Centralize All Operations Supporting Growth Under a CXO with a Broad Transformation Remit and Authority

A wave of B2B firms, including Avaya, Cisco, Honeywell, GHX, Splunk, and Pentair, have executives with “CXO” roles that have a broader scope and a remit to better manage commercial assets, the operations and enablement infrastructure, and the customer journey across the enterprise.

Often the CEO, President, COO, or business unit head will take on the role of the growth leader by becoming a point-person for all revenue-related functions, centralizing the allocation of all growth resources, and creating a common purpose for all customer-facing employees and functions. Alignment happens from the top down because a single leader, the “tsar,” approves the growth strategy and allocates the resources to make it happen. Unfortunately, most leaders don't have a professional background or hands-on experience in each of the core functional areas and thus struggle to competently extract the best from all of them. Also, many organizations don't give these executives the span of control they need, or in the case of the CEO, put too much control in that one person's hands, creating a devastating bottleneck in the operation of the business. Nonetheless, naming one growth leader remains attractive to many for its clarity, and many organizations are adopting this approach.

Establish a CXO Executive to Lead Commercial Transformation and Coordinate All Revenue Team Functions

Avaya put sales, channels, customer success, and marketing under one CXO to create a culture of teamwork and a single point of accountability for all revenue teams. “One of the things we did to make our revenue team more successful was to bring in a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to create a single point of authority over that entire go-to-market organization on a global scale,” says Jim Chirico, the CEO of Avaya.¹³² “The CRO is the accountable party for marketing, sales, delivery, customer success, professional services, and all the channel partners that support our organization. These are hard line reports. Subsequently we brought on a global head of services, an SVP in charge of global channels, and a global head of strategic partnerships who are key to bringing new technologies to market – all reporting to our CRO. It is working out extremely well. The teams get along quite well, which has really reinforced our core cultural principles of teamwork and trust. It has also made things simpler – because this is a much simpler organization. It may sound complicated, but it is much simpler because there is a single point of accountability, and he makes sure our revenue teams are empowered and in control of their success. It is a matrix environment. The teams still work in the local theatres on a dotted line basis. And the theatres still manage the direct business.”

Centralize All Decisions About Cross-Functional Resource Allocation, Infrastructure, and Commercial Architecture

Splunk centralized the management of their commercial operations, enablement systems, and insights that support the revenue cycle to drive double-digit growth at scale ($2.4B in revenues). To facilitate those changes, they brought in a new leader to integrate the operations that support the revenue teams across customer success, marketing, and sales, and demand higher returns on their investment in sales enablement and revenue intelligence. The company established a President and Chief Growth Officer function to sit on top of these growth functions to get them to work better together. This approach demands accountability from every revenue resource, program, and capital investment by defining financially valid criteria (SLA) to prioritize, size, allocate, and measure growth resources and capital investments.

Christian Smith, CRO of Splunk, understands the impact of holding every commercial function, including sales enablement, accountable for generating measurable growth outcomes and financially valid returns on investment. “One of the first things I did when I took on global sales was to measure the impact of enablement, which is controversial,” says Smith.¹⁶³ “I wanted to know that what we were doing was actually working, and that's essential to unlocking more growth potential from data and technology. And that focus on ROI has really helped us optimize our enablement philosophy. It has led us to focus on high impact goals like enabling just-in-time learning and specializing our enablement investments to make them more role based and goal oriented,” he continues. “Measuring the impact of enablement helps us understand if the productivity initiatives that we have are paying off. For example, we have actually gotten our productivity of ramping new hires to be 35% faster than a year ago. We also measure the impact of investments on the productivity of existing reps. It's part of our corporate metrics that we review at e-staff every week.”

Creating a Common Purpose and Culture of Growth

Marc Lautenbach joined Pitney Bowes as CEO eight years ago on a mission to turn a business in secular decline into a growth business that offers market-leading mailing, shipping, e-commerce logistics, and financial services solutions. Lautenbach set corporate performance goals that defined success for all go-to-market functions and cascaded down to customer-facing teams. He provided the leadership the business needed to deliver more value to its clients and return the business to revenue growth – from launching digital channels, to championing the go-to-market transformation, to investing in product innovation in mailing, shipping, and logistics markets. Marc has the entire organization focused on accelerating profitable revenue growth going forward. Lautenbach laid out three clear go-to-market performance goals that define success for the revenue team – to build a digital sales and service channel for their new Sending Technology business, improve the customer experience, and reduce selling costs with better teamwork between marketing, field sales, and inside sales channels. By working together, his sales and marketing leadership were able to sell the majority of their simpler transactions directly on the web, halve inbound phone account servicing calls by migrating those transactions to a digital sales and service channel, while significantly improving the client experience with digital customer satisfaction scores above 80%. As a by-product of all this effort, the company was able to free up sales resources to focus on growth, higher-potential market segments, and most importantly, to deepen their client relationships.

The Wonder Twins at insightsoftware

Joe Healey and Stacy West, the company's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer respectively, represent a new generation of growth leader with an expanded remit to drive organic growth and a mandate to align sales with customer success and professional services.¹¹⁸ As the COO, Joe maintains direct control over sales, customer success, customer support, professional services, and a tight partnership with Stacy in marketing. Joe and Stacy work very closely on sales force design, go-to-market strategy, and the methods they deploy to manage the commercial teams, processes, systems, and operations that support revenue growth. “Joe and I refer to ourselves as the wonder twins,” reports West.¹¹⁸

“We think alike, and we approach situations the same way so frequently that I find myself saying, get out of my brain. I don't think there's anything revolutionary about the need for sales and marketing to work closely together but making it a successful reality is another story. Joe and I share a mutual respect, and we feel equally responsible for maintaining strong lines of communication and working in lockstep to scale this business. Our past experiences leading previous sales and marketing teams is a real benefit, and it allows us to better understand the upstream and downstream impact of the decisions we are making. That's where I occasionally see other leaders ‘shoot themselves in the foot.’ Sometimes, sales will make a decision, and they don't understand, or consider, the impact it will have on marketing, or vice versa.” Stacy and Joe collaborate very closely to aggressively penetrate and expand share of a growing market. Together they are building out and enabling a mix of direct and indirect channels, redefining the roles in those channels to improve front of the funnel business development, product expertise, and account management, and focusing these teams on tighter market segments and buyer personas.

To coordinate all moving parts, Stacy and Joe are using process overlays more than official changes to the organization. For example, they are moving toward a Revenue Operations framework for managing the people, processes, and systems responsible for revenue growth. They are actively synchronizing the two operations teams that support revenue: marketing operations (owned by Stacy) with sales and service operations (owned by Joe). “I've deployed Revenue Operations and integrated sales and marketing operations in past companies,” says Healey. “Our path right now is to continue to have marketing ops and sales ops separate today but sharing information and working together to support the entire customer journey. For example, Stacy and her team make sure first party signals and intent data from ABM are fed to the BDR teams, Account Development Reps (ADR), and Client Development Reps (CDRs) in partnership with our sales and customer success operations teams.”

By working together, West and Healey have been able to effectively share data and insights across sales and marketing to adapt to market opportunity and manage the end-to-end commercial process in a more unified and coordinated way. Stacy's marketing team designs go-to-market content that delivers a consistent value proposition, and Healey deploys all members of the revenue team to carry that message to their target markets. “Beyond sales and marketing, it's important to involve key customer support, technical support, and customer success team members in the customer journey,” says West. “I think of it a little like lean manufacturing – you train people up and down the line to help bolster the teams' efforts and achieve desired outcomes. We are continuously improving this model within sales, marketing, customer success, and customer support. And we work hard to retain our top talent to build institutional knowledge and continue growing at this rapid pace.”

Common Purpose and Culture of Teamwork at Ciena

Joe Cumello and Jason Phipps lead marketing and sales respectively for Ciena (CIEN), a networking systems, services, and software company.¹²⁶ Over the past four years they have forged a tight partnership that is rare in terms of trust, teamwork, and results – contributing to over $1 billion in new growth. Though the “marriage” of sales and marketing challenges every organization, especially in the B2B technology sector, Joe and Jason have been able to build a highly effective working relationship. Their partnership has been tremendously successful when it comes to culture, teamwork, and revenue growth. Over the last five years, Ciena has grown revenue from $2.4 billion to $3.6 billion.

Joe and Jason have cracked the code on what is a huge problem for most enterprises – getting sales and marketing to work as one. “It all starts with an invitation by sales leadership to set the table in some ways, and a recognition of the value of marketing,” says Joe Cumello, who leads marketing. “I've got to compliment Jason for setting up the arrangement because at the time I reported to him as SVP of sales. Jason invited me to be a strategic partner with a seat at the table for every strategic conversation about growth in the company because he understands when sales and marketing work together it can be a ‘force multiplier.’ That's certainly different from what I've experienced throughout my career, where marketing has traditionally been viewed as ‘serving’ sales.”

“I'd start with the first conversation I had with Joe when we were considering bringing marketing and sales together under one umbrella a number of years back,” says Phipps. “Just to be clear, today sales and marketing are two peers on the executive leadership team, reporting to the CEO. There are a few factors underlying our bringing the sales and marketing functions together. Leverage and talent. Sales plays a big role in our growth, and there was a fear that sales was going to take all the marketing money. But frankly, that had already happened, so I viewed this as actually a way to reallocate those resources more optimally by taking advantage of the ‘multiplier effect’ between sales and marketing. This was important because growth dollars are not unlimited, and at some point putting another body in front of the customer doesn't create the growth that putting that dollar into marketing will accomplish. I believe there is a lot more leverage putting the next growth dollar into marketing, particularly when you've reached critical mass.”

“From a talent perspective, coupling sales and marketing allows us to have more interactions in terms of talent on both teams and opinions,” according to Phipps. “One of the things Joe did was bring in new talent in terms of adding key people to the operations and product marketing teams who had sales backgrounds as well as marketing experience. These key managers brought immediate credibility and respect that made it easier to create leverage and synergies across our teams. Trust and teamwork are critical components of business in the twenty-first century, even if the results can be harder to quantify.”

Phipps identified a key to their collaboration is that Ciena is a very metrics-driven business. “We both realized it's important to capture the more qualitative aspects of growth in terms of meaningful conversations with the customer and the number of times the sales team raised their hands,” Phipps reports. “And we brought marketing – as well as the engineering and product teams – into the conversations with the customer, in quarterly business reviews, and other account development activities. These collaborations demonstrated we were building trust and that marketing was being viewed as an extension of the sales team. So, we've moved to more of a ‘Quality of Engagement’ (QOE) score to measure our account teams that reflects all of the actions, activity and engagement that contribute to account health and lifetime value.”

“Traditional demand generation metrics – MQL, SQL – were not effective or relevant for us because we have very deep customer relationships and a long (nine months or more) sales cycle,” adds Cumello. “So, we had to adapt our approach. What we really care about is moving the needle within an account – focusing on the next RFP or engaging more deeply with the key stakeholders – to open up different areas of the account or diversify the business strategy within the account. I want to be able to supply our sales team with data about how customers engage with us across all our materials and enablement, and then give that to Jason and say this is what a winning engagement model looks like when we win, and this is what happens when we lose.”

“So, we've developed customer engagement reporting and Quality of Engagement (QOE) measurements that give us a more complete and real time picture of the breadth, depth, and frequency and impact we are having on our customers,” he continues. “Our dashboard is like an ‘EKG for selling’ that gives us a dynamic and digital picture of what is going on in the account. Are we engaging the right levels in the organization? And are those stakeholders attending webinars, participating in ‘Demo days,’ or downloading materials?”

“Bringing it all together takes more than teamwork; it also requires that different functions share data,” says Phipps. “A big part of that is rethinking how we organize our operations and enablement organizations. Operationally, we've had to coordinate and integrate marketing and sales operations. Joe and I have a common operations support team. Joe has Marketing operations on this team which creates the customer engagement dashboard, or what we've been calling the ‘EKG.’ The sales enablement and sales operations folks who are focused on QOE (Quality of Engagement) measurements are on my team. But they'll have a connection to Joe's marketing operations leader, because when he's looking at the customer engagement dashboard, or EKG, in the field, we know this is going to be correlated to the Quality of Engagement score. So, if we have a high QOE on a particular account, then it should have a better EKG.”

This teamwork extends just beyond the two leaders and encompasses the entire business. “We've also worked with our partners in IT to better leverage data from across the organization,” says Cumello. “A lot of companies, and ours is one of them, have data silos from operations to the finance function. This goes beyond what Jason and I have control over so that's a bigger discussion than just sales and marketing operations. So, we had to step back and have a bigger discussion amongst the leadership about what we want to do with data and analytics and AI and how we amalgamate and create value with the data. This will create a big opportunity.”

The Demand Generation Board at Oracle and SAP

Globalization of functions – the consolidation of functional resources, people, and budgets from all parts of the company into one global organization – has become popular over the last few decades. This effort is usually intended to increase professionalization by consolidating domain expertise and to improve efficiency by reducing fragmentation. The consolidation of back-office functions is fairly commonplace, yet globalization of customer-facing functions like marketing and sales tends to generate more internal friction. For example, the creation of a global marketing function can also create greater separation and misalignment with other business functions, such as sales, which will resent the loss of control.

Oracle globalized its marketing function in 2000, moving all the budgets, headcount, and program prioritization from the regionally based teams to the CMO. To maintain connective tissue with sales, the field marketing leaders in Asia and Europe pioneered a new concept, the Demand Generation Board (DGB), to serve as a transparent planning, prioritization, and alignment process between sales and marketing. The DBG was, in essence, a quarterly meeting between the key heads of sales and marketing in the region to

1. review market, revenue, and customer data;
2. agree on the primary go-to-market plays that we wanted to make; and
3. prioritize the allocation of resources to generate sufficient demand for us to meet and exceed our revenue targets.

Enthusiasm for the process grew, and Charles Phillips, President of Oracle at the time, imported the process from the regions to set it up globally. That move extended the DGB up to corporate leadership and down to subregions. Once successful, the meetings added more functions to the roster, and eventually the DGB evolved to serve as a leadership meeting dedicated to go-to-market topics for the entire business.

A few years later, SAP adopted a similar practice to foster the successful alliance between sales and marketing work. This time the DGB used more analytics to measure the before and after results and to assess the revenue impact of marketing efforts. Using the DGB process, SAP generated 55% more pipeline opportunities and increased the combined value of those marketing-generated opportunities by 48% with roughly the same resources.

Collaborative Resource Allocation at Juniper

Mike Marcellin and Marcus Jewell are respectively the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer of Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks that connect the world. Over the past several years they have forged a tight partnership between sales and marketing that is rare in terms of teamwork and results – contributing to a surge in revenue growth and turning Juniper back into an agile growth company.

After a decade of profitable but relatively flat growth as their core telecommunications and infrastructure markets have matured, revenue growth has increased to 8% in the last sales quarter on a large base of almost $5 billion in revenues, with record levels of customer satisfaction and new logo sales. Their go-to-market team has expanded Juniper into new markets where they are growing much faster – including AI-driven enterprise solutions (28%), cloud-ready data center solutions (28%), and security (21%). This has moved Juniper from what Mike Marcellin describes as a “margin maximizer” to an “agile growth” enterprise with the ability to pivot faster and realize the potential of new and attractive growth markets.

“A few years ago we as a leadership team realized we would not achieve our growth objectives by just selling to the same customers we've sold to in the past,” adds Marcellin.¹¹⁶ “We made that decision collectively as a leadership team. That was a sales statement, a marketing statement, and a product build statement. Growth has become a team sport and all of those things together have now allowed us to expand successfully.”

To go after those markets, Juniper has invested tens of millions of dollars more into sales and marketing over the last several years. And they are getting results. Because they work as a team, Marcellin and Jewell were able to balance how those growth funds were invested across the revenue cycle. They also were very thoughtful about the portion of funds that should go toward capital investments in technology versus adding the right skills to the revenue team.

“How we allocate that investment is interesting,” says Marcus Jewell. “The emergence of low-touch and no-touch digital channels and the need to align sales, marketing, and customer success have really changed the way we think about budgets and resource allocation. Mike and I look at the increases in growth investment as a ‘fungible budget’ between ourselves in terms of where we spend it. We run a small steering committee to figure out where we should put this money to drive the greatest growth and realize the most opportunity across our markets. We set clear OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) about the outcomes we are looking to achieve and use that to agree on the best allocation. Ultimately, we don't really separate the sales and marketing budget when we look at our growth engines. We make sure that those investments are linked across our organizations, and we keep it flexible and dynamic.”

“In my years of experience allocating marketing and product budgets, that's pretty unique,” adds Marcellin. “Normally everyone gets their budget target, and you do what you can with that. But there's a limited ability to shift money around in real-time as we see opportunities pop up. I think you have to be more agile and be thinking about your entire go-to-market engine to compete in the rapidly evolving markets we operate in.”