When it comes to building a high-performing marketing organization, strategy isn’t just a line item in a planning doc — it’s the foundation everything else rests on. And yet, most teams don’t step back often enough to ask the tough questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing, how it ties to revenue, and whether the current approach is truly built to scale. As part of our Revenue Marketing Operating System (RM6), we focus heavily on organizational strategy under the Strategy > Organizational Foundations capability. If you’re serious about evolving marketing into a revenue engine, this is where the transformation starts.
1. Are we structured for scale—or are we organized for survival?
This is the starting point for every serious conversation about organizational strategy. A lot of companies say they want growth, but the way they’re structured tells a different story. Teams are stuck in silos, decisions are reactive, and marketing is still seen as a service center rather than a growth engine. If your org chart reflects more of a survival mindset—chasing leads, chasing requests, chasing attribution—you’ll never get ahead. The structure of your teams should reflect the outcomes you want to drive. If you want scalable, repeatable revenue, your organization has to be built with that goal in mind.
2. Do we have a shared revenue vision across marketing, sales, and customer success?
You can’t have alignment without a shared definition of success. And for modern revenue teams, that success has to be tied to the entire customer lifecycle—from first touch to renewal and expansion. Too often, each team is focused on their own metrics: MQLs for marketing, closed-won for sales, NPS for customer success. But none of that matters if they aren’t working together toward revenue outcomes. A shared revenue vision aligns behaviors, processes, and investments. It builds trust. And it ensures that the handoffs between teams don’t become drop-offs.
3. Is our marketing strategy built into business planning—or bolted on after?
One of the clearest signs your organization doesn’t yet treat marketing as a revenue driver is when marketing plans show up after the business plan is already set. If marketing isn't in the room when growth targets are being shaped, how can they be expected to drive them? Strategic marketing has to be embedded early—because that’s when you influence the market approach, buyer experience, investment mix, and sales readiness. You can’t expect marketing to own revenue without giving them a seat at the table.
4. Do we make organizational decisions based on data or gut?
Everyone says they’re data-driven. But when it comes time to decide where to invest, who to hire, what to prioritize—are those decisions backed by evidence or made based on who has the loudest voice in the room? Data doesn’t just help us measure results; it should guide structure, resource allocation, tech stack investment, and even team development. If you’re not regularly reviewing performance data to shape how your team is organized and how your strategy evolves, you’re leaving money on the table.
5. Is the CMO seen as a revenue leader or a service provider?
This is a big one. If your CMO is still being asked to "get things done" rather than lead growth strategy, you haven’t made the leap. The role of marketing leadership in today’s revenue organization isn’t to churn out assets—it’s to partner with the CEO, CRO, and CFO to drive growth. That means ownership of pipeline targets, input on product and pricing, influence over customer experience. If your CMO isn’t empowered to lead, it might be time to rethink your structure.
6. Have we clearly defined who owns what in the revenue process?
Misalignment doesn’t always come from disagreement—sometimes it comes from ambiguity. If no one knows who owns a lead once it hits the CRM, or who is accountable for onboarding a new customer, or who is responsible for upsell campaigns—you’re setting yourself up for confusion and inefficiency. Clear roles, responsibilities, and service level agreements across functions are critical to an effective organizational strategy. Revenue doesn’t care whose job it was. It just suffers when the job doesn’t get done.
7. Are we organized around functions or customer outcomes?
Functional orgs are neat. But customer journeys aren’t. When your teams are organized by internal functions instead of customer outcomes, it’s easy to lose sight of the experience you’re creating. Silos between demand gen, product marketing, field marketing, and customer marketing often result in a fragmented buyer journey. When you start organizing around the customer—and how you move them from unaware to advocate—you begin to build an organization that can deliver real impact.
8. Are we hiring for the skills we need tomorrow—or the tasks we needed yesterday?
It’s easy to backfill based on what someone did, but the smartest companies hire based on where they’re going. That means looking beyond executional tasks and thinking in terms of capabilities. Are we hiring people who understand data, who can think across systems, who are comfortable with ambiguity, who can lead cross-functional work? Or are we hiring for comfort and familiarity? The shape of your org is only as strong as the talent within it.
9. Are our teams built to test, learn, and adapt—or just to deliver?
If your team is only structured to deliver what’s asked of them, you’re missing out on innovation. Organizational strategy should enable experimentation. You need people who have the time, mandate, and psychological safety to test, learn, and improve. Whether that’s A/B testing campaigns, piloting new processes, or iterating on customer experience, your structure has to support learning loops—not just production loops.
10. Does our structure help us deliver predictable revenue?
At the end of the day, this is the litmus test. If your organizational strategy isn’t producing predictable, scalable revenue outcomes, then it’s not doing its job. That doesn’t mean chasing perfection or reorging every six months. It means intentionally designing your teams, your processes, your roles, and your tech to support a revenue engine—not a cost center. Predictability comes from clarity, accountability, and alignment—and your org structure needs to support all three.
Getting organizational strategy right isn’t about checking boxes — it’s about being intentional in how your marketing function drives business growth. These ten questions are a starting point, but the real work happens in how you answer them, what gaps you uncover, and what actions you’re willing to take next. The organizations that win in revenue marketing aren’t the ones with the flashiest campaigns — they’re the ones with alignment, clarity, and a strategy built for scale. Let’s get you there.
