How We Set Our Marketing Goals At Drift For 2017

The Simple Framework We Used To Set Team Goals

We spent two days last week up in Vermont for our 2017 company kickoff at Drift.

And outside of skiing, eating, drinking, and bonding at the world famous Pickle Barrel in Killington, the main goal of the trip was to set our team goals for 2017.

So much is written about goal setting (and David Cancel and I recently did a whole podcast episode on setting goals) — but I thought it might be helpful to break down exactly how we did it and the simple process that we used.

It’s still early for us at Drift, so up until now we’ve set goals across each team, but they were generic things like “generate 2,000 new inbound leads this month.”

As the team continues to grow (now 25 people, 4 full-time marketers), we wanted to find a framework that worked for us to set goals for the year and get everyone on the same page — but didn’t take months to create or require a spreadsheet and years of historical data to go off of.

So we landed on using V2MOM.

V2MOM is the framework that Marc Benioff created in the early days of Salesforce, and we chose it because well, it fits all of the criteria I mentioned above:

It’s super simple and easy to digest (and it’s not the worst idea to copy anything Salesforce does on the operations side of things).

V2MOM stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures.

“While a company is growing fast, there is nothing more important than constant communication and complete alignment. . . Combined, V2MOM gave us a detailed map of where we were going as well as a compass to direct us there” — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in Behind The Cloud

After David Cancel walked through our company V2MOM with the entire team, we all split up into our functional areas to create V2MOMs for sales, marketing, customer success, and each one of our product teams.

To make things easy, we gave each team a printout with some helper text for each section.

The helper text we gave everyone is the first line of each section below in italics — and then for the sake of this post, my commentary on how to think about each one:

Vision: What we want to accomplish this year.

Everyone’s sheet had the same vision — our revenue target for the year (ARR).

This keeps everyone focused on the same goal, and it serves as a good reminder as you fill out each item on the sheet: Does this support our vision of getting to $X in revenue this year? If not, scrap it.

Values: Guiding principles. These guide everyday decisions and tradeoffs.

What are your guardrails? What things are important to you?

Here are the values we came up with for our marketing team:

• Be human in everything we do.
• Always think: how can this be 10x? (email, content, design, copy)
• Attention to detail: the little things make a big difference.
• Transparency (internal + external)
• Just ship it: perfect is the enemy of good.

Methods: How we’ll get there. The actions we’ll take to achieve our vision.

These are typically the 2–3 big priorities for your team. For example, we want to make sure our internal knowledge scales as we continue to grow our marketing team, so one of our key methods is doubling down on playbooks (continuing to document, share, and teach out key processes inside of the team at Drift, like how we send email, how we think about SEO, how we create videos, etc.)

Obstacles: Things that could prevent us from achieving our vision.

Push harder on this than the first two or three ideas that you come up with. It’s good to be critical and take an outsider’s perspective on the business here — what would prevent you from hitting your goals? Hiring? Budget? Traffic slows? One person is a bottleneck? Competitive noise? Etc.

Measures: The measurable outcomes of our work.

Push yourself to come up with measurable goals here. For example, reduce churn, improve reliability, and get more people using X feature are not good measures.

Reduce churn by 5%, improve reliability to 99.999% uptime, and get 10,000 people using X feature are good measures.

We set measurable goals for leads we’ll deliver to sales, monthly active users, website traffic, blog traffic, podcast downloads, and video views.

Once each team filled out their V2MOM, they added it to a shared page on our internal wiki so anyone can see each team’s V2MOM and update throughout the year.

• This post from Salesforce was very helpful in coming up with items of each section.
• I would also recommend reading Behind The Cloud if you’re interested in how V2MOM helped guide Salesforce.
• If you want to hear more on how we think about goals at Drift, check out the podcast below:

PS. Curious about Drift? Learn more right here (that’s our website).