Over the last 20 years, we've built two $100M+ companies and made hundreds of mistakes along the way. Everything we do runs on our GTM Operating System frameworks. We even wrote a book called MOVE — which became a WSJ best-selling book on go-to-market, quoted by Geoffrey Moore (author of the iconic Crossing the Chasm).
Bryan and Sangram (guess who’s who)
Our mission: help 100,000 businesses run on GTM OS to build profitable companies. We're at about 3,000 now so we have a long way to go.
We also run the GTMarketplace — connecting CEOs with 100+ certified fractional CMOs, CROs, and ops leaders all over the world who know the GTM Operating System.
With that intro, let's get moving!
Here's why I think the CMO and CRO roles are about to become one job.
Let's dig in.
The Promotion That Started This
Angela Shori, one of our GTM OS certified partners and chief GTM strategist at Shift Insights, worked as an operational layer running ABM campaigns at TrueDialogue, an enterprise SMS platform.
While she was in there, something happened worth talking about.
Amanda McGuckin Hager, their CMO, got promoted. Not to a bigger marketing title. To CRO. Same person, both departments, marketing and sales, one executive.
I sat down with the recording of Angela and Amanda's conversation and I think it's the clearest real-world proof of something I've been saying for a while: the traditional CMO role in B2B is not staying the same.
My prediction: more companies will merge CMO and CRO into a single chief go-to-market officer or chief growth officer role. And it'll solve 80% of the alignment problem most companies fight every single quarter.
Watch: How Amanda went from CMO to CRO, and why.
This Clear Approach Eliminates the Finger-Pointing Completely
Amanda spent 20 years in demand gen before taking on revenue. Here's how she described the shift:
"Following that bow tie, if you will, that funnel all the way through to the revenue line has been great. Knowing that I'm accountable for it all the way through gives me the opportunity to ensure that what I'm driving at the top is really going to convert."
Before, it was the same fight every marketing leader knows. Marketing says sales isn't following up on leads. Sales says the leads aren't any good. Nobody wins, revenue stalls, everyone blames the other department.
"This holistic approach eliminates that completely. We operate in a one team mentality."
That's not a soft skill. That's a structural fix. When one person owns brand through demand through pipeline through close, the incentive to point fingers disappears because there's nowhere left to point.
Why B2B Is Suddenly All In On Text
True Dialogue's whole business is enterprise SMS, and Amanda made a case I didn't expect: text messaging is becoming a real B2B go-to-market motion, not just a consumer play.
Why now?
Because every other channel is getting harder. Algorithms keep shifting. Search traffic is drying up. Email filters are tighter. Apple's call screening kills cold calls. Nobody sits at a desk phone anymore.
"Bouncing between the different channels to find your prospects and your customers... I think bouncing around those different channels is a sure way to grab the attention of our audiences. Their attention spans are short, but their attention is also spread so thin."
RCS messaging (the upgrade to plain SMS) lets a brand name and logo show up instead of a random 10-digit number, and Amanda says it's nearly impossible to spoof. For high-trust industries like healthcare, financial services, and higher ed, that trust signal matters more than almost anything else in the channel mix.
What This Means If You're Stepping Into the Combined Role
Amanda's advice for a marketer moving into revenue ownership, or a sales leader taking on marketing:
Get a strong finance partner. You need real modeling to track spend all the way through to closed revenue and payback, especially since some sales cycles take six months to show up.
Get a strong RevOps partner. Amanda called RevOps her "unsung hero" — the person making sure data, systems, and fields all flow correctly so decisions are based on what's actually happening, not a guess.
Don't treat marketing as the execution arm. If you're a sales leader inheriting marketing, know it's not just flyers and event swag. Marketing builds the air cover so that by the time your reps get someone on the phone, that prospect already knows who you are.
Her pull quote, and honestly the whole thesis of this issue:
"We are all in it for growth."
The Takeaway
This isn't a title trend. It's a structural response to a real problem: marketing and sales operating as two teams with two sets of incentives, pointing at each other instead of owning the same number.
Companies that collapse CMO and CRO into one seat aren't doing it to save headcount. They're doing it because alignment stops being a meeting and starts being a job description.
Our blunt advice to CEOs and GTM leaders:
Alignment isn't a meeting.
It's a job description.
If this made you think "I wish I had someone to help me connect marketing and sales like this," go take the free GTM assessment. 15 minutes, and it shows you exactly where you're stuck. Over 3,000 businesses are already running on GTM OS. runongtmos.com/move
CEOs: if you want to work with a certified partner like Angela who can operationalize this for your team, check out the GTMarketplace.
Fractionals: 10+ years in GTM and want to join the GTM OS Certified Partner program? DM me on LinkedIn.
Now, let's get moving.
love,
sangram
p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more frameworks like this, follow along at runongtmos.com and let's get moving.