Good morning leaders!
Over the past few weeks we have been on a mission to help you solve problems:
We broke down Substack and if it can become your new marketing & media system,
The brand problem solving exercise to run with your management teams
And this week is no different.
We have our first article from Kathleen Richardson, Kathleen helps you to stop watching your long-term marketing budget get cannibalised to salvage this quarter's immediate sales targets. Discover the data-backed case for why marketing and sales must report as peers directly to the CEO, and how adopting a shared scorecard is the ultimate key to protecting your strategic vision.
Katleen Richardson is a B2B marketing and commercial leader with more than 20 years in information, data and intelligence businesses, including The Economist Group, Citeline, Evaluate, Informa and Causaly. She writes The Trust Premium on LinkedIn, a newsletter on B2B go-to-market strategy in the age of AI-mediated buying.
Separate Bedrooms, Shared Scorecard: Marriage Guidance For Marketing And Sales
Why Marketing And Sales Should Not Report To The Same Person
Talk to marketers who report into sales, or once did, and you hear the same stories: focus pulled onto whatever closes this period, and long-term gain traded for short-term relief.
The stories repeat across businesses and leaders, so the cause sits in the structure.
When one leader runs both functions, the immediate sales target wins every argument, whichever function that leader came up through. Marketing and sales should instead report to the chief executive as peers, held to the same pipeline and closed-won numbers.
The case is strongest where what you sell is complex, with deals spending three months or more in the pipeline and a buying committee behind each decision.
Separate reporting lines are also the more common choice. SaaStr’s analysis of Pave compensation data on more than 3,000 CMOs found that between 48% and 81% report to the chief executive, depending on company size, and between 5% and 10% to a chief revenue officer.
One Leader Over Both Funds The Immediate Sales Target First
Sales is measured on the current period and should be.
Marketing’s most valuable work pays out over a longer horizon: choosing the segments to win, positioning against the alternatives buyers consider, bringing evidence of customer value into messaging and building the reputation that puts the business on a buyer’s shortlist before any seller is involved.
That shortlist is increasingly built through AI research. G2’s 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers found that 51% now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, and that AI chatbots are the leading influence on which vendors make the shortlist.
That shortlist decides most deals.
The 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025, a survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, found that buyers first contact a seller around 61% of the way through their journey. They buy from a vendor on their day-one shortlist 95% of the time, and the vendor they contact first wins 8 deals in 10. A place on that shortlist is earned by marketing’s longer-term work, from PR and organic social to brand. Marketing also works inside the current period: engaging the full buying committee on open opportunities, giving sellers the evidence for the business case and flagging accounts that show buying signals. That work shortens cycles and lifts win rates, and it survives a squeeze because its return shows up this period. The longer-term work is the hardest to protect when the sales target is under pressure.
The sales target, meanwhile, is getting harder to hit. Bain & Company’s 2026 survey of more than 1,100 senior B2B executives found that 42% missed their 2025 growth targets, up from 32% a year earlier.
The Bridge Group’s 2026 research across 158 B2B companies found that 48% of account executives achieved quota, down from 51% in 2024.
A leader carrying both functions under that pressure reaches for the nearest lever, and the nearest lever is the marketing budget. At the forecast review, pipeline coverage for the coming period is short.
The customer research and analyst programme planned for later in the year are paused, and the money funds a field event for late-stage deals. A few more deals close on time.
A year later the business is missing from the AI-generated shortlists it used to appear on, and that leaves it competing for the 5% of deals buyers award to vendors outside their day-one list.
Each decision was defensible when it was taken. No one signed off the trade between this period and next year, because no one saw it as one.
SHARE! Building a pipeline is a team sport but protecting your long-term strategy requires executive consensus. Share this blueprint with your commercial leadership team to start defining what truly drives your revenue engine across both marketing and sales.
Copy & Paste - https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/103 or hit
The Trade-Off Between Now And Later Belongs To The Chief Executive
Marketing argues for the segment the business should be winning in three years.
Sales argues for the accounts that can close this period.
Both are right.
Choosing between them decides how much of today’s revenue the business trades for tomorrow’s position, and that decision belongs to the person who owns the whole business.
Boards that want one person accountable for revenue already have one: the chief executive.
How closely that person stays involved with the commercial engine shows in the results. Research by Christoph Senn of INSEAD and Noel Capon of Columbia Business School, drawing on more than 500 strategic account managers, found that 28% of senior executives take a hands-off approach to sales and hardly ever meet customers.
Over five years, companies whose executives were hands-off or engaged without preparation grew sales by less than 2% a year.
Companies whose executives engaged well grew by 8.8%.
Where marketing sits in the chief executive’s growth strategy matters as well. McKinsey’s research with the ANA, covering more than 100 C-level growth executives and 21 CEOs, found that B2B companies whose CEOs put marketing at the core of their growth strategy are more than twice as likely to grow faster than 5% a year.
A marketing leader who reports to the chief executive can make that case in person.
With marketing and sales reporting as peers, the trade-off reaches the chief executive with both arguments attached. Under one commercial leader it is settled a level down, by someone measured on the immediate sales target. The usual objection is that a chief executive does not want to referee between sales and marketing. With one scorecard and shared definitions agreed in advance, there is little left to referee day to day.
What reaches the chief executive is the trade-off between this period and the next: a decision about the business, not a dispute between functions.
The chief executive feels that pressure too, and in a listed or private equity-backed business may feel more of it. They may still choose this period over the next. The difference is that they choose knowingly, as the person who owns the whole P&L.
Shared Measures Deliver The Alignment A Combined Leader Promises
The strongest case for putting one leader over both functions is alignment. When both report to the chief executive, the two functions already share a boss. What aligns them day to day is what they are measured on and how they define it, and neither needs a commercial leader between them and the chief executive.
Start with the value of the work that cannot be attributed, before choosing how to measure anything. PR, organic social and brand work take a large share of marketing’s time and budget, and none of them connect directly to pipeline.
Write down what each one adds.
PR puts independent evidence about the business into what buyers and their AI assistants read. Organic social keeps the business in view of buyers not yet in the market.
Brand work earns the place on the day-one shortlist.
Agree those statements with sales and the chief executive, and do not assume the agreement: in the same McKinsey research, CEOs and CMOs agreed on the top three marketing metrics only half the time. Only then build a method that separates what is attributed from what is estimated and names the assumption behind each estimate. Without that method, the estimated share of marketing’s contribution is the first budget line cut when the sales target is at risk.
With that value agreed, measure marketing on pipeline created and closed won, the numbers it owns with sales. Lead volume counts only the part of marketing’s work that can be attributed and says nothing about whether any of it becomes revenue.
Finally, agree the definitions every later argument about contribution will run through: what counts as a marketing-sourced or sales-sourced opportunity, what counts as marketing-influenced, when an opportunity enters the pipeline and what each stage means. Sales owns every opportunity from the moment it is created, whoever sourced it, because in B2B it is sales that closes the business.
If You Already Report To A Chief Revenue Officer
Many marketing leaders cannot redraw their own reporting line. Two practices still bring the longer-term decision to the chief executive, and both start with your own manager.
Record every budget move from longer-term work into the immediate pipeline: what moved, what it was meant to produce and who agreed. Agree the shared definitions and value statements with your manager. Then take the record and the agreed statements to the chief executive together, so the trade-off reaches the person who owns the whole business with both of you behind it.
What To Put In Place
Put marketing and sales side by side under the chief executive and give them one scorecard. Then let the person who owns the outcome decide between the immediate sales target and the value the business is building for later.
Before redrawing any lines, look back over the past year.
Two questions will show whether the structure is already making these decisions for you:
Which decisions about next year’s pipeline did your business take this year?
Who was in the room when they were traded for this period’s sales target?
If the answer to the second is a leader measured on the sales target, the trade-off is being made a level below where it belongs.
Here are some picks of the week, you and/or your team can be inspired by:
Thanks for reading Kathleen’s first MU, have a great weekend and we will land in your inbox again next Friday!
Danny & Harry @ Marketing Unfiltered