Why Revenue Operations Is Replacing Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are fighting because the org chart is broken.

I’ve watched friction between sales and marketing intensify over the last decade. Mistrust. Finger-pointing. Competing KPIs that don’t align with actual business goals.

The root cause isn’t people—it’s structure. Digital automation blurred the lines of who owns what in the customer journey. Marketing owns awareness but also nurtures leads. Sales closes deals but also educates prospects. Customer service retains accounts but also upsells.

Where does marketing end and sales begin? Nobody knows anymore. So teams protect turf, build separate tech stacks, and produce conflicting reports that make leadership decisions harder instead of easier.

There’s a better way.

How we got here.

Modern sales and marketing emerged in the 1950s post-industrial boom. Think Mad Men. As competition increased and consumers gained choice, marketers developed techniques to generate interest and differentiation.

Sales practices go back further—early salesmen were known for aggressive door-to-door techniques during the Great Depression. Trading and bartering date back centuries. Sales is one of the oldest professions.

Marketing’s history is murkier. There’s debate about definitions, phases, and when “marketing” as a practice actually began.

But here’s what mattered: through the late 19th and 20th centuries, sales and marketing lived in harmony. Clear delineation. Simple KPIs. Early media channels that were easy to measure. Marketing generated interest. Sales closed deals. It worked.

Then Web 2.0 happened.

E-commerce. Digital sales and marketing. Social media. New customer data and segmentation capabilities. The marketing funnel—originally devised in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis—got operationalized with technology.

The buyer journey fundamentally changed.

Both functions splintered into specializations. Brand marketing. Performance marketing. SEO/SEM. Product marketing. Content marketing. Marketing analytics. SDRs. BDRs. AEs. Inside sales. Outside sales. Digital everything.

Like engines, the more moving parts, the more things break.

Separate stacks, separate truths.

Over the last decade, some organizations started identifying the real problem: sales, marketing, and customer service were building independent operating stacks, producing separate KPIs, and creating conflicting narratives.

Each function rolled up its own reports. Leadership couldn’t get a single source of truth. Decision-making became political. Resource prioritization turned into turf wars.

The best organizations adapted. They collapsed these functions under unified revenue structures—Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), Chief Growth Officers (CGOs), supported by Revenue Operations teams that connect processes, people, technology, and systems.

This provided a unifying goal: revenue growth. It reduced mistrust. It made organizations leaner and faster.

Like biological systems, the best companies adapt to stressors and devise more efficient structures to survive.

A thought experiment.

Here’s an exercise: if I started a generic SaaS company tomorrow, how would I organize customer-facing teams without using “sales” or “marketing” titles?

What would the structure look like if I used activity-oriented roles instead of legacy function names?

Could I explain it to a six-year-old?

The framework: customer decision journey.

First, I need clarity on what drives revenue. A customer exchanges money for a product or service that generates value—real or perceived.

Assuming product-market fit, revenue increases by acquiring and retaining customers.

But how do you acquire and retain customers in a digital-first world?

The traditional marketing funnel has had a 100+ year run. But explaining “awareness, familiarity, consideration, intent, and loyalty” to a six-year-old is impossible.

McKinsey published research in 2009 proposing a new customer decision journey map. It’s more intuitive. Minimal sales and marketing jargon. Descriptive language that feels relatable today.

I tested it with my six-year-old. Much easier to explain. The loyalty loop was a hit.

The journey breaks into two stages:

• Acquisition (top half): attract and commit customers to purchase
• Retention (bottom half): support value after purchase, build loyalty

Building the team.

At the top: a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). I want revenue in the title for clarity. The CRO needs fluency in acquisition and retention, strong leadership, cohesive storytelling, financial discipline, and technical understanding.

Reporting to the CRO: Acquisition Lead (AL) and Retention Lead (RL).

The AL is a hunter—clear vision for attracting and closing prospects across the acquisition journey.

The RL is a farmer—adept at creating lasting relationships, educating customers, solving problems, and generating loyalty.

Acquisition roles.

To land on a customer’s initial consideration set, you must capture positive attention wherever that attention lives—passive browsing or active searching.

Prospect Librarian — Segments prospects to maximize attention. Understands who’s searching, where they’re looking, and what content resonates.

Search Attention Wizards — Optimize for active search behavior.

Attention Content Creators — Build content that grabs eyeballs.

Attention Campaign Planners — Orchestrate multi-channel campaigns.

Non-Digital Attention Gurus — Handle offline channels (yes, they still matter).

Once you have attention and positive first impressions, prospects enter research mode. They’ll research online, talk to current customers, ask professional communities, meet with reps, watch videos, attend events, compare competitors, and test the product.

You need people excellent at creating narratives, building relationships, participating in communities, developing media, planning events, and providing informative content across digital and analog channels that drive positive perceptions and trust.

Moment of purchase.

The customer has passed attention, consideration, and research. They’re on the cusp of a decision—McKinsey’s “moment of purchase.”

An agreement happens between customer and company to exchange product for compensation. This may happen with or without human interaction.

Agreement Experience Team — Makes the buying experience effortless, whether self-serve or human-assisted.

Empathetic Closers — For prospects needing additional convincing, these are relationship-focused negotiators who close agreements without pressure tactics.

Retention roles.

The retention game begins immediately after purchase.

Onboarding Wizards — Create unforgettable first impressions. Get customers to value fast.

Relationship Shamans — Maintain ongoing customer relationships. Check-ins. QBRs. Expansion conversations.

Self-Help Facilitators — Build content for customers who prefer to solve problems independently. Knowledge bases. Video tutorials. Community forums.

Customer SWAT Team — For customers needing human support, these problem-solvers move fast with empathy.

Retention Magicians — Identify at-risk customers and create solutions to convince them to stay (within reason). Early warning systems. Intervention strategies.

Retention is underfunded in most organizations. But I’d argue it’s equally—if not more—important than acquisition. Keeping customers is cheaper than finding new ones. And loyal customers expand.

In this organization, retention gets equal priority and budget to acquisition.

The connective tissue.

Two critical threads span the entire customer journey:

Storyteller Lead — Weaves together product names, brand identity, visual appearance, meaning, and humanizes the company. This isn’t “branding fluff”—it’s the connective tissue that makes everything else work.

Measurement Lead — Owns data, analytics, and reporting across the full customer journey. Single source of truth. One KPI rules them all: revenue growth.

Both report directly to the CRO.

The takeaway.

This exercise isn’t a rigid org chart. It’s a way to trigger first-principles thinking about organizational design.

Sales and marketing titles carry baggage—decades of functional separation, territorial behavior, and misaligned incentives. Activity-oriented roles force you to think about what actually needs to happen to acquire and retain customers.

You can run this exercise with your team. Debate it. Get creative. Have fun with the titles. The goal isn’t perfect structure—it’s identifying blind spots, root causes of friction, and whether your org chart matches how customers actually buy today.

Even if you’re not ready for organizational change, this exercise will surface problems you didn’t know you had.

The real question.

Does your organizational structure reflect 2025 buyer behavior? Or is it optimized for 1995?

If sales and marketing are fighting, the answer is probably the latter.