Sep 2, 2026 · 43 min · 9 segments
Emily Cates, Head of Go-to-Market Transformation and Operations at Zebra Technologies, has built a career by saying yes to opportunities before having every detail figured out. Starting in HR and…
I always ask people if there's anything in your own life where you feel like, gosh, I really was able to move from agreeing that that sounded like a good idea to getting it done or where maybe you've struggled to do that either way.
But is there a story that you could share for our listeners just to help them get to know you a little bit better? about a time when, let's call it in recent history, you've thought, I would like to do that, but you've had to really work to get aligned and get it done and get over the failure gap.
You know, maybe we'll just touch on the larger vision that the CRO asked me to put together, right? The transformational go-to-market vision.
And again, I reached out to my network to see who else has taken on such a journey.
At the time, it was really hard to find folks who had go-to-market transformation in their title, I will say.
And one of the transformation leaders that I was speaking with, she said, Emily, do not underestimate the how much personal investment you're going to need to make with each of the stakeholders that need to sign off on whatever the transformation is going to be.
She said it is almost like a bit of a sales type of a role, but it's a constant.
You can't just bring it to them once and then we're good, right? You've got to constantly nurture that relationship, nurture that change management individually.
And so I realized, especially with all the time that I've spent in kind of the go-to-market sales space effectively, Effectively, what we're doing on these large transformations, it's a bit of a value selling methodology.
It's a bit of making sure that we really understand the compelling reason or the kind of compelling reason to buy in a sales capacity or a compelling reason to buy in in a transformation capacity.
If we don't understand and are not spending the time with each individual stakeholder to really understand what's the compelling reason for them to make such a shift, for their organization to participate, for them to allocate the resources, whatever the ask is, right, then we're not going to move forward, right? And so I've spent a lot of time really trying to make sure as we began to figure out what this journey was going to look like, that we spent time individually understanding what's in it for them, what's their compelling reason, so that we had all of that out and could start to kind of shape the journey together.
You know, I think another thing that oftentimes stands in our way of moving people forward together is is certainly around helping folks understand that if we bring an idea that's too far baked right up front, kind of the first instance that our stakeholders get a chance to see the presentation or see the recommendation, if it's too far baked, it almost invites a ton of feedback.
It can almost sort of feel defensive in some cases, where if you put inside your mind that you're bringing something that needs to be shaped right from the very beginning, and that the whole point of it is to shape it together, right? If we understand from each of the stakeholders that what's in it for them and their kind of compelling reason.
Then if we invite them to shape it, and this is kind of one of the things that's really now in my philosophy of transformation is that we're going to shape the thing together.
I always ask people if there's anything in your own life where you feel like, gosh, I really was able to move from agreeing that that sounded like a good idea to getting it done or where maybe you've struggled to do that either way.
But is there a story that you could share for our listeners just to help them get to know you a little bit better? about a time when, let's call it in recent history, you've thought, I would like to do that, but you've had to really work to get aligned and get it done and get over the failure gap.
You know, maybe we'll just touch on the larger vision that the CRO asked me to put together, right? The transformational go-to-market vision.
And again, I reached out to my network to see who else has taken on such a journey.
At the time, it was really hard to find folks who had go-to-market transformation in their title, I will say.
And one of the transformation leaders that I was speaking with, she said, Emily, do not underestimate the how much personal investment you're going to need to make with each of the stakeholders that need to sign off on whatever the transformation is going to be.
She said it is almost like a bit of a sales type of a role, but it's a constant.
You can't just bring it to them once and then we're good, right? You've got to constantly nurture that relationship, nurture that change management individually.
And so I realized, especially with all the time that I've spent in kind of the go-to-market sales space effectively, Effectively, what we're doing on these large transformations, it's a bit of a value selling methodology.
It's a bit of making sure that we really understand the compelling reason or the kind of compelling reason to buy in a sales capacity or a compelling reason to buy in in a transformation capacity.
If we don't understand and are not spending the time with each individual stakeholder to really understand what's the compelling reason for them to make such a shift, for their organization to participate, for them to allocate the resources, whatever the ask is, right, then we're not going to move forward, right? And so I've spent a lot of time really trying to make sure as we began to figure out what this journey was going to look like, that we spent time individually understanding what's in it for them, what's their compelling reason, so that we had all of that out and could start to kind of shape the journey together.
You know, I think another thing that oftentimes stands in our way of moving people forward together is is certainly around helping folks understand that if we bring an idea that's too far baked right up front, kind of the first instance that our stakeholders get a chance to see the presentation or see the recommendation, if it's too far baked, it almost invites a ton of feedback.
It can almost sort of feel defensive in some cases, where if you put inside your mind that you're bringing something that needs to be shaped right from the very beginning, and that the whole point of it is to shape it together, right? If we understand from each of the stakeholders that what's in it for them and their kind of compelling reason.
Then if we invite them to shape it, and this is kind of one of the things that's really now in my philosophy of transformation is that we're going to shape the thing together.
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