In January 2024, Gotransverse was rebuilding its marketing and revenue operations from the ground up. Instead of hiring a head of marketing, a RevOps lead, and a BDR manager separately, I made the case to own the whole engine myself. Here's what happened.
When I arrived in January 2024, Gotransverse was in the middle of rebuilding its entire marketing and revenue operations function. The systems were fragmented, reporting couldn't be trusted, and the plan on the table was to hire three separate leaders to fix it.
The conventional move was to staff up: a head of marketing to own brand and demand, a RevOps lead to fix the systems, and a BDR manager to run the pipeline. Three searches, three salaries, three sets of priorities, and three people who would then have to learn to agree with each other before anything actually improved.
I've spent twenty years watching that structure create the exact problem it's meant to solve. Marketing, sales operations, and the systems underneath don't fail in isolation. They fail at the seams between them. Splitting ownership across three leaders builds those seams in on day one.
Rather than fill three roles, I made the case to lead the whole thing myself: marketing, revenue operations, and BDR strategy under one accountable owner. One person who could set the strategy, build the systems to support it, and align the pipeline to both, without waiting for three leaders to negotiate a shared definition of "qualified."
Brand, demand generation, product marketing, and GTM strategy.
The systems, data, reporting, and automation underneath it all.
Pipeline strategy, routing, and the handoff into sales.
The value wasn't saving on headcount. It was removing the seams. One owner meant the strategy, the systems, and the pipeline were designed to fit each other from the start.
They gave me the shot. What I built with it is the rest of this story.
Through the rest of 2024, I hired and built the team around the system I was designing, not the other way around. RevOps, marketing, and product marketing specialists brought on to fit a coherent operating model, rather than inherited silos I'd have to reconcile later.
The single-owner structure worked well enough that the role grew with it: I was promoted from Head of Revenue Operations to VP of Marketing while continuing to own the operating systems underneath.
If you're rebuilding revenue and marketing and weighing whether to split it across three leaders or trust one operator to own the system, that's exactly the conversation I want to have.