You have a budget for one senior revenue hire, and every advisor you ask gives you a different answer. Half of them say marketing has to come first because sales can't close leads that don't exist, and the other half say sales pays the bills, so start there. Meanwhile, the hire keeps getting pushed another quarter because no one internally can agree on which problem is actually the bottleneck.
Sarah Shepard and I spent this episode working through that question the way we work through it with clients, and you'll come away with the head-count signals that tell you a combined role is about to break, a real client story where sales beat marketing as the first hire, and a reason to consider going fractional before you commit $150K or more to a permanent seat.
This post is based on Episode 73 of Revenue Rewired | The Real Cost of Hiring Marketing or Sales First (and Why It's Rarely Either).
If you'd rather listen than read, find the full episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon. It's worth your time.
Can Sales and Marketing Ever Be One Role?
Sarah opened with this one, and I gave her the answer I hate giving, which is that it depends. On paper, growing companies look nearly identical, but get under the hood, and the nuances pile up fast: the age of the business, the positioning, what resources already exist, the strengths of the people in the seats. A combined head of sales and marketing, or a chief revenue officer, can work well when there's proper leadership above that person and a solid plan beneath them.
The catch is that people acclimate to whatever they're comfortable with. One of our clients holds that combined title, and on our first call she described herself as a big S and a small M, meaning she's far more passionate about the sales side. I loved the self-awareness, but it tells you something about the seat itself. Whoever holds it will drift toward the half they love, and when the pipeline gets painful, marketing becomes the comfortable distraction rather than a deliberate priority.
The numbers give you an early warning, too. A contact of mine runs both departments with 16 or 17 direct reports and no mid-management tier between her and the people doing the work, and I know from experience that I start getting overwhelmed once more than about five people report to me. If you're a $25 million company with hundreds of pipeline items and one departure means the department head personally absorbs that person's workload to keep momentum, the structure was already breaking before anyone left.
If You Could Only Hire One, Which Comes First?
Sarah went first and argued for marketing: without strategy, nothing else falls into place. The first job is auditing what exists and defining your ideal client profiles, then checking whether you're even talking to the right people. I pushed back a little, because much of what she described isn't marketing execution; it's brand strategy and positioning. That distinction matters, because when a friend recently asked me this exact question, my advice was that either hire will likely fail without the right foundation underneath them.
Here's the failure pattern when marketing arrives without that foundation. Three to six months in, an experienced marketer starts generating real leads, and if nobody on the team can handle those conversations, you've created stress instead of revenue. A typical marketing person isn't a salesperson, and asking them to run the meetings they generated distracts them from the job you actually hired them for.
Sometimes the answer flips entirely. A year or so ago, a company came to me wanting help hiring a head of marketing, and after doing my due diligence, I recommended they hire in sales instead. Their total market was maybe 500 businesses, and they already had a solid reputation and real visibility at the key industry conferences. When I asked the owner what would happen if a marketer brought in 30 leads a month and they closed all 30, he said, "We would die overnight." Turning on lead flow you can't answer damages your reputation before you ever get off the ground. For that niche of a business, a smart outbound motion beats an entire marketing department.
Is Rev Ops the Hybrid Answer?
Midway through the conversation, Sarah reframed the whole debate: maybe the right first hire isn't either role, it's the hybrid, the rev ops person. She sees rev ops as operational sales more than marketing, the function that finds and patches the revenue leaks between handoffs. That framing resonates with me because much of what breaks down between departments isn't a talent problem; it's friction in the flow from lead to close.
It also explains why a fresh pair of eyes matters so much. Leadership teams justify the answer they already believe. We worked with a company about two years ago where the owner had a family member overseeing marketing, and the internal diagnosis was always that the salespeople couldn't close, so they churned through rep after rep like a revolving door spinning in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. The more uncomfortable possibility, that marketing was feeding the machine badly, was one nobody inside the building was positioned to raise.
A lot of why I launched StringCan about 16 years ago comes down to this. When we first come into a business, we have no financial stake in the answer yet, so there's no reason to tell anyone what they want to hear. Sarah called it having no bias toward either side, and I'd call the role a diagnostic architect: examine the positioning and pricing, trace the handoffs between departments, then build a road map before anyone writes a job description.
Why Do So Many Senior Marketing Hires Fail?
The CMO title itself causes trouble. Two of our client contacts were hired as true chief marketing officers, expected to deliver a smart strategy inside 60 or 90 days, and both walked into a mess. Neither company had ever had anyone oversee marketing before, so these talented people arrived to find none of the basics in place, not even proper logo files or access to analytics, and it took six-plus months just to get a foundation down. From there, the role becomes a dumping ground, where the head of marketing is somehow also picking paint colors for the office and finding a new landscaping vendor.
The salary you offer isn't the true cost, either. Sarah reminds me of this regularly: once you bake in benefits and the full burden rate, a $150K hire costs a multiple of that number. So before making the permanent commitment, a fractional leader or an agency can find your gaps and build the systems the new hire would otherwise inherit as a mess. Experienced sales leaders especially are wired to hit the ground running, and if their first six months get eaten by writing process documents, you've paid a premium for new-hire momentum that never showed up.
FAQ
Q: At what point does a combined sales and marketing role stop working?
A: Watch the ratio of people to leadership, not just revenue. Jay says he starts drowning past five or so reports, so a leader carrying sixteen-plus with no management layer in between is a gap waiting to surface. If the leader ends up doing a departed employee's work herself whenever a seat opens, the structure is already failing.
Q: Should my first revenue hire be sales or marketing?
A: It depends on what's already in place. If you have lead flow nobody's answering, hire sales; if you have sellers staring at a dry pipeline and no positioning work done, foundation and marketing come first. The episode's bigger point is that you should diagnose the whole business before choosing at all.
Q: Why hire a fractional CMO before a full-time one?
A: A senior hire at $150K on paper really costs far more once benefits and overhead are included. Bringing in fractional help first means the gaps get identified, and basic systems are stood up early, so the permanent person spends their first 90 days executing instead of untangling.
Q: What is rev ops, and does it replace a sales or marketing hire?
A: Rev ops sits between the two functions, smoothing the path from first touch to closed deal and patching leaks in the handoffs. It doesn't replace frontline selling or demand generation, but for companies whose problem is friction rather than volume, it can be the smarter first investment.
Q: How do I know whether my real problem is sales or marketing?
A: Assume you're too close to call it. Jay tells the story of a company that kept firing salespeople when the actual issue was the marketing feeding them, because leaders tend to hear the diagnosis they were hoping for. An outside review from someone with nothing to gain from either conclusion is the fastest way to find out.
Ready to Get This Hire Right?
Sorting out this decision is a big part of what we do at StringCan. We come in from the outside, run a diagnostic across the whole revenue engine, then hand you a road map showing which seat to fill first and what that person needs waiting for them on day one. Our team typically brings five or six specialists into a project, because the range of skills a growing company needs rarely lives in one unicorn hire.
Listen to the full conversation in Episode 73 of Revenue Rewired. And if you're staring at this decision right now, reach out to us and let's figure out what your business actually needs before you post the role.
