I Still Think Sales Should Report Into Marketing

Summary

Why the case for marketing owning go-to-market is stronger in B2B than in the CPG model he's based his argument on. Matt Heinz revisits his claim that sales should report into marketing, conceding the CPG "brand manager" analogy is flawed, but arguing the underlying case is actually stronger in B2B — where marketing and sales share the same customer, buying committee, and market knowledge.

Sangram Vajre (whom I truly love and respect) recently called me out by name on a livestream.

I wasn’t there. A couple friends who were messaged me to tell me about it, which is its own kind of fun. The line from Sangram, more or less: I love you, but I disagree with you that marketing owns go-to-market.

Fair enough. I’d commented on an earlier post of his saying sales should report into marketing if we’re doing GTM right.

I’m not backing off. In fact, I’m doubling down.

The short version of what I already believe

Marketing is a verb. It’s the act of activating a market, not the department that makes the deck. I’ve made that case at length before, so I won’t rebuild it here.

If that’s the job, sales is one channel for executing it, alongside partnerships and product-led growth and everything else. The function designing the commercial motion should be accountable for whether the motion works.

This happens in CPG already. The brand manager for Tide doesn’t just run the ads. They OWN the Tide market and go-to-market strategy. It’s a proven model that would work in B2B.

That’s the premise. But let’s go deeper.

The CPG analogy is messy

The brand manager in consumer packaged goods (CPG) owns a lot more than modern B2B marketing leaders, but I want to address three holes that make the comparison and analogy a little messy:

The CPG comparison doesn’t say what marketers want it to say. I reach for consumer packaged goods as a “marketing owns GTM” parallel a lot here, because P&G invented brand management in 1931 to create what the company still calls “a single point of accountability for the brands at the center of the business model.” But P&G’s own careers site says of brand and sales that “their responsibilities are separate and very different.” Trade spend, shelf, distribution and the price a retailer actually pays sit with sales.

P&G solved the integration problem in the other direction. In the late eighties it turned its sales department into Customer Business Development, pulling logistics, finance, IT and marketing into the sales organization and killing sales quotas along the way. Sales became the integrator, not marketing.

The closest thing to my argument has already been tried. The Chief Growth Officer wave — Coca-Cola, Mondelez, Colgate, Coty and Kellogg’s — was a real attempt to put one person over the whole commercial motion with marketing near the center of it. Coke eliminated its global CMO. Two years later it brought the role back.

So my historical CPG / “brand manager owns GTM” argument has a few holes. Fine.

But I’d been borrowing somebody else’s model without really understanding and clarifying why theirs is built that way in the first place. CPG splits marketing and sales because CPG has to. B2B doesn’t.

What’s actually happening in B2B

The CMO Survey out of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business (308 marketing leaders, 97% of them VP and above, roughly two-thirds B2B) asks what marketing is primarily responsible for at their company. Brand comes in at 94%. Digital at 93%. Advertising at 87%.

Pricing: 28%.

Sales: 19%.

So at about four out of five companies, the function I keep saying should be the owner of go-to-market owns no part of going to market except the part that makes the noise.

Forrester’s Fortune 500 analysis also found executive-level CMO presence at B2B companies dropping from 48% to 42% in a single year, with B2B leading the retreat rather than following it. Spencer Stuart counts 31% of S&P 500 companies with no chief marketing officer at all, and notes that software companies in particular are designating a chief revenue officer instead.

Anteriad recently surveyed 631 B2B marketing decision-makers and asked who the most senior marketing leader reports to. 36% report to the CEO. 33% report to a sales leader, though they bundle CRO, president and chief sales officer into one bucket, so the real CRO number is smaller.

The Duke survey also asks marketers how well they work with other functions. Sales scored highest of every pair — 5.79 out of 7, with two-thirds rating it a six or a seven. Higher than finance. Much higher than HR.

Two decades of alignment hand-wringing, and marketers say sales is the function they get along with best.

Which tells me the problem was never the relationship, and that no amount of getting along produces an owner let alone an outcome.

Why B2B is the stronger case, not the weaker one

In CPG, marketing owns the consumer and sales owns the retailer. Those are two different customers sitting in two different buildings, and the split is defensible. A brand manager in Cincinnati can’t negotiate shelf space in Bentonville. The account team can’t run a national campaign. Nobody in that structure can own both ends, which is exactly why P&G built the integrator on the sales side and why the Chief Growth Officer experiment didn’t hold.

B2B doesn’t have that problem. The company you research is the company you sell to. Same organization, same buying committee, often the same people in the same meetings. One market, one motion, and no structural reason to hand half of it to a function that doesn’t study the market for a living.

Because marketing does study it. Marketing knows the customer better than anyone else in the building — not should, does. We run the win/loss interviews. We sit in the advisory board. We read the review sites, the community threads, the churn reasons and the competitive takeouts. We know which segments are ripe, which ones are stalling and why.

The four Ps are closer to marketing in B2B than they have ever been in CPG. No shelf to buy. No trade spend to negotiate. No retail buyer holding the pen on price. Product is a roadmap conversation. Price is a packaging and positioning conversation. Place is channel strategy — direct, partner, product-led, marketplace — which is a market question long before it’s a sales question.

Partners are where that gets tested, and it’s the objection I’d raise if I were arguing the other side. Resellers, integrators, ISVs and marketplaces do put somebody between you and the buyer, which starts to look like the CPG split all over again.

I’d argue it cuts the other way. A partner channel is a means of distribution, the same as a direct sales team — a route to the end customer, not a different customer. What changes is control. Your own rep can be coached the morning of the meeting. A partner’s rep walks in with whatever stuck from onboarding four months ago, and whatever comes out of their mouth is what your market hears.

So the place where you have the least control is the place where the message discipline matters most. Which accounts to point them at. Which member of the buying committee actually feels the pain. What to lead with, and what not to promise. That’s what marketing spends all year building, and it’s worth the most in the meetings you’ll never be in.

Hand the channel to the function with the least visibility into the end customer and you get what most partner programs already are: a logo page, a product-centric pitch and a shared drive full of stale decks.

A CMO recently walked a group of us through how her company handles channel leads. Partner referrals come in on dedicated forms. Partner managers create the contacts and opportunities. The leads get their own label, channel qualified leads, and they run through the same unified funnel model as everything else. Scored, routed, measured.

Reseller deals sit outside the marketing and sales process entirely. They turn up in Salesforce at the end, logged as customers with a different record type.

That’s a thoughtful operator with a real system, and the deals where somebody else does all the talking are still the ones nobody manages the talking for. No message discipline, no feedback loop, in the segment with the least visibility and often the most at stake. Somebody should own that. It probably shouldn’t be the function that learns how the deal got sold after it closes.

If you know the market better than anyone and you know the customer better than anyone, you should have real influence over how the thing gets sold — through your own team and through everyone else’s. Ideally accountability for it.

Accountability is also what kills the excuse. “Sales didn’t follow up on the leads” has been marketing’s standing defense for as long as I’ve been doing this. Own go-to-market and it’s gone, along with every other explanation that starts with what the other team did. You’d also be carrying a number you can miss, in a quarter where the campaigns worked and the deals still didn’t close. I’d call that a fair trade, and I’d argue the trade is the point rather than the price.

Plenty of people asking for this job would hand it back once they sat with it. That’s about the person, though, not about the ceiling of and potential for the role.

You still need a great sales leader

Let me be clear about what I’m not arguing.

Owning go-to-market doesn’t mean the CMO builds the comp plan, sets territories, runs deal desk or coaches a rep through a close. That work is a craft, and it belongs to somebody who has spent a career getting good at it. Hire that person. Pay them well. Let them run.

Same goes for the channel chief who knows how to recruit a partner, enable them and hold them to a number. I’m not asking marketers to learn those jobs.

The question is who’s accountable for the strategy they’re executing. Which segments we go after. Which channels we use. What we say, what we charge and whether the whole motion is working.

That’s a market question. And it already has a natural owner.

Where I landed and why I’m doubling down

CPG gave me the wrong precedent but the right principle: one person accountable for a market outcome, with authority that matches the accountability.

McKinsey found that marketing organizations built around generalists who integrate deliver two to three more points of organic growth than organizations leaning on specialist groups. The executive integrator role works! It just has to be a real role with real levers, and not a coordination function with a good title.

Marketing reporting into a CRO is the opposite bet. That structure says the commercial motion is a selling problem with a promotion department attached to it. A defensible way to run a company, perhaps. It’s also why nearly a third of the S&P 500 doesn’t employ a CMO, and why the B2B seat is vanishing faster than anyone else’s.

But I haven’t changed my mind. Sales could report into marketing at companies where marketing is willing to be a business rather than a service.

Sangram got one thing right on that livestream. Most of us haven’t earned this. It’s an idea without a lot of data or precedent. Yet.

This post originally appeared on Matt Heinz’s Substack.