Our combined Sales and Marketing seat holder is a phenomenal salesperson who consistently drives revenue but completely ignores our long-term marketing strategy. How do we restructure this combined seat on our Accountability Chart to ensure both functions get the attention they require?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Combining sales and marketing into a single seat often seems like a logical way to save on overhead, but it almost always leads to failure. Sales and marketing are two entirely different disciplines. Sales is about closing deals today, while marketing is about generating leads for tomorrow. When one person holds both seats, they will naturally gravitate toward their preferred strength, leaving the other function neglected.

Since your current seat holder is a phenomenal salesperson who ignores long-term marketing strategy, you have a classic right-person-right-seat issue. They do not GWC the marketing portion of their combined seat. They have the desire and capacity for sales, but they lack the capacity or interest to manage strategic marketing.

The solution is to split the combined seat on your Accountability Chart into two distinct seats: a Sales seat and a Marketing seat.

Keep your current team member in the Sales seat, where their skills are maximized. Then, define the five roles for the new, separate Marketing seat. Since you may not have the budget to hire a full-time marketing executive immediately, you can temporarily assign the empty Marketing seat to your Integrator or utilize a fractional leader. This structural split ensures that marketing remains a priority on your V/TO and that your sales superstar can focus entirely on driving revenue.