What Successful VPs of Revenue Marketing Do Differently to Build Repeatable, Scalable B2B Growth

Summary

This article breaks down what successful VPs of Revenue Marketing do differently to build scalable, repeatable GTM engines across marketing, sales, and customer success. If you’re serious about moving from episodic wins to predictable growth, this is the operating model behind it.

By Maria Geokezas, Chief Operating Officer at Heinz Marketing

Recently, our Founder and President, Matt Heinz, made a sharp observation on LinkedIn:

The hottest job in B2B marketing right now is the VP of Revenue Marketing. Two years ago, it would have been VP of Demand Generation.

That shift in title is not cosmetic. It signals a deeper evolution in how companies think about growth.

As Matt pointed out, the rise of the VP of Revenue Marketing reflects several important shifts:

• Recognition that demand alone is short-sighted
• Acknowledgment that revenue comes from more than net-new leads
• A broader CMO mandate beyond “promotion”
• Validation that lifecycle revenue marketing is outperforming siloed models
• The reality that digital self-serve and website experience now sit directly in the revenue path

Organizational charts are changing because the market demands it. But titles alone do not create scalable growth.

The companies that actually translate this philosophical shift into measurable performance have something else in common: disciplined revenue systems. Here is what that means for VPs of Revenue Marketing:

1. Treat the funnel as an operating system, not a reporting artifact

In high-performing organizations, the funnel is not a loose set of stages used for forecasting. It is a defined operating model with clear rules for how work moves from one team to the next. Successful VPs of Revenue Marketing insist on:

• Explicit lifecycle stage definitions
• Clear exit criteria between stages
• Data requirements that must be met before progression

For example:

• What qualifies a lead as sales-accepted (SQL)?
• What discovery must occur before an opportunity is created?
• What conditions must be true to advance a deal from early to late stage?

This level of clarity reduces false progress, improves forecasting accuracy, and protects seller capacity. Salesforce research consistently shows that sellers spend a significant portion of their time on non-selling activities; tighter process discipline helps reclaim that time for revenue-producing work.

2. Operationalize alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success

Alignment is not treated as a cultural goal — it is engineered through shared definitions, shared metrics, and shared accountability.

Successful revenue marketing leaders:

• Enforce one ICP definition across teams
• Use a single lifecycle and funnel model
• Review pipeline and performance end-to-end, not in functional silos

Forrester research shows that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment outperform peers on revenue growth and profitability.  But alignment only sticks when it is embedded in operations, not left to good intentions.

Increasingly, this alignment is formalized through a RevOps model. Gartner has projected that the majority of high-growth B2B organizations will operate with revenue operations as a central function, reflecting the need for cross-functional governance of the revenue system.

3. Focus on a small number of metrics that drive the right behavior

High-performing VPs of Revenue Marketing resist metric sprawl. Instead, they align teams around a small set of shared metrics that connect activity to outcomes.

Common examples include:

Pipeline and acquisition health

• ICP-qualified pipeline created
• Stage-to-stage conversion rates
• Win rate and sales cycle by segment
• Forward-looking pipeline coverage ratios

McKinsey research highlights that relatively small improvements in conversion rates and win rates can produce outsized revenue impact, particularly when applied consistently across the funnel.

Retention and expansion performance

• Gross revenue retention
• Net revenue retention (NRR)
• Expansion pipeline from existing customers

The KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures SaaS Survey provides widely referenced benchmarks, showing gross retention approaching ~90% and net retention at or above ~100% for many SaaS segments — reinforcing that scalable growth depends as much on customer expansion as new logo acquisition.

It should be noted that it’s not enough to track the right metrics.  To be successful, leaders must use these metrics to drive decisions, not just populate dashboards.

4. Standardize cross-functional workflows to remove friction

Repeatable growth depends on repeatable ways of working. Strong VPs of Revenue Marketing ensure that key workflows are consistent across teams and enforced through systems and cadence.

Common standardized workflows include:

Lead and pipeline handoff

• Clear SLAs for follow-up
• Required data fields at handoff
• Explicit accept, reject, and recycle paths

Opportunity progression

• Standard discovery and qualification criteria
• Mutual action plans for late-stage deals
• Buying committee and decision-process mapping

Install-base growth

• Early identification of at-risk accounts
• Clear ownership of expansion opportunities
• Coordinated marketing, sales, and CS motions for renewals and upsell

Closed-loop learning

• Win/loss and churn reviews
• Feedback loops that inform ICP, messaging, and enablement

When these workflows are absent or inconsistent, organizations rely on individual heroics. When they are present, learning compounds and execution becomes more predictable.

5. Clarify roles, decision rights, and skills across the revenue organization

One of the most consistent failure points in scaling revenue is unclear ownership. Successful organizations address this directly through RACI discipline and capability design.

They clearly define:

• Who owns funnel definitions and lifecycle stages
• Who is accountable for data quality and attribution
• Who governs ICP evolution
• How decisions are made and escalated

Equally important, they invest in the right skill sets:

• RevOps: analytics, systems thinking, process design, change management
• Sales leadership: deal inspection, coaching rigor, forecasting discipline
• Customer success leadership: retention governance, expansion strategy, health modeling
• Marketing leadership: lifecycle orchestration, pipeline math, messaging clarity

When these roles are under-resourced or ill-defined, leaders become manual integrators between teams — a clear signal that scale will stall.

The throughline: discipline enables predictability, and predictability enables scale

Across industries, segments, and growth stages, the pattern holds. Companies that achieve repeatable, scalable B2B revenue growth do not rely on luck, hero sellers, or one-off campaigns.

They:

• Define how revenue is created
• Align teams around shared goals and metrics
• Enforce consistent workflows
• Clarify ownership and decision rights

Funnel and process discipline is not bureaucracy — it is the infrastructure that allows growth to compound. For successful organizations, that discipline is the difference between chasing numbers and producing them.

Want to better understand what’s holding your team back from realizing predictable, scalable growth?  Reach out – let us help you get there.