Insight - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
Misaligned sales and marketing teams cost scaling businesses millions. Learn how unified revenue ownership under a fractional CCO unlocks growth.
It is one of the most frustrating and expensive problems in B2B and SaaS scaling environments, yet it happens in almost every business.
Your marketing team is working around the clock, spending substantial budget on digital campaigns, and celebrating a massive increase in lead numbers. They present beautiful dashboards showing high engagement and ‘marketing qualified leads’.
Part 01
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.
The result? Marketing says sales isn’t closing the opportunities. Sales says marketing doesn’t understand the real 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 not just annoying—it is actively stealing your margin.
Part 02
The conflict between sales and marketing is rarely about a lack of talent or effort. It is a structural failure.
Traditionally, sales and marketing operate in independent silos. Marketing is judged on lead quantity, while sales is judged on closed revenue. Because they have entirely separate KPIs, they have no shared ownership of the customer’s actual journey. 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 of them is structurally incentivised to look at the entire, unified revenue cycle.
Part 03
To unlock sustainable, high-margin scale, you must replace these independent silos with unified revenue leadership. This is precisely what a Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) is designed to do.
Unlike siloed leaders, a CCO takes absolute, end-to-end responsibility for the entire revenue lifecycle—from the very first touchpoint of lead generation, through the sales pipeline, all the way to customer success, retention, and account expansion.
A CCO aligns the teams by:
For many scaling £10M–£30M SMEs or funded startups, a full-time CCO is a heavy overhead. A fractional CCO provides this exact senior leadership, embedding within your team to redesign your commercial engine and build a unified, high-performing revenue function without the full-time cost.
Questions
A VP of Sales focuses almost exclusively on pipeline execution and closing deals. A CCO owns the entire revenue architecture, aligning marketing, product, sales, and customer success under a single, unified strategy.
You stop the finger-pointing by aligning their metrics. When marketing’s bonuses are tied to sales-qualified pipeline or actual closed revenue rather than lead volume, they are forced to collaborate closely with the sales team to ensure high lead quality.
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.
If your sales and marketing teams are operating in silos, or if your marketing spend isn’t translating into closed sales, let’s bridge the gap together.
Book a Free Discovery Workshop: Let’s spend two hours tackling a specific commercial challenge in your business, live. No pitch, just practical strategy.
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