Every once in a while, Tanner spots something during our walk and decides we have a new strategic direction.
A squirrel. Another dog. A bicycle. Apparently, anything moving faster than I am deserves immediate pursuit.
At that moment, the route we planned matters less than one practical question: Who is holding the leash?
Leadership teams face the same problem. They agree on a growth strategy, select several go-to-market motions, approve the plan, and assume execution will follow. Then the strategy meets the operating reality of limited people, missing skills, unclear ownership, competing priorities, and disconnected systems.
That is when the plan starts pulling in five directions at once.
Strategy without capability is just a PowerPoint.
This episode of Walking the Dogs focuses on an essential part of the Reframe stage in my G-R-O-W-T-H Framework: determining whether the company has the skills, capacity, ownership, processes, and tools required to execute the growth strategy it has chosen.
A Growth Strategy Is Also a Capability Commitment
Every strategic choice creates an execution requirement.
If leadership chooses enterprise account-based marketing, the company is also choosing to fund and coordinate account selection, research, tailored messaging, media, sales activation, measurement, and program ownership.
If leadership chooses product-led growth, the company is also choosing to invest in activation, onboarding, product analytics, lifecycle communication, experimentation, conversion paths, and sales handoffs.
If leadership announces that the business will become AI-first, it is also choosing to address data ownership, workflow design, quality control, system integration, governance, and human oversight.
The strategic decision and the capability requirement are inseparable. Yet companies frequently approve the first without examining the second.
🐕 The route may look good on the map, but someone still has to walk it.
The Difference Between an ABM Strategy and an ABM Aspiration
Consider a leadership team that identifies enterprise ABM as a priority growth motion.
The idea sounds focused. The company will target a defined set of high-value accounts, coordinate marketing and sales, and build relevant engagement across the buying committee.
But what does that decision require in practice?
🐕 Account selection and data: Someone must define the ideal customer profile, construct the account model, validate the data, and keep the list current.
🐕 Account intelligence: Someone must identify business changes, buying signals, technology use, organizational priorities, and other reasons an account may be ready to engage.
🐕 Relevant content: The team needs more than a generic ebook. It needs messages and assets that reflect the account, industry, buying role, problem, and stage of the decision.
🐕 Distribution: Someone must decide how the company will reach the account through paid media, outbound, executive engagement, events, partners, or coordinated channels.
🐕 Sales orchestration: Marketing and sales need agreed actions, timing, handoffs, and follow-up. A campaign is not coordinated merely because both teams received the same account list.
🐕 Measurement: The company needs to track account engagement, buying-group coverage, sales activity, opportunities, velocity, win rates, and revenue impact.
🐕 End-to-end ownership: One person must be accountable for keeping the motion connected across functions.
If nobody owns these capabilities, the company does not have an ABM strategy. It has an ABM aspiration.
The same test applies to any priority growth play. A strategic label does not create the operating system required to deliver it.
Buying AI Does Not Create AI Capability
The AI conversation has made this gap even more visible.
A company declares that marketing, sales, or the entire business will become AI-first. It buys a platform, runs several demonstrations, and asks teams to start using it. That may create access to technology, but access is not capability.
The harder questions begin after the purchase.
Who owns the data the system uses? Who redesigns the workflow instead of simply adding AI to a broken process? Who checks the quality and accuracy of the output? Who connects the system to CRM, marketing automation, customer data, and reporting? Who decides which decisions can be automated and where a human must remain accountable?
Without answers, the AI strategy becomes another tool looking for an owner.
Buying an AI platform does not magically create AI operations. The company still needs clear use cases, process design, integrations, governance, measurement, and people who understand how the work should change.
Subscribe for more resources on this topic here
Walk the Dog With a Capability Map
When I say, “Let’s walk the dog,” I mean taking a rough strategic idea around the block until the team has examined it from enough angles to turn it into an informed plan.
Years ago, I used a whiteboard exercise to help a team determine how to win more commercial work. We began with what we already knew, mapped the people and stages involved, identified who we needed to reach, invited the team to complete the thinking, and finished with specific actions and owners.
That is the same discipline needed here.
Start by writing the company’s priority growth plays down the left side of a whiteboard. These might include enterprise ABM, product-led growth, customer expansion, partner marketing, category creation, or AI-assisted lifecycle marketing.
Across the top, list the capabilities those plays require. Depending on the plan, the list might include:
🐕 Creative and content
🐕 Demand generation and media
🐕 Product marketing
🐕 Revenue operations
🐕 Data and analytics
🐕 Lifecycle marketing
🐕 Partner marketing
🐕 Sales enablement
🐕 AI operations and governance
🐕 Program management and executive ownership
Then walk each growth play through five questions.
1. What do we already do well?
Look for demonstrated capability, not confidence. Which work has the team delivered successfully before? Where do results show repeatability? Which processes are already documented and supported by reliable data?
2. Where do we have a meaningful skill gap?
Be specific. “We need better content” is too vague. The real gap may be technical product storytelling, executive thought leadership, customer proof, industry expertise, conversion copy, or product education.
3. Where is ownership unclear?
If three functions are involved but nobody is accountable for the outcome, the work will stall between meetings. Contributors can be shared. Accountability cannot.
4. Where is one person covering several specialist roles?
This question usually produces the most honest discussion. A demand generation leader may also be expected to run paid media, administer the marketing automation platform, write content, manage events, build dashboards, support sales, and experiment with AI.
That is not a job description. It is an execution bottleneck.
5. What must we stop, delay, simplify, automate, outsource, or hire for?
The purpose of the exercise is not to create a long hiring request. It is to make deliberate tradeoffs so the most important work has a realistic chance of succeeding.
Sometimes the Growth Problem Is Math
Leadership teams often interpret weak execution as a performance problem. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the plan is mathematically impossible.
The company has ten priorities and enough capacity for four. Every initiative receives partial attention, timelines slip, quality declines, and the team spends more time switching contexts than completing work.
Or the company has enough people but the wrong combination of expertise. A team built for enterprise field marketing cannot instantly become a product-led growth team because leadership added PLG to the annual plan. Both motions can contribute to growth, but they require different skills, operating rhythms, data, content, and customer experiences.
Headcount does not automatically equal capability, and activity does not automatically equal capacity.
That is why prioritization must include resource math. For every priority, leadership should know the required owner, contributors, estimated effort, dependencies, and capability gaps. If the total demand exceeds the available capacity, something has to change before execution begins.
More Hiring Is Not the Only Answer
A capability gap does not always require a full-time hire. The right response depends on how strategic, frequent, and enduring the need is.
🐕 Stop or delay lower-priority work when the team is spread across too many initiatives.
🐕 Simplify the play when the original scope is larger than the expected value justifies.
🐕 Train current team members when the capability is adjacent to their existing strengths and will be needed repeatedly.
🐕 Automate repetitive work when the process is stable, rules are clear, and human review can protect quality.
🐕 Consolidate agencies or vendors when fragmentation is creating more coordination work than expertise.
🐕 Use specialized external expertise when the need is important but temporary, or when the team needs help building the capability before taking ownership.
🐕 Hire when the capability is strategically important, continuously needed, and better owned inside the company.
The question is not simply, “Do we need more people?” The better question is, “What is the most effective way to secure this capability for this growth play?”
A Practical Growth Execution Scorecard
Before approving a major growth initiative, score it against these six dimensions:
| Dimension | Question to answer |
|---|---|
| Ownership | Is one person accountable for the complete outcome? |
| Skills | Do we have proven expertise for the work required? |
| Capacity | Is there enough protected time to execute it well? |
| Process | Are the workflow, decisions, and handoffs defined? |
| Technology and data | Do the systems and information support the motion? |
| Measurement | Do we know how progress and business impact will be evaluated? |
Use a simple red, yellow, and green rating for each dimension. Any red area should trigger a decision before launch. Close the gap, reduce the scope, change the sequence, or stop pretending the initiative is ready.
This turns a vague resourcing discussion into an operating decision.
Fewer Initiatives, Properly Staffed
The goal of this Reframe exercise is not to build the largest team. It is to expose the distance between the route leadership selected and the organization’s ability to walk it.
That distance is where strategies fail.
The team may need sharper prioritization. It may need a different skill mix. It may need clearer ownership, better systems, outside expertise, training, or a new hire. Often it needs a combination.
What it cannot afford is the assumption that a presentation, budget line, or software purchase creates execution capability by itself.
Fewer initiatives, properly staffed and clearly owned, will usually beat twenty initiatives competing for the same five people.
So put the priorities on the whiteboard. Map the capabilities. Name the owner. Test the capacity. Make the tradeoffs. Then send the follow-up that assigns the work and brings the dog home.
Dog walked.
Next time, we will look at what happens when everyone has the right skills but still is not walking together.
What growth strategy is your company expecting people to execute without the skills, ownership, or capacity required to make it real?
Watch Episode 9 of Walking the Dogs, Who Is Holding the Leash? Skills, Resourcing, and Execution Reality: https://youtu.be/bS_9B_0aI1U
