At PE-backed companies, this misalignment can quietly cost 1-2 turns at exit. And almost nobody names it correctly.
I’ve written about the CMO’s relationship with the CFO, CIO, CEO, and the CHRO. Each of those matters. But if I’m being direct, none of them will make or break your tenure the way the CRO relationship does. And none of them has more potential to quietly destroy value at a PE-backed company if it goes sideways.
Each of those pairings is really one piece of a larger discipline: cross-functional GTM alignment, where every function works from a single shared revenue number instead of pulling in different directions. The CRO relationship is simply the piece with the highest stakes.
The Game Is Already Over Before Sales Shows Up
This week I want to talk about that relationship honestly – why it’s hard, why it’s high-stakes, and what it actually takes to get it right.
Before we get into the relationship dynamics, you need to understand something fundamental about how B2B buying actually works today, because it completely reframes what the CMO’s job is – and why CRO-CMO alignment is a value-creation imperative, not just a management nicety.
Kerry Cunningham and the research team at 6sense have published some of the most important B2B buying research available right now. The headline: the average B2B buying cycle is 10 months long, and buyers don’t engage a seller until they are 61% of the way through that journey. That’s roughly six months of researching, evaluating, and deciding – all happening before your BDR or AE gets a single call returned.
More importantly: by the time that first call happens, 85% of buying groups have already established their requirements, and 94% have already identified a preliminary winner. The shortlist of 4 to 5 vendors was formed on Day 1 of the buying cycle, and 95% of deals are ultimately won by a vendor who was on that original shortlist.
Let that land. The game was largely decided before your sales team ever knew there was a game being played. And as the 6sense research frames it plainly: when buyers finally engage at that 61% mark, it is not because the current campaign or BDR was so clever. It was because of brand gravity built long before.
This is exactly what I mean when I talk about brand gravity. Your job as CMO – especially in a PE-backed company where you are trying to compress the value-creation timeline – is to make sure that when a buying group in your ICP forms its shortlist, your company is on it. Not because of lucky timing. Not because a BDR happened to cold-call them in the right week. But because they have been consuming your content, engaging with your thought leadership, and forming a point of view about you for months before they were ever “in market.”
If you are not building brand gravity with the 60% of your ICP that is not yet in an active buying cycle, you are invisible when they finally are. And the CRO’s team will spend their days calling into accounts where the selection was already made without you.
This is why the CMO-CRO relationship is not just a cultural or a personalities issue. It is a pipeline architecture issue. And it will show up in your ARR multiple at exit.
The Feud Nobody Wants to Admit Is Happening
Most CROs carry a model in their head: marketing fills the top of the funnel, sales converts it. In that model, marketing exists to serve sales. If pipeline is short, marketing is failing. If win rates are low, marketing sent bad leads.
Most CMOs carry a different model: their job is to build the brand, create demand, and influence the market long before a deal is ever in play. In that model, the CRO who keeps asking for more MQLs is fundamentally misunderstanding what drives revenue.
Neither of them is entirely right. And the gap between those two worldviews, if left unaddressed, quietly bleeds pipeline, kills forecasting accuracy, and frustrates the entire GTM organization.
Your PE sponsor feels it in the board reporting. They see a pipeline coverage ratio that looks fine on paper but produces disappointing conversion. They see marketing investment growing without an obvious correlation to bookings. They see two executives who are polite to each other in QBRs and clearly misaligned everywhere else. Experienced sponsors recognize the pattern and know it costs turns at exit – even if they don’t name it explicitly in the review.
The Shared-Outcome Operating Contract
The fix is not a better SLA between marketing and sales. It is not another committee meeting. It is a genuine shared-outcome operating contract between the CMO and the CRO, built around a common answer to one question: what does pipeline health actually mean for this business?
In my experience, most CMO-CRO conflicts are really arguments about definitions. Who owns pipeline? What is a qualified lead? What is a qualified opportunity? What does “marketing-sourced” actually mean in a world where attribution is increasingly messy?
You have to work through these together – just the two of you, or with your revenue operations leadership – and build shared definitions for the following:
Pipeline ownership: marketing owns pipeline creation and is accountable for pipeline coverage at the top of the funnel. Sales owns pipeline progression and conversion. Neither should be fighting over who “gets credit” for a deal. Both should have their own clearly defined metrics that reflect their actual contribution, and those metrics should be set jointly, not imposed by one function on the other.
Lead qualification: the definition of a marketing-qualified account, an MQA/MQL, and a sales-accepted lead needs to be built together. The fastest way to poison the relationship is for marketing to define MQL unilaterally and for sales to reject 60% of what comes through. That is a definition problem masquerading as a performance problem.
Forecast input: the CMO should be a genuine contributor to forecast conversations – not just presenting pipeline creation metrics, but bringing insight into what is building in the brand-to-demand zone: what content is resonating, what segments are showing intent signals, what the 6-to-12-month pipeline outlook looks like based on in-market behavior. That input makes the CRO’s forecast sharper, and it positions marketing as a strategic revenue partner rather than a cost center.
When you build that contract together, you shift from a zero-sum conversation to a shared accountability conversation. That shift changes everything.
A Heads-Up on One Dynamic You May Encounter
I want to mention one situation that sometimes occurs – not because it is the norm, but because it is worth being prepared for.
Occasionally, a new CMO walks into a company where the CRO has been operating as the dominant revenue voice for years, with marketing in a supporting or subordinate role. In that structure, the CRO has built their credibility and internal relationships around owning the GTM narrative. Your arrival as a capable peer – someone who now shares that stage, contributes to the revenue conversation with equal weight, and has the CEO’s confidence – can feel threatening, regardless of how collaborative your intentions are.
If you find yourself in that situation, my advice is simple: do not try to win the argument. You will not win it by being right. You win it by being genuinely useful to the CRO’s priorities first, before you ask for anything in return. Find out what keeps them up at night about pipeline. Bring intent data and content signals that help their team prioritize. Sit in on discovery calls. Ask what is working in competitive situations and build materials around it.
When you demonstrate that your presence is making their team better, the posture changes. It does not always change quickly, but it changes. And if it does not change after a sustained period of genuine effort, that is a management conversation – not a marketing conversation – and your CEO or sponsor needs to be part of it.
Most CMO-CRO relationships are not like this. But the ones that are can derail an otherwise strong CMO tenure quickly. Better to know it can happen than to be caught off guard.
The Operating Rhythm That Makes It Real
An alliance without a rhythm is just a good intention. Here is what the operating model should look like, regardless of whether your company has a unified RevOps function or separate Marketing Ops and Sales Ops teams. In either structure, those operational functions must work from the same set of performance KPIs and a shared definition of what good looks like versus what needs attention. Separate systems feeding different narratives into the same pipeline conversation is a recipe for dysfunction.
Weekly: a working pipeline and account review involving RevOps – or Marketing Ops and Sales Ops working in close coordination – focused on account-level intent signals, deals in motion where marketing can add support, and accounts showing early in-market behavior worth flagging to the sales team. This is not a status meeting. It is a working session.
Monthly: a full GTM alignment review with the CMO, CRO, CCO, and their respective direct reports, covering the quarter’s pipeline health, content performance by segment, competitive dynamics, and joint priorities for the next 30 days. This is where you resolve friction before it calcifies into a grievance.
Quarterly: a shared QBR presented jointly to the CEO and executive team. Not marketing’s QBR with a sales slide, and not sales’ QBR with a marketing slide. A single integrated revenue review that shows how the two functions are operating as one GTM system. When the CEO and CFO see the CMO and CRO presenting together with shared metrics and a coherent story, it builds confidence in the leadership team’s ability to execute. When they see two separate presentations that don’t quite add up, they start asking harder questions.
What PE Sponsors Should Actually Grade On
If you are a PE sponsor reading this, here is what I would encourage you to probe in your value-creation reviews, beyond standard pipeline and bookings metrics:
Do the CMO and CRO have a shared definition of pipeline? If not, your bookings are harder to forecast than they should be.
Does marketing have a clear, substantive answer to the question: “How are you building brand gravity with accounts that are not yet in market?” If the CMO can only talk about MQLs and campaign conversion rates, your top-of-funnel is more fragile than the numbers suggest.
Are Marketing Ops and Sales Ops – whether unified under RevOps or operating as separate functions – working from the same KPI framework? If there are two different versions of pipeline health being reported, that is a structural problem worth surfacing.
Is there a shared QBR? If the CMO and CRO are presenting entirely separately, that is a yellow flag worth exploring.
The CRO-CMO relationship is not a soft issue. It is a direct input to your ARR trajectory, your net revenue retention, and ultimately your exit multiple. Companies that get this right grow faster, forecast more accurately, and build stronger competitive positions. Companies that let the tension simmer quietly lose more than they ever fully account for.
The good news is that it is fixable. And it almost always starts the same way: two leaders deciding to sit down together and build something jointly, rather than around each other.
If you are navigating a CMO-CRO alignment challenge at a PE-backed company and want to think through the operating model, I welcome the conversation.
Thoughts? I’d love to hear from CMOs and CROs on what has actually worked – and what has not – in your experience building this alignment.
