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?

Every once in a while, Tanner sees a squirrel, another dog, or a bicycle and decides our walk needs a new strategic direction.

That is when one practical question matters: Who is holding the leash?

Companies create the same kind of chaos when leadership adds enterprise ABM, product-led growth, customer expansion, partner marketing, and AI operations to the plan without testing whether the team can execute them.

You may have ten priorities and enough capacity for four. You may have adequate headcount but the wrong skills. You may have several contributors but no end-to-end owner.

For every priority growth play, ask: Who owns the complete outcome? What specialist skills does it require? Does the team have protected capacity? Are the processes and handoffs clear? Do the data and systems support the work?

Fewer initiatives, properly staffed and clearly owned, will usually beat twenty initiatives competing for the same five people.

Watch the episode here: https://youtu.be/bS_9B_0aI1U

Read the full breakdown: https://www.lisa-schwartz.com/growth-strategy-skills-and-resourcing/

Then ask your team: Which growth priority are we pretending is resourced when it is not?

Dog walked.

Many companies are trying to run ABM, inbound, events, product-led growth, partner marketing, outbound, customer expansion, and executive thought leadership at the same time.

Every motion has an internal advocate.

Few companies have enough resources to execute all of them well.

When I walk Dusty and Tanner, I can choose the short neighborhood loop, the long one, this is how growth companies do it…Check it out here Your GTM Strategy Has Too Many Routes - Lisa Schwartz

Dusty can catch a scent during one of our walks and become completely committed to following it.

He does not stop to ask whether it is fresh, useful, or leading us anywhere we actually want to go.

Companies do the same thing with their ideal customer profiles.

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.

They define an ICP, put it into a PowerPoint deck, and continue pursuing it while the market changes around them.

The product changes.

Competitors change.

Buyer priorities change.

Budgets change.

Technology changes.

But the ICP remains untouched.

In the newest Walking the Dogs episode, I explain how to walk your ICP around the block and challenge the assumptions behind it.

🐕 Which customers have the highest win rates?

🐕 Which customers implement fastest?

🐕 Which customers expand and renew?

🐕 Which customers generate the strongest economics?

🐕 Where are sales cycles painfully long?

🐕 Where is the product only a partial fit?

I also make three distinctions that growth teams need to understand:

TAM is who could buy.

TRM is who you should realistically pursue right now.

ICP is who you must be able to win.

Once you update the ICP, your positioning must change with it.

Your buyer needs to understand what important problem you solve, why it matters now, how you differ from the alternatives, and what evidence proves that you can deliver.

The goal is not to chase every scent in the market.

It is to identify the right customers, with the right problem, at the right moment, and give your company a credible reason to win.

Watch Updating the Scent Profile: ICP, Positioning, and the Competitive Lens here:

Dog walked. For more resources visit my website at Your ICP Has Gone Stale: How to Refocus Your Market and Sharpen Your Positioning - Lisa Schwartz

#GrowthStrategy #IdealCustomerProfile #Positioning #B2BMarketing #GoToMarket #WalkingTheDogs

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.

Brand teams often say they need more awareness, stronger thought leadership, greater share of voice, or category leadership.

Those may be worthwhile ambitions.

But you cannot manage an adjective.

When I take Dusty and Tanner to the dog park, Dusty sees dogs, people, noise, movement, and interesting smells everywhere.

Learn this and more perspectives. Listen...

Marketing generated the leads.

Sales completed the activities.

Customer success protected retention.

Product increased usage.

Finance protected margin.

Every team hit a metric, but the company still missed its growth goal.

That can happen when teams share a destination but operate with different priorities.

It reminds me of walking Dusty and Tanner.

Dusty sees a squirrel. Tanner finds something interesting to smell. I am trying to get home.

Technically, we are all on the same walk. Operationally, we are pulling in three different directions.

Businesses do the same thing when every function optimizes its own dashboard without connecting its work to one shared business outcome.

That is why the Reframe stage of my Growth Framework includes choosing a North Star metric.

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.

The North Star is not website traffic, impressions, MQLs, or the number of campaigns launched. It should represent an important growth outcome that multiple teams can influence.

Depending on the company’s real constraint, that might be:

🐕 Qualified pipeline in the priority market

🐕 Pipeline velocity

🐕 Expansion ARR

🐕 Time from qualified opportunity to revenue

The North Star does not replace every other KPI. It creates a hierarchy underneath one primary outcome so marketing, sales, customer success, product, RevOps, and finance can see how their work fits together.

In the latest episode of Walking the Dogs, I explain how to choose the metric, connect supporting KPIs to it, and expose the initiatives that no longer support the company’s growth strategy.

One destination. One primary outcome. One leash keeping the entire pack moving in the same direction.

What metric is your company actually walking toward?

Check it out and get additional resources at Your Teams Can Hit Every KPI and Still Miss the Growth Goal - Lisa Schwartz