I ran go-to-market before I advised on it. A CMO seat, a CRO seat, and a business unit with a P&L.

What I have actually run

Four businesses, each one handed to me because it was not working. A CPQ business that had spent two years under $2.5 million. A distribution business growing on headcount. A marketing organization sourcing less than a tenth of its own pipeline. A private equity backed SaaS company with no qualification process and an acquisition cost climbing past three. The figure above is what I was asked to change in each, what I did, and what happened. The pattern in it matters more than any single number: the fix was never more activity, it was deciding where we had a right to win and then making every function answer to the same measure of it.

The range is the part that is hard to hire. I have been an individual contributor and a chief marketing officer in marketing, an individual contributor and a chief revenue officer in revenue, and a business unit executive carrying a P&L alongside product management and engineering, with a finance degree underneath all of it. That is why no function's answer gets taken at face value in this seat, and why none of them gets dismissed either.

And the teams, because a number that leaves when I do is not worth much. Seventy sales and solutions people in one organization at IBM. A business development function built from nothing that produced four times the qualified pipeline inside six months. A management team rebuilt in a transition year that still made plan, with every seller contributing. Thousands of managers and customer facing people trained and coached since. I teach Modern Leadership in the University of Georgia's MBA program.

What the seat is

The problems that put you on this page do not close on a delivery date. A plan gets written and then has to survive a quarter, a competitor, and your own leadership team disagreeing about it. What that needs in the room is not another firm with a deck. It is somebody senior who already holds a position, is there every week, and is accountable for the same numbers you are.

So this one does not end the way the rest of my work ends. A diagnosis gets accepted, a workshop finishes, a coaching cohort closes, and I go. Here I am on your calendar for a defined number of days each month, agreed before the month begins. I report to the CEO or the President, with one executive sponsor as the liaison for prioritization. And my position is written into the agreement as a functional member of the leadership team rather than a supplier to it. That phrase comes out of a signed statement of work rather than a brochure, and it is the operative one, because it decides whether I hear the debate or the summary of the debate.

What the seat owns is the go-to-market: the scope we agree at the start, the metrics it gets judged on, the pipeline and the deals worked weekly, and the interfaces between marketing, sales and customer success that no single function owns by default. It owns its own ending too, because part of the job is developing the leader on your team who holds the seat after me.

That is not a description of how I would like to work. It is signed, at Energage: a titled, priced, ongoing role with a defined availability, a reporting line to a company President, and the functional member standing written into the agreement. A separate signed agreement before it gave me a dedicated day each week with a named group of executives.

• An evidence-based diagnosis before anyone commits to a direction. GTM Diagnosis and Focus →
• The market model everything downstream depends on. TAM and ICP →
• One story the whole go-to-market team can carry into a conversation. Conversational Messaging →

The scope, and the metrics it is judged on

What the seat covers is agreed before it starts, because it is different in every company. In one it is the whole go-to-market. In another it is the part that is broken, and the rest is deliberately left alone. What does not vary is that we write down the two or three metrics the seat is judged on, and I am measured on them the way the rest of your leadership team is measured. Setting them is itself the work. At IBM I moved a marketing organization's primary metric from leads to sales-qualified opportunities, and marketing-sourced pipeline went from under a tenth of new business to forty percent of it. That one change did more to end silo behavior than any process I could have written, because it made two functions answer to the same number.

The pipeline, worked weekly

Where pipeline comes from and what happens to it. Coverage against the number, the path from a first conversation to a qualified opportunity, the conversion rates, the place in the funnel where it quietly went flat, and the mix of channel and message producing it. At FPX the qualification process we put in doubled signings against the prior twelve months while new logo acquisition tripled, and acquisition cost came down from over three to one and a half. That is the altitude this gets worked at, weekly, rather than in a quarterly readout.

Pivotal deals, and the view from underneath them

Targeted involvement in the deals that matter, not in all of them, with real visibility into the CRM so attention lands where it changes an outcome. The side effect is the main effect. Talking to sellers and customer success people every week is how I can see what is happening in the business, and bring the leadership team evidence rather than an opinion at the moment they are deciding what to do.

The leaders, grown on purpose

Mentoring the people who will hold this seat when I do not. I have talked a client out of hiring me into the top marketing job, because the person they already had was good and needed developing rather than replacing. That is the work rather than a favor, and it is the reason this seat is not a permanent fixture.

The interfaces, named and owned

Clear process spanning the buyer engagement journey, with the interfaces named and owned: marketing into sales, sales into customer success, the overlay teams, product. Alongside it, a repeatable way of surfacing proof points out of live engagements, so customer evidence becomes something the company owns instead of an anecdote somebody happens to remember.