Building A Modern Sales & Marketing Machine

As CEO, I'll bet you're having a hard time keeping up with the dizzying pace of innovation in social media and trying to understand the potential impact of these various social media platforms on your business.  

You're not alone-according to a recent study, 68% of Fortune 500 CEOs are not currently using any social media platforms (2013 Social CEO Report-http://www.ceo.com/social-ceo-report-2013/). This is a shocking statistic, but consistent with what I hear from Enterprise CEOs that I meet with everyday.

I've been very fortunate in my career to work for several Enterprise tech start ups that experienced rapid growth-HubSpot, Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), Pegasystems (NASDAQ: PEGA)-and I get asked all the time what are the key similarities between them.

As CEO, one of your jobs is to keep close tabs on your competitors and to stay ahead of them by driving continuous innovation across all aspects of your business-product, sales and marketing.  

When you analyze your company's marketing, how do you know if it is giving you a competitive advantage? Many CEOs that I speak with are not satisfied with their marketing because they can't easily measure the impact of their marketing spend.  

As CEO, you're pushing hard to grow the top line as fast as possible while staying vigilant on costs. What if there were a way to accelerate top line growth not by spending more, but by simply getting significantly more out every dollar your company is currently spending?  

One huge opportunity to get a lot more bang for your buck is your company's marketing investment. Historically, you and your CFO have probably had a very difficult time trying quantify and measure the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing spend.  

As CEO, your job is to ensure that your executive team is aligned on key company goals and is executing in tandem to accomplish these objectives.  That they're all rowing in the same direction so your company can achieve its big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs).  So why does it often feel like your heads of Sales and Marketing aren't on the same page?  Because Sales and Marketing don't communicate.