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.

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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

There is a moment after every good diagnosis when people get impatient.

You’ve looked at the data. Found the performance gaps. Examined the market. Challenged the assumptions. Identified what isn’t working.

Now everyone wants to do something.

Launch the campaign.

Buy the platform.

Change the sales motion.

Move the budget.

But this is exactly where I think growth teams need to be careful.

In Episode 9 of Walking the Dogs, we’re moving from Gauge to Reframe in my Growth Framework.

Imagine I’m walking Dusty and Tanner and realize we’ve taken a wrong turn. I can walk faster, shorten the leashes, or get annoyed that one of the dogs keeps pulling.

It doesn’t matter.

We’re still headed the wrong way.

Reframe is the moment when you turn the map around.

Instead of asking, “What should we fix?” start with:

🐕 What does winning look like 12 to 24 months from now?

🐕 What must be true for that future to happen?

🐕 What needs to change this quarter?

🐕 What should we stop doing because it doesn’t get us there?

Years ago, I used to bring teams around a large whiteboard when we were working through a difficult business problem and say, “Let’s walk the dog.”

I’d put my incomplete thinking on the board. Other people would challenge it, add what I missed, and help turn the mess into a plan.

That’s exactly what Reframe is designed to do.

Gauge gives you evidence about today. Reframe turns that evidence into a point of view about tomorrow.

And perhaps the most important part is deciding not only what deserves more investment, but what no longer deserves any.

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.

Because strategy isn’t simply deciding what to do.

It’s deciding what you’re willing to stop doing.

Watch Episode 9 of Walking the Dogs: Turning the Map Around: The Future-Back Moment.

Then ask your team one question:

Are we optimizing the route, or have we actually agreed on the destination?

Read more here. Future-Back Growth Strategy: Turn the Map Around Before You Execute - Lisa Schwartz

Thanks for reading Walking The Dogs- Grow Revenue, Navigate Marketing Teams, Frameworks and Systems! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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A large total addressable market can make almost any growth plan look credible.

But a billion-dollar TAM does not tell you how many companies fit your product today, whether you can identify the right buyers, which channels can reach them, or whether your team has the capacity and budget to win them.

Listen to Walking the Dogs Podcast Episode 8 by Lisa Schwartz, Your TAM Is Probably Lying to You, and ask whether your team can name the exact accounts in its obtainable market.

Companies are racing to deploy copilots, predictive scoring, automated personalization, generative content, and AI agents.

The assumption is that adding intelligence will create better decisions.

But AI does not repair missing context.

It reasons from the information it can access.

Imagine asking an AI assistant to recommend the best walking route for Dusty and Tanner. It suggests a perfectly logical three-mile loop through the park.

The problem is that it does not know Tanner reacts to bicycles, Dusty stops for every squirrel, one trail is closed, the pavement is hot, I only have thirty minutes, and one of the dogs has already walked three miles.

The recommendation may be logical.

It is still wrong.

The problem is not the intelligence.

The problem is the context.

The same issue appears when a company asks AI to identify its best accounts, recommend the next sales action, predict churn, personalize a campaign, or allocate marketing spending.

The system may see CRM data but not sales conversations.

It may see campaign activity but not product usage.

It may see customer behavior but not revenue history.

It may see internal records but not market changes, competitor activity, hiring signals, or organizational events.

That is why AI readiness should begin with the Gauge stage of the Growth Framework.

Before automating a decision, companies need to audit their structured, unstructured, and external data. They need to assess whether the information is complete, accurate, consistent, current, governed, accessible, and connected to business outcomes.

The goal is not perfect data.

The goal is a unified context layer that allows employees and AI systems to work from the same customer reality.

In the newest episode of Walking the Dogs, I explain how to evaluate that context before AI confidently leads your company down the wrong route.

Watch the episode and ask yourself:

What decision are you asking AI to make before checking whether it has the complete customer and revenue context required?

That may be the next dog you need to walk.

Subscribe to receive future Walking the Dogs episodes and practical lessons from the G-R-O-W-T-H Growth Framework.

Also, visit the Lisa Schwartz blog for more resources.

Welcome back to Walking the Dogs.

It’s Lisa here, out with Dusty and Tanner, working off some canine energy and thinking through another growth problem.

Today, we are talking about dashboards.

Most companies do not have a shortage of marketing data.

They have campaign reports, attribution tools, CRM dashboards, budget spreadsheets, and quarterly reviews.

What they usually do not have is one trustworthy view of what is working, what is wasting money, what the organization can actually execute, and where the biggest growth gaps sit.

A dashboard tells you what happened.

A Gauge audit tells you why it happened and what to do next.

Dusty and Tanner are giving me a good example right now.

Both dogs are pulling.

If I only looked at the obvious metric, I would conclude that I have a leash-tension problem.

But that does not tell me why the walk is going badly.

Tanner may be reacting to another dog.

Dusty may be following a scent.

One leash may be too long.

A harness may be loose.

Or I may have chosen a route with too many distractions.

The visible result is the same, but the right solution depends on the cause.

I have to stop and inspect the entire walking system.

That is what a 360-degree Gauge audit does for growth.

It looks at four connected areas: performance, spend, technology, and team capability.

First, performance.

How much pipeline are you creating?

How quickly is it progressing?

Where are conversion rates breaking down?

What are your win rates, sales velocity, retention, and expansion rates?

Then break those numbers down by segment, product, channel, motion, and journey stage.

Blended averages often hide the real problem.

Second, spend.

Where is the budget actually going?

What does each channel, agency, platform,

event, content program, and

headcount investment produce?

Not just clicks or impressions.

What does it contribute to qualified demand, pipeline,

revenue, retention, or expansion?

And are you still funding programs that no longer support

the company’s priorities?

Third, technology.

Look at the CRM, marketing automation, intent data,

enrichment, attribution, analytics, and customer-success platforms.

Which tools are redundant?

Which are underused?

Which are disconnected?

Where is data unreliable or being moved manually?

A sophisticated tool on top of a broken process simply creates a more expensive broken process.

Finally, team capability.

Does the team have the strategy, content, creative, media, ABM, lifecycle, RevOps, analytics, data, and AI skills required to execute the plan?

And are roles and ownership clear?

The audit should produce five things:

A KPI scorecard.

A capability assessment.

A marketing-operations audit.

An opportunity heat map.

And a measurable baseline against which improvement can be judged.

Back to Dusty and Tanner.

If I shorten one leash, adjust a harness, and change the route, the walk may improve immediately.

That does not mean the dogs suddenly became better trained.

It means I diagnosed the system instead of blaming the most visible symptom.

Companies often do the opposite.

Pipeline falls, so they launch more campaigns.

Conversion drops, so they redesign the website.

Sales slows, so they buy another tool.

Those actions may be reasonable, but without a baseline, you do not know whether you are fixing the cause or reacting to the symptom.

So here is the question for your walk today:

What part of your growth system have you been trying to fix without first inspecting the entire leash, route, equipment, and walking team?

Until next time, keep walking the dogs.

Most companies say their revenue teams are aligned.

They have shared meetings, dashboards, systems, goals, and planning sessions.

Yet Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success often behave like four separate companies.

Marketing generates the lead.

Sales restarts the conversation.

Product delivers the product.

Customer Success discovers what the customer thought they were buying.

The customer carries the burden of connecting everything.

That is not alignment.

It is a broken operating model.

I see a much simpler version of this problem when I walk Dusty and Tanner.

Dusty may be heading confidently toward the park.

Tanner may be investigating a hedge in the opposite direction.

I may be attempting to keep the entire operation moving toward home.

Announcing that we are aligned does not fix the walk.

I have to adjust the route, manage the leashes, respond to the signals in front of me, and keep everyone moving toward the same destination.

Revenue alignment works the same way.

It requires shared objectives, clear roles, visible customer signals, defined handoffs, service expectations, and a next action when the customer does something nobody predicted.

In the latest Walking the Dogs episode, I introduce the One Revenue Team™ journey map.

The exercise begins with one specific customer segment.

Not the entire market.

One segment. One growth objective. One complete customer journey.

Then map what Marketing, Sales, Product, onboarding, Customer Success, and the expansion team must each do to move that customer forward.

The most important part is not the diagram.

It is identifying where the customer changes hands without a clear owner, readiness trigger, context, or next step.

That is where growth stalls.

It is also where the Gauge stage of the Growth Framework becomes valuable.

Gauge helps you inspect the revenue system you actually have, rather than the one described in the strategy presentation.

The dog to walk this week is simple:

Choose one customer segment and trace its journey from the first sign of interest through adoption and expansion.

At every transition, ask:

Who owns this?

What must be true before ownership changes?

What information moves with the customer?

How quickly must the next team respond?

What happens when the customer takes a different path?

You may discover that your teams are not operating one journey.

They are each managing their own short stretch of sidewalk.

Watch the new episode and consider this question:

Where does your customer journey currently change hands without a clear owner, trigger, or next step?

Read more at Your Revenue Team Is Not a Team If Everyone Is Running a Different Play - Lisa Schwartz One Revenue Team: Fix Broken Marketing and Sales Handoffs