Integrating Sales Orgs | SBI TV

When Thoma Bravo bought Motus and my former employer, Runzheimer International, back in 2018, I expected to spend a couple of weeks doing handoff meetings. Instead I ended up as the new CRO of the combined company, staring at two sales teams that supposedly served the same market. Except they didn't — one was a high-volume junior team closing small deals fast, the other a senior team working a handful of big enterprise transactions a year. When we finally pulled the pipelines together, the two customer bases overlapped by just 8%.

I told Matt Sharrers on SBI TV that the way through was to start as an outsider on purpose — spending my first two weeks asking every "kindergarten" question I could think of (what do you sell, what's the value prop, what do you wish you could do that you haven't) before I let myself have an opinion. Matt has a name for the mistake most new leaders make instead: the red wagon effect — showing up and unpacking whatever worked at your last job, whether or not it fits the new one. What got you here won't get you there, and nowhere is that truer than in a newly combined sales org.

We walked through how that listening tour turned into an actual org chart — hunting and farming teams built person by person based on skill, not legacy title — and why I think of the job as Chief Revenue Officer rather than head of sales: you're allocating people, money, and time across the whole revenue supply chain, from lead gen and brand through to customer success. The exercise that tied it together was embarrassingly simple — a bulletin board covered in sticky notes mapping the entire customer journey, so every team could see exactly where they had the leverage to make or break the relationship.