Rocks vs. Sand framework…
As businesses scale, keeping GTM teams aligned can be a complex challenge. We asked Laurabeth Harvey, former President of Lattice and Intercom, how she prioritises and maintains focus across functions to sustain momentum.
She introduces us to the “rocks versus sand” framework—a powerful tool for prioritising what truly moves the needle while managing the day-to-day noise.
Forme Partners#Leadership#GrowthStrategy#ScalingStories
As your revenues growing, your business expands, sometimes it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that sales, marketing and success are all aligned and kind of rowing in the same direction. And my experience, all of those important go to market functions really need to be aligned and working together to drive to the best outcomes. One of the frameworks I always found really helpful with my teams is a concept called rocks versus sand. Rocks are your most critical business priorities and they've got to be tied to needle moving metrics. Sand are all the, you know, kind of important day-to-day or. Things that may crop up or good ideas, but often the sand are not the things that are gonna really move the needle on your business. And so I always like to talk to my teams about rocks versus sand and make sure that we are really focused on driving and prioritizing the rocks in our business. And usually I like to kick off the year by bringing a sales marketing success together and aligning on three to five key rocks or business priorities for the year that also have metrics that we're trying to drive underneath them. And then I ask leaders in quarterly reviews or day-to-day. To ensure that we're really having the discipline to make sure that everything we're working on is really tied to the rocks, we tried to talk about them at all hands and bring them to life as much as possible, whether it's in weekly forecast reviews, etcetera. So that we keep re anchoring to the most critical things in the business. And example of this is one of your business rocks for the year might be re accelerating new logo acquisition and maybe the metrics you're trying to move are trying to crack the code on a new key vertical and doubling new business logos or new business revenue year over year. In that particular vertical, maybe you're looking to move the needle significantly on your average sales price or ASP. You wanna make sure that that's one of your three to five key priorities across your entire org and across the year and that in every conversation and every opportunity you're reinjuring to that and any good idea that crops up is in service of moving those metrics.
