Head of Sales and Marketing: One Role or Two Jobs Badly Merged?

A head of sales and marketing is a senior leader responsible for both commercial pipeline generation and brand-to-revenue strategy, typically in organisations where the two functions are too small or too intertwined to justify separate leadership. The role works when it is built deliberately. It fails when it is created by cutting headcount and handing one person two jobs.

Most of the tension in this role comes from a structural mismatch that organisations rarely acknowledge honestly. Sales operates in weeks and quarters. Marketing operates in months and years. Asking one person to hold both clocks simultaneously is either a genuine design decision or an act of financial convenience dressed up as strategic thinking.

Why Organisations Create This Role in the First Place

I have seen this role created for three distinct reasons, and only one of them is good. The good reason is that the organisation is genuinely small enough that integrated leadership makes sense, and the person appointed has the range to hold both functions credibly. The other two reasons are cost reduction dressed up as integration, and a CEO who has grown frustrated with sales and marketing not talking to each other and decided that one person in charge will fix the communication problem.

It rarely does. The communication problem between sales and marketing is almost never a structural problem. It is a culture and incentive problem. Merging the reporting lines does not change the fact that the sales team is rewarded for this quarter’s numbers and the marketing team is being asked to invest in next year’s pipeline. One leader sitting above both does not dissolve that tension. It just means one person has to manage it alone, without the political cover of a peer relationship.

The organisations that create this role well tend to be in the £5m to £50m revenue range, where there genuinely is not enough complexity in either function to justify two C-suite heads. They appoint someone with real commercial credibility across both disciplines, give them a clear mandate, and build the supporting team around the role rather than expecting one person to execute across everything.

If you are thinking through how leadership structures like this sit within a broader commercial framework, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the full range of how senior marketing roles are built, evaluated, and evolved at different stages of organisational growth.

What the Role Actually Requires Day to Day

The practical demands of a head of sales and marketing are genuinely broad. On any given week, this person might be reviewing campaign performance data, sitting in a pipeline review, briefing a creative agency, coaching a business development manager through a stalled deal, and presenting board-level revenue forecasts. That is not a job description. That is four jobs with a shared calendar.

What makes it workable is prioritisation discipline and a clear understanding of where the leverage is. In my experience running agency teams and managing commercial functions, the leaders who thrive in high-breadth roles are not the ones who try to do everything equally. They are the ones who know which lever moves the business most at any given moment, and they weight their time accordingly. When pipeline is thin, they lean into demand generation. When conversion is the problem, they lean into sales enablement and process. When the brand is losing relevance, they step back from the operational noise and invest in positioning.

The failure mode is the opposite: treating every function as equally urgent and spending the week reacting to whichever team is loudest. Sales teams are usually louder. Which means marketing investment, particularly longer-cycle brand and audience-building work, gets quietly deprioritised. That rarely shows up as a problem in the next quarter. It shows up 18 months later when the pipeline has dried up and nobody can quite explain why.

I spent years watching performance marketing get credited for growth that was, in large part, already going to happen. Someone who has already decided to buy will click your retargeting ad on the way to converting. That does not mean the ad drove the decision. A head of sales and marketing who understands this distinction will invest differently from one who reads last-click attribution as gospel. The former builds audiences and brand salience alongside conversion infrastructure. The latter optimises the bottom of the funnel until the top runs dry.

The Structural Tension That Most Job Descriptions Ignore

Sales and marketing have different time horizons, different success metrics, and different relationships with uncertainty. Sales is measured on closed revenue in a defined period. Marketing is measured, when it is measured well, on a combination of short-term lead quality and longer-term brand contribution that takes months or years to manifest fully. Asking one leader to optimise for both simultaneously is asking them to serve two masters with different definitions of success.

The organisations that handle this well are explicit about the trade-offs. They define, in advance, what happens when quarterly sales pressure conflicts with a longer-term marketing investment decision. They give the head of sales and marketing a clear mandate rather than leaving them to negotiate that conflict alone every time it arises. And they build board-level literacy about marketing’s contribution to revenue beyond the immediate quarter, so that the leader is not constantly having to defend brand investment against short-term pipeline metrics.

Understanding how user behaviour and intent data can inform both sales and marketing decisions is one area where the functions genuinely overlap. Tools that surface qualitative insight, like those offered through Hotjar’s lead generation research, can give a combined leader a clearer picture of where prospects drop out of the experience and what that means for both messaging and sales process.

The alignment between sales and marketing technology stacks has been a recurring theme in analyst thinking for over a decade, and the challenge has not meaningfully simplified. The tools have multiplied. The integration work is still largely manual. A head of sales and marketing who has not thought carefully about which platforms serve both functions, and which ones create siloed data that undermines the whole point of having integrated leadership, will spend a disproportionate amount of their time managing reporting inconsistencies rather than making commercial decisions.

When a Permanent Hire Is the Wrong Answer

Not every organisation that needs integrated sales and marketing leadership needs a permanent head of sales and marketing. That is a more important distinction than most hiring managers are willing to make, because the instinct when a gap appears is to fill it with a permanent hire. Permanent hires are expensive, slow to onboard, and carry significant risk if the brief is unclear or the organisation is still working out what it needs.

There are three situations where a fractional or interim model is almost certainly the better answer. The first is a business in transition, a post-acquisition integration, a leadership departure, or a period of rapid scaling where the commercial model is still being defined. The second is a business that needs senior capability but cannot justify or afford a full-time hire at that level. The third is a business that has never had integrated sales and marketing leadership and needs someone to build the operating model before hiring permanently into it.

In all three cases, bringing in a fractional marketing leader with commercial breadth across both functions can deliver the strategic input the business needs without the commitment and cost of a permanent appointment. The fractional model has matured significantly in the last five years. It is no longer a second-best option. For the right brief, it is genuinely the most commercially intelligent choice.

Similarly, interim CMO services can cover the marketing dimension of this role during a gap or transition, while the organisation takes time to define whether a combined head of sales and marketing is actually what it needs, or whether separate leadership with a shared commercial framework would serve it better. That clarity is worth taking time over. The wrong hire in this role is expensive in ways that are difficult to quantify but very easy to feel.

What Good Looks Like in Practice

The best heads of sales and marketing I have encountered share a few characteristics that are worth naming directly, because they are not always what organisations look for when they write the job specification.

First, they have genuine commercial literacy. Not marketing literacy with some sales awareness attached. Real fluency in how revenue is built across the full cycle, from first awareness through to closed deal and account retention. That comes from having worked in both functions at a level where they had to own the numbers, not just report on them.

Second, they are honest about what marketing can and cannot be credited for in the short term. Early in my career I was as guilty as anyone of over-indexing on performance metrics that looked clean and defensible in a board deck. It took years of managing P&Ls and watching the downstream consequences of underinvesting in brand to understand that the metrics that are easiest to measure are not always the ones that matter most. A head of sales and marketing who has not worked through that realisation will reliably make the wrong investment decisions when budget is tight.

Third, they are resourceful in a specific way. Not in the sense of being willing to work long hours, but in the sense of finding ways to make progress when the conditions are not ideal. I have always believed that constraint reveals character in a way that abundance does not. When I was starting out and could not get budget for a basic website, I taught myself to code and built it. That instinct, to find another route rather than wait for permission, is what separates the leaders who build things from the ones who manage processes.

Understanding how to use behavioural data to improve both marketing performance and sales conversion is increasingly part of this role. Platforms that enable direct engagement with prospects and customers, such as Hotjar Engage, give commercial leaders a qualitative layer of insight that pure analytics cannot provide. Knowing why someone did not convert is often more valuable than knowing that they did not.

Effective search visibility also sits within the remit of this role in most organisations. Understanding how your business is found, whether through organic search, paid channels, or both, is a commercial question as much as a technical one. The infrastructure that supports your digital presence has a direct bearing on how well your marketing investment performs, and a head of sales and marketing who treats this as purely a technical matter is leaving commercial leverage on the table.

How the Role Sits Within Broader Leadership Models

In organisations where the head of sales and marketing reports to a CEO or MD, the dynamic is usually one of high visibility and high accountability. There is no CMO or CSO layer above them to absorb board pressure. They are the senior commercial voice in the room, and they need to be comfortable in that position.

In larger organisations where this role sits below a Chief Commercial Officer or CEO, the dynamic is different. The head of sales and marketing has more operational focus and less strategic latitude. The role becomes more about execution quality and team leadership than about setting commercial direction. Both versions of the role are legitimate. They require different people.

For organisations considering how external leadership models can complement or temporarily replace this role, CMO as a Service arrangements offer a way to access senior commercial thinking without the full-time commitment. This works particularly well when the organisation needs strategic direction at the marketing level but has strong operational capability already in place on the sales side.

The CMO for hire model operates similarly, with the distinction that the engagement is typically more defined in scope and duration. Both models have grown in credibility as organisations have become more comfortable with senior leadership arrangements that do not fit the traditional permanent hire template.

For organisations that need marketing leadership at director level rather than C-suite, the interim marketing director model can cover the marketing half of this combined role during a transition, while the organisation works out whether it wants to hire a full head of sales and marketing or keep the functions separately led.

And for those building out the broader leadership infrastructure around commercial functions, the Marketing Leadership Council provides a framework for how senior marketing leaders can be structured and supported across an organisation, which is directly relevant to how a head of sales and marketing fits into the wider governance model.

The broader question of how senior commercial roles are evolving, and what organisations should expect from the people who hold them, is something I cover across the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub. The head of sales and marketing role sits at the intersection of several of the most important shifts happening in how organisations think about commercial leadership, and it is worth understanding the full context before designing or hiring into it.

The Question Organisations Should Answer Before Creating This Role

Before writing the job description, before briefing a recruiter, before deciding whether to promote internally or hire externally, there is one question that matters more than any other: is this role being created because it is the right commercial structure, or because it is the most convenient one?

If the honest answer is the latter, the organisation should pause and think harder. A role created for convenience will attract candidates who are either too junior to push back on the brief or too senior to stay once they understand what they have actually been hired to do. Neither outcome is good.

If the honest answer is the former, the organisation should invest in designing the role properly. That means defining the success metrics for both functions clearly, establishing how conflicts between short-term sales pressure and longer-term marketing investment will be resolved, and building a supporting team that gives the head of sales and marketing the operational coverage they need to lead strategically rather than execute tactically.

Done well, this is one of the most commercially powerful roles in a mid-market organisation. Done badly, it is a burnout machine that cycles through capable people and leaves both functions worse than they were before the merger.

The difference is almost entirely in how seriously the organisation takes the design work before the hire.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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