Matt Heinz, a prominent figure in the B2B marketing landscape, has revisited his assertion that sales departments should report into marketing, a stance that sparked debate during a recent livestream with Sangram Vajre, a respected voice in the go-to-market (GTM) space. While acknowledging that his initial analogy to the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) "brand manager" model has its limitations, Heinz argues that the fundamental case for marketing leadership in B2B GTM is, in fact, even more robust. This is due to the inherent convergence of customer, buying committee, and market knowledge within the B2B context, a dynamic distinct from the often-segmented approach seen in CPG.
The genesis of this discussion traces back to a prior public exchange where Heinz expressed his belief that for a truly effective GTM strategy, sales operations should be integrated under the purview of the marketing function. Vajre, in a livestream event titled "GTM Shakedown: Who Owns GTM?" held on February 29, 2024, publicly challenged this perspective, stating, "I love you, but I disagree with you that marketing owns go-to-market." This direct engagement, while friendly, highlighted a significant divergence in strategic thinking regarding the ownership and execution of market entry and growth.
Heinz, unfazed by the disagreement, has chosen to "double down" on his conviction. His core argument hinges on the definition of marketing not as a departmental output, such as creating presentations, but as an active, ongoing "verb"—the act of strategically engaging and activating a market. From this perspective, sales becomes one critical channel among others, including partnerships and product-led growth, for executing this overarching market activation. Consequently, the function responsible for designing the commercial motion, Heinz contends, should bear the ultimate accountability for its success.
The Shifting Landscape of B2B Marketing Leadership
Historically, the CPG industry has been cited as a model where marketing functions with significant GTM oversight. The "brand manager" role, exemplified by figures managing products like Tide, was conceived to embody "a single point of accountability for the brands at the center of the business model," a concept pioneered by Procter & Gamble in 1931. These managers were tasked with understanding the entire market for their product, dictating strategy across advertising, pricing, distribution, and promotion.
However, a closer examination of the CPG model reveals complexities that complicate its direct application to B2B. Heinz himself points out several key discrepancies. Firstly, while brand managers were historically responsible for a broad spectrum of market activities, modern CPG structures often delineate responsibilities. P&G’s own career site, for instance, notes that "their responsibilities are separate and very different" between brand and sales, with trade spend, shelf placement, distribution, and retail pricing remaining firmly within the sales domain. This suggests a historical division that might not fully support the idea of singular marketing ownership.
Secondly, a significant structural shift occurred within CPG companies like P&G in the late 1980s. P&G transformed its sales department into "Customer Business Development," integrating functions like logistics, finance, IT, and marketing into the sales organization and notably eliminating sales quotas. This move positioned sales as the primary integrator of commercial activities, rather than marketing.
Thirdly, the broader "Chief Growth Officer" (CGO) movement, which saw major CPG players like Coca-Cola, Mondelez, Colgate, Coty, and Kellogg’s experiment with consolidating commercial leadership under a single executive, with marketing often at the core, has faced challenges. Coca-Cola, for example, eliminated its global CMO role only to reinstate it two years later. These instances suggest that while the principle of integrated commercial leadership is appealing, its implementation and the specific locus of accountability have proven to be dynamic and sometimes iterative.
Data Illuminating the B2B Reality
Heinz’s argument for marketing ownership in B2B is significantly bolstered by contemporary data that paints a picture of current organizational structures and the perceived responsibilities of marketing departments. A comprehensive study from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, known as The CMO Survey, surveyed 308 marketing leaders, with 97% at the VP level or above and approximately two-thirds from B2B companies. The survey consistently shows that core marketing responsibilities like brand (94%), digital (93%), and advertising (87%) are firmly within marketing’s domain. However, pricing (28%) and sales (19%) are areas where marketing’s primary responsibility is significantly lower. This data suggests that despite the theoretical potential for broader GTM ownership, marketing departments in many B2B organizations are not operationally aligned with or responsible for these critical commercial functions.
Further underscoring this trend, Forrester’s analysis of Fortune 500 companies revealed a decline in the executive-level presence of CMOs in B2B companies, dropping from 48% to 42% in a single year, with B2B leading this retreat. Spencer Stuart reports that 31% of S&P 500 companies lack a chief marketing officer altogether, and notably, software companies are increasingly appointing Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) instead, signaling a prioritization of sales-centric leadership in some high-growth sectors.
The reporting structure of marketing leaders also provides insight. An Anteriad survey of 631 B2B marketing decision-makers indicated that 36% of senior marketing leaders report to the CEO, while 33% report to a sales leader (including CROs, presidents, and chief sales officers). While the exact number reporting to a CRO is smaller within that bundled category, it still represents a significant portion of marketing functions being operationally subordinate to sales leadership.
Paradoxically, The Duke survey also highlights a strong collaborative relationship between marketing and sales. When asked about their working relationships with other departments, sales consistently scored highest among all functional pairs, with an average of 5.79 out of 7. Two-thirds of marketers rated their relationship with sales as a six or seven, outperforming finance and HR. This suggests that the long-standing "alignment" challenges may not stem from interpersonal friction but from fundamental structural and accountability issues. The data implies that despite strong working relationships, marketing is not being empowered or tasked with the strategic ownership of the GTM motion.
The B2B Advantage: A Unified Customer and Market Understanding
The core of Heinz’s renewed argument lies in the fundamental differences between CPG and B2B markets that make the case for marketing ownership of GTM stronger in the latter. In CPG, marketing typically owns the relationship with the end consumer, while sales is responsible for the relationship with the retailer. These are often distinct entities, located in different geographic areas and possessing different operational priorities. A brand manager in one city cannot directly negotiate shelf space in a retailer’s headquarters in another. This inherent segmentation creates a structural rationale for dividing responsibilities, leading to models like P&G’s sales-led integration or the challenges faced by CGO initiatives.
B2B, however, presents a fundamentally different scenario. The entity being researched is the same entity being sold to. The buying committee, often comprising individuals from various departments within the same organization, is a singular focus. There is one market, one overarching commercial motion, and crucially, no inherent structural impediment to a single function deeply understanding and influencing the entire process.
Marketing, by its nature and function, is positioned to be this entity. B2B marketers are actively engaged in understanding the customer better than any other department. They conduct win/loss interviews, participate in advisory boards, monitor review sites and community forums, analyze churn reasons, and track competitive intelligence. This deep immersion provides them with unparalleled insights into market segments, customer pain points, and the evolving competitive landscape.
The traditional "Four Ps" of marketing—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion—are far more directly influenced by marketing in B2B than they were in the CPG context. The absence of physical shelves to negotiate, trade spend to manage, or retail buyers dictating price shifts the focus. Product becomes a strategic roadmap conversation, price becomes a matter of packaging and positioning, and "place" transforms into channel strategy (direct sales, partners, product-led growth, marketplaces)—all of which are market-driven considerations long before they become purely sales execution tactics.
Navigating the Partner Channel Complexity
The introduction of partner channels—resellers, integrators, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and marketplaces—presents a potential counterargument, appearing to reintroduce a split similar to CPG. These intermediaries can create a layer between the vendor and the end buyer. However, Heinz argues this perspective is also flawed. From his viewpoint, a partner channel is simply another "means of distribution," akin to a direct sales team—a route to the end customer, not a different customer.
The critical distinction lies in control and message discipline. While a direct sales representative can be coached immediately before a client meeting, a partner’s representative operates with a degree of autonomy, their messaging influenced by their onboarding and interpretation of the vendor’s offerings. In these scenarios, where direct control is diminished, the foundational market intelligence and messaging strategy meticulously crafted by marketing become even more critical. Missteps in partner messaging can lead to a diluted or inaccurate representation of the product or solution, resulting in ineffective pitches and missed opportunities.
"Hand the channel to the function with the least visibility into the end customer and you get what most partner programs already are: a logo page, a product-centric pitch and a shared drive full of stale decks," Heinz posits. He cites an example of a CMO who described her company’s system for handling channel leads. While partner referrals were captured and integrated into the sales funnel, reseller deals were often managed outside the core marketing and sales process, only appearing in Salesforce at the end as distinct customer records. This disconnect, Heinz argues, leads to a lack of message discipline and feedback loops in segments where they are most needed and often carry the most strategic weight.
Ultimately, the function that possesses the deepest understanding of the market and the customer should wield significant influence over how the product or service is sold, both through its direct channels and indirectly through partners. This influence, Heinz argues, should ideally translate into accountability for the overall GTM outcome.
Accountability and the Demise of Excuses
The concept of accountability is central to Heinz’s thesis. The perennial marketing excuse, "Sales didn’t follow up on the leads," is rendered obsolete when marketing owns the entire GTM motion. This shift forces a focus on tangible outcomes rather than attributing failures to other departments. Owning GTM means accepting responsibility for the entire commercial funnel, including the campaigns that generate interest, the sales process that converts opportunities, and the ultimate revenue generated.
This ownership comes with a direct P&L responsibility, meaning marketing would carry a revenue number they could miss. Heinz frames this as a "fair trade," arguing that the benefit of eliminating excuses and fostering true accountability outweighs the risk of carrying a performance target. While many might shy away from such direct responsibility, Heinz believes this challenge is not about the individual but about the inherent potential and ceiling of the role itself.
The Enduring Need for Sales Leadership
It is crucial to clarify that Heinz is not advocating for marketers to abandon their core competencies or to take over the intricate operational aspects of sales. He emphasizes that owning GTM does not equate to building compensation plans, setting territories, managing the deal desk, or coaching individual sales representatives through closing complex deals. These are specialized crafts requiring deep expertise and dedicated professionals. Similarly, the nuanced role of a channel chief, skilled in partner recruitment, enablement, and management, remains distinct.
The core question, according to Heinz, is about strategic accountability: who is responsible for defining the target segments, selecting the appropriate channels, crafting the messaging, determining pricing strategies, and ultimately, ensuring the entire commercial motion is effective and delivering desired outcomes. This, he maintains, is fundamentally a market question, and one for which marketing, with its inherent market and customer insight, is the natural owner.
A Principled Stance for B2B Growth
While Heinz acknowledges that the CPG model may have provided an imperfect precedent, it highlighted a crucial principle: the need for a singular point of accountability for market outcomes, coupled with commensurate authority. Research by McKinsey & Company suggests that marketing organizations structured around generalist roles that integrate various functions deliver superior organic growth compared to those relying on highly specialized, siloed groups. The "executive integrator" role, when empowered with real influence and not just coordination duties, proves effective.
Conversely, a structure where marketing reports into a CRO signals a belief that the commercial motion is primarily a sales challenge with marketing as a supplementary function. While this may be a defensible organizational choice, it aligns with the observed trend of declining CMO presence in B2B and the rise of CROs as the primary commercial leaders.
Despite these structural realities, Heinz remains steadfast in his conviction. He posits that sales can indeed report into marketing, provided marketing departments are willing to evolve into true businesses driving commercial outcomes, rather than merely serving as a support function. He concedes that this idea, as Sangram Vajre rightly pointed out, may currently lack extensive data and precedent. However, the fundamental principles of market understanding, customer insight, and strategic accountability, coupled with the unique dynamics of the B2B environment, create a compelling case for marketing to assume a leadership role in defining and executing the go-to-market strategy. The evolution of this perspective will likely continue to shape discussions around organizational structure and GTM effectiveness in the years to come.
