This week’s episode of Move the Needle features Kyle Lacy – a seasoned SaaS CMO now at Docebo (with past stops at Salesforce, Seismic, and OpenView).

This one hit home for me. The conversation was equal parts marketing therapy and hard truths. 

If you’ve ever felt frustrated that Marketing still gets treated like an order taker – or caught that side-eye in the boardroom – you’re not alone. Kyle’s been there. And he’s built a career on flipping that dynamic.

Let’s dive in! 👇

In this edition:

• The 4-Part Alignment Framework Every SaaS CMO Needs
• Resources to Support Your Pipeline Reporting
• New Survey: What Go-To-Market Teams Track When Clicks Disappear
• Upcoming DBUG Event: Beyond Attribution
• This Week’s Silo-Smashing GTM Reads

🎙️ The 4-Part Alignment Framework Every SaaS CMO Needs (w/ Kyle Lacy)

“We say yes to everything. And when you do that, you train a team to feel productive by checking boxes instead of driving revenue.” — Kyle Lacy

Kyle Lacy, now CMO at Docebo and formerly of Salesforce, Seismic, and OpenView, has seen the inner workings of every kind of GTM org. And he’s built a framework for shifting Marketing from execution arm to revenue engine.

He calls it CREM, and it stands for:

• Communication
• Revenue
• Enablement
• Metrics

And while that might sound like just another acronym at first, what Kyle delivers is the crème de la CREM (yeah, we went there!) – a framework packed with both tactical guardrails and cultural resets any marketing leader can implement.

Communication

CREM is designed to position Marketing as the GTM hub, not a spoke. It focuses the team on business outcomes, not busywork. 

To make that happen, Kyle gives his team permission to say “no” to tasks that don’t drive revenue. It’s tactical, but they gate incoming requests with a form that asks the requestor to detail the business case.

Kyle also suggests that Marketing owns the narrative (and the numbers) around pipeline – and the key to success is communicating up, down, and across – with consistency. And that leads right into the next point.

Revenue

Maybe Kyle’s strongest point is this: if you’re not aligning to pipeline and bookings, your metrics don’t matter. 

“You can’t celebrate top-of-funnel wins when bookings are down. It’s tone deaf. Celebrate as a team. Lose as a team.”

Kyle suggests that Product Marketing should own product-specific pipeline targets, especially in multi-SKU orgs, while demand gen owns pipeline by source and segment. 

Either way, pipeline ownership sits with marketing.

That doesn’t mean Kyle ignores brand metrics all together (he’s actually cooking up an idea for a brand score metric). But “if you’re not clear on pipeline and bookings, the board won’t care about your [brand] campaign.”

Enablement

Kyle takes a much broader view of enablement than collateral for sales. 

Instead, he makes the case for product enablement: 

• Marketers should be demo-certified
• Onboarding should include product training for every employee
• Internal content enablement should be standardized across every department

Real alignment comes when everyone – marketing, product, CS, sales, execs – deeply understands the product and can communicate its value.

Metrics

This is where alignment lives or dies. 

Kyle doesn’t just talk about GTM alignment – he’s obsessed with fixing what breaks it. And the #1 thing that breaks GTM team alignment?

No single source of truth.

“If people are pulling different reports and metrics, friction is inevitable. Alignment starts with agreeing on what numbers we track and where we track them.”

Kyle advocates for marketing to own the source of truth. But more importantly, he stresses the need for:

• One centralized place for reporting
• Alignment on metric definitions
• Written and signed go-to-market SLAs (like a contract)

Also… marketing is hard 😅

Kyle’s advice isn’t soft. But it is delivered from a place of empathy.

He reminds marketers that this role is one of the hardest in the business because of the context switching, the expectations, and the emotional labor.

“It’s okay to raise your hand and say, ‘I need a break’ or ‘I’m having a hard time.’ No matter what you’re measuring, it’s important to take a break sometimes.”

📚 Resources for Your Pipeline Reporting

Ready to level up your pipeline reports? Browse over a dozen plug-and-play dashboards.

👉 Must-Have Sales Marketing Pipeline Dashboard Templates

Don’t have time to play around? We’ll build a personalized dashboard for free. 

👉 Get a Free Dashboard Setup

📊 New Survey: What Go-To-Market Teams Track When Clicks Disappear

Dark social and AI overviews are stealing all the clicks. It’s making attribution reporting… murky, to say the least. 

What are the metrics GTM leaders are monitoring to predict pipeline now? 

👉 Take the survey and you may get featured in our report!

🚀 Upcoming DBUG Event: Beyond Attribution

On Friday, September 12, join Databox CEO Pete Caputa and a circle of experts and peers for a 60-minute live session unpacking the survey findings.

• Discover which metrics best predict pipeline in a zero-click landscape
• Share your attribution successes (and failures)
• Walk away with practical ideas for tracking dark-funnel impact

👉 Save your spot

🤝 This Week’s Silo-Smashing GTM Reads

Share with a colleague and tear down those walls! 

• Why PMM Should Own a Number – Kyle Lacy’s post that sparked the CREM conversation
• Metrics That Matter: 5 KPIs for GTM Teams (Mural)
• GTM Metrics That Matter: How to Track the Health of Your Strategy (KRP Consulting)

👀  Coming soon!

Next time we’re featuring a special edition with our own CEO, Pete Caputa. He’s been squirreled away writing over 100 pages of a brand new Predictable Scale methodology, and he’s going to join Move The Needle to tell us all about growing revenue with confidence.

📣 How'd we do?