strategy, B2B Growth, Marketing Leadership, Customer Journey, Growth Framework

A lot of companies have some version of the same objective:

We need to deploy AI.

That sounds a little like me saying, “I bought an automatic leash. Therefore, Dusty and Tanner are walked.”

No. I bought a piece of technology.

The dogs still need a destination. Someone still needs to choose the route. And when Tanner sees a bicycle and bolts, I still want judgment attached to the leash.

The same distinction matters in business.

Instead of asking, “Where can we use AI?” ask:

Which growth outcome could AI materially improve?

Maybe sellers spend hours deciding which target accounts deserve attention. The goal should not be to deploy AI account scoring. A better goal would be to reduce the time between a meaningful account signal and seller action from five days to five minutes.

Maybe your website serves dozens of personas. The goal should not be to add an AI chatbot. Define the result: increase qualified visitor-to-meeting conversion from 2 percent to 3 percent.

Maybe customers underuse features associated with stronger retention. The goal should not be to deploy a customer-success agent. Define the result: increase adoption among at-risk accounts by 15 percent and reduce churn.

Once the outcome is clear, the operating questions become clearer too:

🐕 What can AI decide?

🐕 What can it recommend?

🐕 What can it execute?

🐕 Where does a human approve or intervene?

🐕 Who owns the business result?

Customers do not ultimately want software. They want fewer outages, faster hiring, more revenue, lower risk, higher productivity, and better retention.

That is why the more important shift is not from manual work to AI features. It is from software as a tool to results as a service.

In R8 of Walking the Dogs, I close the Reframe stage of my G-R-O-W-T-H Framework with one final question:

What would we design differently if the result mattered more than the technology?

Dog walked.

Next, we move into Orchestrate, where all these choices finally have to work together in the real world.

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Learn more here How to Turn AI Into Measurable Growth Outcomes

If nobody owns the handoff, the buyer gets the work.

They explain what they already watched. Repeat the problem they need solved. Remind customer success what sales promised. Somewhere inside the company, several teams are checking off completed tasks.

The customer is still trying to connect the conversation.

Dusty and Tanner occasionally give me forty-five seconds of perfectly coordinated walking. Same speed. Same direction. Nobody trying to take my knees out with a leash.

I appreciate those forty-five seconds.

In this week’s Walking the Dogs, we look at what it takes to keep marketing, sales, and customer success moving together for longer than that.

Imagine a CIO attends your executive webinar. Three days later, a rep sends a generic introduction because the webinar context never reached them.

Now imagine sales closes a deal around three use cases, but customer success starts onboarding with only “Closed won.”

Every handoff should preserve what the buyer has already told you.

This is R7 in Reframe, Walking the Dogs Podcast #15 where we connect the growth choices we’ve made to the journey our teams need to support.

My suggestion: pick one journey, put it on the whiteboard, and walk it through together.

🐕 Name the owner of the next action.

🐕 Identify the context that must travel with the buyer.

🐕 Agree on the timing and what happens if progress stalls.

Then assign the fixes. Someone needs to carry those decisions out of the meeting.

Dusty and Tanner can choose interesting directions all afternoon. I still have to get the whole group home.

Read the full post: https://www.lisa-schwartz.com/b2b-funnel-orchestration/

Watch Episode 15: Walking in Sync: Orchestration Across the Funnel.

What handoff does your team need to walk through this week?