Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Coordinated Management of Marketing and Sales Matters

Left to their own devices, marketing and sales departments simply won’t align themselves. Yet as I pointed out earlier, companies need better internal alignment to accelerate revenue growth. Three of the characteristics we found in our survey suggest just how important it is to coordinate marketing and sales to achieve superior revenue growth. But doing so requires management time, attention, focus, and metrics.

First, the CEO must hold both marketing and sales accountable, and more closely use equitable metrics for each to determine individual advancement and compensation. However, the survey found that in terms of daily operations, it’s desirable to have a reporting structure through which the company’s operational management devotes direct attention to marketing and sales. As shown in Figure 8.3, companies with higher growth rates tend to have their head of sales and head of marketing report to the COO—that is, to a more operationally focused executive—than to the CEO. We explore marketing and sales reporting relationships in more detail in Chapter 25.

FIGURE 8.3 Companies tend to grow faster when the head of sales and the head of marketing report to an operationally focused executive.