Insight · Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
Silos are Stealing Your Margin: Why a CMO or VP of Sales Won’t Fix Your Funnel
Misaligned sales and marketing teams cost scaling businesses millions. Here is how putting revenue under one owner, a fractional CCO, gets growth moving again.
It is one of the most frustrating and expensive problems in scaling B2B and SaaS businesses, and it turns up in almost all of them.
Your marketing team is working around the clock, spending substantial budget on digital campaigns, and celebrating a big rise in lead numbers. They present beautiful dashboards showing high engagement and ‘marketing qualified leads’.
Part 01
The blame game: the hidden friction in your revenue funnel
Meanwhile, your sales team is complaining that their pipeline is empty, claiming the leads marketing generates are low-quality, cold, and a complete waste of time.
Marketing says sales isn’t closing the opportunities. Sales says marketing doesn’t understand the buyer. The leadership team is caught in the middle, trying to mediate a civil war while revenue growth stalls and customer acquisition costs spiral out of control.
This breakdown is eating into your margin, and the longer it runs, the more it costs.
Part 02
The root cause: misaligned KPIs and structurally siloed teams
The conflict between sales and marketing is rarely caused by a lack of talent or effort. The cause is usually structural.
Traditionally, sales and marketing operate in independent silos. Marketing is judged on lead quantity, while sales is judged on closed revenue. Because their KPIs are separate, neither team owns the customer’s path from first contact to purchase. Marketing does its job, throws the leads ‘over the wall’ to sales, and washes its hands of the outcome.
Hiring a standalone CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) or a VP of Sales rarely solves this alignment issue.
A CMO is naturally focused on brand, awareness, and top-of-funnel activity. A VP of Sales is naturally focused on the final handshake and hitting immediate monthly closing targets. Neither is incentivised to look at the whole revenue cycle.
Part 03
The CCO solution: unifying the entire revenue cycle
To scale sustainably and at a healthy margin, you need one leader responsible for revenue in place of separate silos. That is what a Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) is for.
A CCO takes end-to-end responsibility for the revenue lifecycle, from the first lead generation touchpoint through the sales pipeline to customer success, retention and account expansion.
A CCO aligns the teams by:
- Structuring shared KPIs: Ensuring both sales and marketing are measured on the same outcome: closed-won ARR and net revenue retention, rather than arbitrary lead counts.
- Mapping the complete buying process: Designing a smooth handover from marketing attention to active sales pipeline, removing the friction points where leads usually die.
- Establishing point-of-conversion rigour: Ensuring marketing spends its budget only on channels that attract the high-value buyer profiles sales needs.
For many scaling £10M–£30M SMEs or funded startups, a full-time CCO is a heavy overhead. A fractional CCO provides the same senior leadership, working inside your team to redesign how you sell and build a single revenue function without the full-time cost.
Questions
FAQs: revenue silos and commercial alignment
Why is a Chief Commercial Officer different from a VP of Sales?
A VP of Sales focuses almost exclusively on pipeline execution and closing deals. A CCO owns the whole revenue set-up, aligning marketing, product, sales and customer success under one strategy.
How do you stop marketing and sales teams from pointing fingers?
You stop the finger-pointing by aligning their metrics. When marketing’s bonuses are tied to sales-qualified pipeline or closed revenue rather than lead volume, they are forced to collaborate closely with the sales team to ensure high lead quality.
What is the most common friction point in the B2B revenue funnel?
The most common friction point is the handover phase between marketing leads and active sales opportunities. Without clear qualification frameworks, leads are often passed over too early or neglected entirely, causing customer acquisition costs to spike.
Align your sales and marketing for scale
If your sales and marketing teams are operating in silos, or if your marketing spend isn’t translating into closed sales, I can help you bring the two together.
Book a free 30-minute intro call. You tell me where things are stuck and I outline how I’d approach it. If it looks like a fit, I’ll offer a free working session on one real problem.
Book a free 30-min call →Take the 10-Point Checklist: Assess the strength of your commercial foundations and find the bottlenecks in your pipeline.
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