Here’s a generally-pretty-generic article on “What Sales Leaders Need To Excel Over Time” — that article is written somewhere on Earth roughly 14,991 times in a given day, and often called “thought leadership” — but I do want you to pay attention to this paragraph:
One reason the notion of term limits for sales executives isn’t commonly discussed is that generally speaking, sales leaders don’t stay in the job long enough for these situations to arise. Instead, many companies face the opposite problem: managing the high cost of frequent sales leader turnover. When sales executives depart too quickly, their initiatives don’t have enough time to make a significant impact. In addition, the learning curve gets disrupted and the company fails to benefit from the leadership wisdom gained through experience.
Now I want you to consider this: oftentimes, average CMO (marketing) tenure is somewhere between 30 and 48 months, i.e. 2.5 to 4 years.
So, across a half-decade, you might have 3–4 different people rotating in and out of top sales and marketing roles. Marketing is supposed to help sales with message, and sales is supposed to bring in revenue. Hmm. That seems a lot of turnover at the levels where the strategy stuff should be being set. Maybe that’s the issue in reality. Maybe that’s part of the reason nothing ever gets done. Because…
