Why Strategy Fails Without Execution (And How RevOps Holds It Together) | Nicole Brownell

Most companies, they actually don't have a growth problem. They have a fragmented systems problem or an alignment issue, which is more clearly surfaced.

This episode's going to be about the gap between strategy, which everyone seems to want to tell people about, and execution, which no one seems to want to really do.

I often see sales teams selling products that are actually not the product. Right now, you're going to have yourself a retention problem 30 days after contract signed.

[Music]

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. Today's guest is Nicole Brownell, who is the managing director of growth and value creation at Novo Advisers. She's a seasoned GTM and transformation leader who's helped scale, restructure, and reinvigorate companies through some of their most pivotal chapters. She's been a COO, CPO, CXO, and she's known for cutting through complexity to get systems, teams, and strategy pointing in the same direction. This episode's going to be about the gap between strategy, which everyone seems to want to tell people about, and execution, which no one seems to want to really do, and what it actually takes to build a high-performing go-to-market motion that lasts. Nicole, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Adam. And I'm going to steal that bio. I'll tell you what.

See, I told you the only reason Dale lets me stay.

We'll add some walk-on music behind it. When you go up on stage at some big event, I'm sorry, I'm in marketing land this morning.

I'll be your intro person. I don't even charge royalties.

All right, I love it. I'm in.

Awesome. Nicole, thanks for joining. It's been a bit of time. We've been trying to get you on the show for a while. I know you're busy. So, let's jump into it. The first thing we want to talk about is when GTM looks aligned, but it really isn't. So you've worked at a few complex organizations with good intentions, but misaligned expectations. Where does it usually break first in that organization?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And what I see overall is that most companies, they actually don't have a growth problem. They have a fragmented systems problem or an alignment issue, which is more clearly surfaced. So when we're thinking about go-to-market, I think about go-to-market as married to the overall commercial strategy, which becomes where are we playing and how are we going to win. And then the subcomponent where the fixing can actually happen is where RevOps occurs. RevOps is going to be your playbook on how you're going to win those games. So those are the areas that I see most often overlooked, and it's connected. Often that's going to happen at a leadership level. How are we communicating through the line? What is our narrative? What are our shared values? What are our shared metrics? And how do we translate that forward?

Yeah, that's very interesting. What do most teams confuse with alignment? Like, what else are they thinking is alignment when it's actually not? When we come in and have conversations with people, we're like, "Well, your definition of alignment and my definition of alignment is totally different." Where does that confusion come in?

So I see it in a couple of areas. I'll start initially. Let's separate from product and let's start with each team's goals and alignment, ownership of KPIs. I think that's one of the largest breakdowns I see. Who owns the revenue? We always say sales is going to own the revenue, but then what's marketing's role in that? And as the marketing landscape has changed so much, they need to have an ownership in the revenue as well. Their goal is obviously to be bringing those qualified leads in. Today requires new tactics. So they're not speaking the same language, and we're only putting revenue on sales, and then we're looking at marketing for brand and inspirational. You're just not aligned.

Don't forget MQLs.

Yes, exactly. Right. So that's where having a shared scorecard where each department is laddering up to their contributor and those goals. That's where I also love OKRs over KPIs. So then we have that universal rollup.

So that's the first area that I see. And then that other area of misalignment is going to be right. What is our product? What is the value that it delivers? And then how are we translating that to the front? That is a massive miss, and you know, that really sits a lot of times in product marketing as well as what I think would be this customer success or CX feedback loop. Right? Translating that through line all the way so that we have that value really well defined. Product marketers to me are like unicorns, you know? Very, very rare birds that are able to understand what the customer value is and then how is that received in the process. They iterate on the fly and get those key differentiators. But I often see sales teams selling products that are actually not the product delivery. And then right now you're going to have yourself a retention problem 30 days after contract signed.

Yeah, that's a whole show on its own. Everyone wants to blame CS, then CS wants to blame sales, then sales wants to blame marketing. And I think, listen, everyone has their part. I don't like the blame game, but it starts with who are we targeting, what's the ICP, what are we selling, how are we selling, how are we retaining.

I think what a lot of people get wrong is, you know, we've sold them, we've won. That's great. Now the hard part just started. We have to get them onboarded. We have to show time to value. And we have to retain them.

That's right. Um, when you look at operations, right? You mentioned RevOps when we started. What role does ops or RevOps more specifically play in stitching all of this together? And how do they become that glue? And then I have a follow-up question before Dale gets to anything else he might have.

Okay. All right. So for me, like I said, RevOps, it always is going to start with that commercial strategy. So again, where are we playing? Why or how are we going to win? And now we need to break this down to RevOps. RevOps is not just some operational name. It is a complete system. Right? So it's not one process. It's not one automation. It is a system that works consistently and measurably. So when I look at RevOps, right, I'm going to be in great detail. I'm going to be looking at lifecycle stages, qualifications, my routing, my marketing, my enablement. But really what I want to be doing is connecting my sales to my marketing, my CX, my product, and then most importantly, finance. Right? So a lot of folks operationally, they'll get the other components going, but they don't have finance looped in.

Yeah.

There's your next problem, right? So that's how I like to drill into RevOps. And then from there it becomes right, system setup, shared systems, shared automations, and those shared definitions.

I love it. So my question, and I'm going to perhaps get a little controversial here.

What does RevOps report to?

I like that. So right, I've seen it report all over the org. A lot of times they're going to roll it up into sales, but I think if you roll it into sales, again, you're going to create a disconnect because then people are going to point at sales and be like, "This is a sales problem. This is a sales problem." Your sales team's job is not to set up your pipeline automations. Their job is to follow the process, right? So you can't put that on them. In my former organization, we rolled it into operations, so office of COO. And that allowed us to have consistency across all departments without folks feeling like marketing was coming over the top or sales was coming over the top or CX was dictating. But rather, this is the universal ownership structure. I also love it when you have operations and then you have like an office of PMO. So that's a nice area to run it through, but it has to be hooked in to each department. So I like to have one key leader within each department that rolls into RevOps.

I love it. I think RevOps supports sales ops, supports marops, supports CSOPS. Has to touch finance. I think that if it reports into sales, you have a glorified sales ops. If it reports into marketing, you have a glorified marops. And there's a big difference between sales ops, to your point, setting up HubSpot, Salesforce automations, what I would call more BIS ops, than a true RevOps function. I'm a big believer of it reporting into the CEO. If there is a COO, I think that certainly can make sense. What it can't report into, in my opinion, is like a functional head like sales, marketing, or CS, because then they're monopolizing all the time.

Let's shift gears a little bit. So let's talk about kind of that turnaround playbook, right? You've done a turnaround or two or ten. We've done a few as well. And the mandate that we typically see, and I'm sure you do as well, is like transformation, right? You have to come in and you've got to fix stuff, Nicole. It's broken.

Yes.

Where do you start? What's that first 30 days look like?

Yeah, I mean, again, great question, right? So turnaround definitions are going to be critical. So...

I would say in the first 30 days, let's figure out where we are. Are we in a situation where we've got a 90-day runway, 120-day runway, six-month runway, right? That's going to be the first place I'm going to start because that's going to tell me what lever I can pull.

So if we're in a massive distress issue, we're going to start with the office of CFO and try to get our overhead to a place that's controllable to give as much runway as possible. And then what I like to have right is an evaluation done across the board. I think you have to start right back at ground zero, right? What's my product? Who's my ICP? What problem?

Like an audit.

Yes. Exactly. I would say an audit. Beyond an audit, right? You want to make sure that your strategy is bulletproof. I've seen a lot of circumstances. We had a phone call last week where due diligence wasn't done diligently. That never happens. And so right, maybe the TAM was overestimated or there was a shift in market that caused a massive disruption, one that shouldn't have caused that much disruption, but disruption had that diligence been done diligently. So we want to run those tracks all at the same time. That's how I look at it.

Should we be looking at TAM or should we be looking at Serviceable Addressable Market and Serviceable Addressable Market? I understand in the investor world we're trying to find the next, I don't know, now I guess it's a trillion-dollar business because a billion is not enough. But this idea of a total addressable market is, in my estimation, a fantasy.

Yeah, so.

Is that a failure in the investment world? Is that a failure in the founder world? Where should we be focusing our execution strategy on that?

I mean, I think, great question right? Is anybody going to base their entire model off of TAM? No. But if without your TAM, you're not going to get your SAM and you're not going to get your SAM. So I mean it's a process of metric deduction, right? I think that we're going to use TAM when we're looking for investors. But most folks know obviously you're going to capture 0.00001% of what that potentially looks like. But I always like a moonshot strategy to start with, you know, where do we want to be in ten years, right? Okay, we want to be on the moon. Now, where can we be now? Maybe ten million, you know? So breaking it back that way. How do you like to manage that? I mean, I'd like your answer to that given the work that you all do.

Yeah, it's interesting when we go into places, we hear a lot about TAM and I always shake my head because I think founders or startups or CEOs are afraid to narrow their niche, narrow their markets, because they want to try to capture everything. And in many cases, we want to narrow down to speed up.

Right, so it's like how do we shrink it together because a lot of these organizations, especially when we go in as you're going through that turnaround process, you don't have unlimited budgets, you don't have unlimited resources. So it's like yes, it's nice to have a big TAM. However, if we get into SOM, if we get down to SAM, we can niche down. We could do really good execution on messaging, value proposition, ICPs, and then once we get really good there, then we can start moving up the ladder.

I think it's just scary for a lot of people or a lot of organizations because it's counterintuitive to niche down to speed up. People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

Yeah, I think I like that niche down to speed up, right? I always say slow is fast.

Very similar, right? But again, in my mind, I always start big for my key number and then I break backwards and then build back up again. So just do it two different ways. But that being said, if you're in a turnaround situation, your TAM value in that moment is not where we are, right? We're typically going to be in a place of what's your current market share and what have you lost most recently? How are you going to be able to earn that back? And let's just do small pills at a time so that we can get everything refined and up and moving and then have your breakout strategy.

Love that. So when you come in, you have to be careful not to call the founder, the CEO's baby ugly, right? There's a very delicate balance of like what you're doing is broken. It's ugly. You're amazing. How do you build trust with these kind of functional leaders, these executive leaders, while at the same time driving the urgency of like you need to change or we're going to have a problem?

Yeah, I mean, so I've called some babies ugly, maybe some digital babies, maybe some real babies, but I've definitely done it. But I think the trust piece is key and your reputation number one speaks volumes. So if somebody's coming to the table to work with me, if they're coming to the table to work with Revenue Reimagined, they know your reputation, right? So that's going to be your starting block to be able to build trust, right? I think having IQ that's married to EQ is also going to be critical. Again, depending on what level of turnaround or distress we're in, you got to read the room. If they're in a situation where they see an opportunity to accelerate, typically you've got to creep in a little slow, but you represent light. You represent a breath of fresh air. So it's going to give you a little bit more runway. If they're in a situation where they're facing bankruptcy, they don't want you there. You are not wanted, right? You are a flashlight on the problem. And so now what you've got to be able to do is work with them and show them, look, I'm here to work with you. We're going to solve this regardless. We're going to get you out of this regardless. Outcomes might not necessarily be what you want, but the more information you give me, the more I can get you out of this struggle, and we all know how real that is.

Love it. Yeah, that's interesting. As we transition into another part of this conversation, and we were just having this conversation at Growth Elevated over the last week as an organization, we kind of start 2026 in this mode. There's this concept of strategy and execution. We've talked a little bit about this. We as an organization have decided to get rid of the word fractional just because there's been some connotations around it and a bunch of other things. But we're now managing partners, which is more aligned to our ICPs, what we're doing, et cetera, and goes into more of we want to do execution. We do the strategy then we execute. We get very entrenched. You've been in a lot of boardrooms and in a lot of trenches. What's the real gap between strategic planning and actual execution?

Yeah, I love this topic. And Adam, you know, I really enjoyed your post. You live streamed on LinkedIn and I heard the fractional, the first video in a very long time.

Glad someone saw it. I have an N of one.

Yeah, I love it, right? This is a really huge debate. I've engaged in a number of conversations recently on this. McKinsey put out research a few months ago and they put out their data from last year and what they identified was that 25% of revenue that came in came in from outcomes-based consultants, right? So I think that outcomes piece is going to be key, beyond just fractional work. It's changing the entire landscape of consultancy. In my opinion, I think that AI and generative and automation is what's going to change that as well. I am one of those believers and I'm part of an advisory consultancy, right? We're outcomes focused. I believe if you're not, you're going to have to reinvent yourself. So that's where we're headed. What has changed is, just calling a spade a spade—I probably pissed a couple people off with this, right—is we used to pay consultancy or fractional for maybe you should do a little bit of this in some sort of strategy deck. You're paying this hourly fee and what do you get out of it? You get a deck. That's it. Nobody's going to monitor what's going to happen. Nobody's going to embed themselves with the team. They're not going to take ownership. They're not going to take accountability. So new model. I see value in advisors, consultancy, call it fractional. It's all about what your budget is. You know, some folks don't have a budget for a full-time CMO. Sometimes I don't think you need one, quite frankly. But if they're...

Not in vetting and they don't have accountability and they don't know outcomes, it's going to be unsuccessful. I think it's interesting, whether it's outcomes or whether it's deliverables. I think outcomes are hard depending on the type of operating partner you are, right?

A lot of what we get in initial discovery calls is, "So, Dale, this all sounds amazing. We're going to hire you. You're going to be here 30, 60, 90 days. How much revenue are you going to bring in at the end of that time?" I don't know. Are you going to listen to everything I say? We haven't done the audit yet. How deeply are we going to partner together? Are you going to be the CEO that's going to cancel our weekly meeting every week because you're skiing? That actually happens. This drives a lot of that conversation. Is your sales team going to do what we say? Are we going to need to replace people?

So, how do you balance outcomes versus deliverables? Now, before you answer, the way we have tweaked it is we do everything in what's called GTM sprint, right? So we have desired outcomes that we're going to target for, but we have very clear deliverables every sprint. And it's not a strategy deck, right? We're going to build this, deliver that, train on this, and then do the follow-up that should result in an outcome.

Yeah. But I could tell you what the outcome would be if I was your seller, because I'm betting on myself. I can't tell you the outcome if Dale's your seller. How do you balance that?

I love how you're doing it, right? Because if you're working in sprints, you're working within the organization and you're working on their exact cadence or you're setting the pace car to get them process and accountability. So right there to me, that is actually what I would consider an outcome is getting them on process and an accountability timeline.

I would define upfront what we're looking at. Again, what you said, right? The audit is going to dictate. I often look at my outcomes as my KPIs, right? I'm looking at them as my conversion, as my viewability. So we want to break those down. We should be able to move the needle.

But I do agree, right? Deliverables are going to be critical. And the organization that you're partnering with, whether you're a full-time employee or you're coming in as an operating partner, right, there has to be accountability beyond oneself. Otherwise it's a one-man band. So defining what you need from them upfront is mission critical and then holding them to it, not with soft hands. That's where I'm very clear. If you miss this deadline, we will not get here. This has now been pushed back, right? And in communicating that upfront so you have the right partner.

Love it. Critically important. It's hard, right? Because I think what you said is accurate and I also think what people used to expect was that slide deck. People were very comfortable. We've never done hourly. We've never done slide decks, but I know lots of fractional leaders where the expectation is, okay, you're going to pay me X tens of thousands of dollars per month and what you're going to get is a deliverable of, you know, here's your strategy.

I think to what I said in my post that you alluded to, that was okay in '24. That started becoming not okay in '25. And in '26, I think that everyone who suddenly became fractional when they got laid off and decided to deliver slide decks is going to find themselves unfortunately unemployed because that's not an acceptable outcome anymore. You have to be able to do strategy, but you have to be able to execute and embed.

You're hitting on something, right? I was reading an article over the weekend. My gosh, I'll send it to you afterwards. Got to dig it up. And it was focused on executives and the percentage of them that are strategic and the percent of them that can execute. And it was like something nuts, like only 1% can actually do both.

And I believe that, right? You've got to know how to execute and you've got to know how to deploy. If you can't do it yourself, you need to understand the team members within that organization that are going to be your on-the-ground tactical.

I write quite often about how the landscape is just changing in general and I think that's what the roles start to merge. And I think that's part of that fractional conversation, right? The CMO, your CRO, your chief growth officer, your commercial officer, they're all kind of merging with those shared goals. And to be successful today in 2025 going into 2026, you have to not only be able to work vertically, you have to be able to work horizontally, figure it out, right?

So if I'm going to look for a partner or a fractional partner, they better be able to see and connect the dots down the line.

Love it. Love it. All right, let's shift gears. So operational leadership as we go into '26 and beyond. You are operating in the PE space now. Very interesting space. My wife works for a PE-backed company and seeing the difference in that versus VC-backed versus, it just blows my mind—the differences.

Totally.

What's changing about ops and go-to-market and how they're expected to show up in a PE-backed environment versus anything else?

Yeah, I mean, great question. There's huge differences. Again, we're all getting to the same runway. But I think language matters, right? How your books look matters. It's critical. So a lot of times, right, in those PE environments, you're going to see, you know, cut headcount or slash this or slash that. Things look good on paper, but then there's the humanity of it all.

Wait, PE has humanity? Sorry, just kidding.

You know, as the leader of an organization, somebody that's coming in and making recommendations, you've got to be able to speak at two different elevations. So right, it's going to come down to the numbers, it's going to come down to the books and their profitability, but equally, you have to have a full view of the landscape of the company because you can't just be pulling levers and pressing buttons, right? There's going to be a reaction and consequence. So being able to look through that line.

I think a lot of focus is shifting this year to retention. So we're going to see a lot more focus around, instead of coming in with, "Oh, we're going to grow 40%" or you know, we've got some sort of unicorn, into how are we retaining our current base? How are we showing value, right? What does our NR look like? So we've got to really drill down into retention strategies. We're going to have to look at efficiencies. You know, PE is going to be looking at that. Our banks are going to be looking at that. Our VCs are, but I think it's very well translated into PE.

If you're bringing in new technology to streamline the work you're doing and then taking those employees that are maybe doing some more automated level work and leveling them up. So how much can we do without increasing headcount, right? So opportunities I see sitting there. What are you seeing on your end?

So I think—I don't want to use this word but it's the only word I know how to, and I'll use it because you said slash, so I'll use another term. I find that PE-backed companies, the expectations are more ruthless. It is very bottom-line driven. There is a lack of humanity in some, not all. I have worked with some PE folks that listen, while we have to be ruthless, we do still recognize like these are people's lives we're talking about. Correct.

And we're going to try to give as much notice as we can and at least treat them as human beings while we still very much have the bottom line to tie to.

I think PE has less tolerance than VC for mistakes. I think that whether you are coming in as an operating partner or a full-time employee or whether you're leadership or not, I think the expectations to be much higher, yes, in PE-backed companies and the fuse and tolerance to be much shorter.

Yeah. I would agree with you. And I agree that there should be more scrutiny around the leadership that you're bringing into PE-backed companies, right? They have to again be able to translate with that level of ruthlessness to the shareholders but equally have the empathy, the decorum, and what they need within the organization to make the right decisions, explain them, and keep the team energized. They also have to have the ability to self-reflect in a postmortem.

Yeah. You know, how did we get here? I mean, we're looking at so many companies riffing their staff. Well, how did you get there to begin with, right? Like, what's wrong with the old playbook that it was, "Let's take the funding and then scale as quickly as we can," which actually means hiring people, right? Is that what scaling means now? I'm not sure about that.

You know, I mean, I've had the opportunity to work with you guys for a little while now, and what I'm seeing is you're looking to scale your technology and your workflows, right? So it's not about how do we add more humans.

It's about how do we use this technology for acceleration. So in those PE-backed environments, those CEOs have to look through that lens and self-reflect. That's why there's such high turnover with CEOs. They have very short tenure in PE.

Yeah, yeah.

100%. Really quick, as a followup to this, as we were thinking about it, what advice would you give a founder who thinks they've built an efficient GTM team but can't seem to scale? Like, never happens.

[laughter]

I mean, they all think that they're, you know, "Oh, I've got rock stars. I've got the best people." Right.

So it's funny you say that. I hate that word related to GTM, by the way. I despise when anyone's like, "We need a rockstar."

Yeah, who?

But it's funny as you said that, Nicole, because when we talk to a lot of our clients that we work with, they feel that way in the beginning.

Yeah.

And then as we get into the audit, it becomes very obvious that the facade is a little bit different than what the reality is. And once you get under the covers, they're willing to pull their guard down a little bit. But how do you get to that place as well? I think, okay, so I'm always a data junkie, so I'm always going to go back to the data. Data has this amazing power to neutralize perception.

So yeah, back to ugly babies. If that's what the data is saying, right? This is no longer my opinion. This is what I'm bringing to the table, and now let's strategize through it. Right? Founders, early leadership, largest pain point, honestly, with good intent, is typically they put a new product out, they bring in those rock stars, right? Those folks that they know, their go-tos, and they're going to have really fast early growth. And that really fast early growth gets mistaken for long-term enterprise value, and it's not. And so then they start doubling up and making unreasonable forecasts and starting to think they're going to get to big numbers. And that's where, going back to your question Dale, we see problems is, now again, right, what I kind of started with: most companies don't have a growth problem. They've got a process and alignment issue, and that goes right back to go-to-market. So you're going to see it when they start to stall out, right? And that S-curve is also normal throughout every business. There's no such thing as up, up, and up. It's not happening. That hockey stick nonsense is just nonsense. It's an S-curve. You're going to have ebb and flows, and you've got to be able to move through it. And go-to-market is going to help you move through it. And RevOps, right, should be giving you indicators before you hit the curves.

Yep. And that is the perfect segue into our wrap-up and rapid fire. The first question I have down that I want to ask you: what's the better first hire, Nicole? RevOps or product marketing?

Oh my gosh, this is such a tough question, right? The better first hire. I'm actually going to go with product marketing. I'm going to do it because I want that RevOps person right behind. Let's identify what that value is upfront and that shared narrative so we can start to at least enable our teams with what they need to be successful. And then we've got to get RevOps in. We've got to get them in. Get the foundation right so you don't have to fix it later.

Harder job: COO or CRO?

That's a tough one too. Right? CRO? I mean, I feel for our revenue officers. They are definitely carrying the ball. But your CEO is taking the beating for it. So COO. They're the ones that are not just accountable for the revenue that is coming in. They're accountable for the revenue that is being spent on R&D, the technology, the team, the failures, the breakdowns, the playbooks, everything. COO.

Interesting take. I like it. Nicole, what's the most overrated dashboard metric?

Oh my gosh, I mean, overrated. I have a laundry list of these, right? Metrics. I was going to talk to you guys about some of these today, actually. Clicks, right? Any sort of clickthroughs. I think that's BS. Impressions. I don't want to look at impressions. They mean nothing to me. So I'm going to look at those. And I'm all in. You know, if you don't have the right RevOps system, you're going to have issues with future forecast. So I would say that when I go into organizations or work with organizations that don't have that sales process nailed down, that actually becomes the most unreliable number that we have.

Love it. I love that. Last one, as we wrap up: dream vacation destination.

Oh, I mean, this is like, you know me. I'm a travel freak. But I'm going to just take an easy win. So for me it's always Italy. I love the food. I love the people.

You and me both.

The wine and I like the food. So it works out well.

I love it. Nicole Brunell, thank you so much for joining the show, for sharing your insights, and congrats on the new gig. Excited to see everything that you're going to accomplish in the role.

Thank you. Thank you both for having me today.

Thank you for coming.