Establishing the Revenue Team at QFG

Hey 🙂

A few weeks ago, we made it official that I’d be taking on the CEO role at QFG. And almost immediately I pulled five people together and said: we need a Revenue Team.

I’ve been working with organisations on sales and marketing alignment for the better part of seven years now, and I’ve seen the same thing happen over and over again: even small teams, even teams that talk to each other all the time, develop gaps between what marketing is doing and what sales is doing. It creeps in. It’s never malicious. It’s just what happens when people get busy doing their jobs.

We weren’t immune to it either. We’re a small team — a dozen or so people — and I’d already started to notice the cracks. Simple things. Someone on the team mentions a sales call they’ve got booked and they have no idea where the lead came from. I know exactly where he came from, because I’ve been watching the marketing side. But they’re on the sales side. That gap — that small, accidental disconnect — is the beginning of a silo.

So what’s a Revenue Team, exactly?

It’s simple. It’s a weekly meeting where sales and marketing sit in the same room and talk about the work we’re doing to drive revenue. No separate marketing forum. No separate sales check-in. One meeting, one goal: we’re all here because we’re all trying to get customers and grow the business.

It doesn’t matter if your job is writing articles, managing email sequences, booking sales calls, or sending proposals. You’re on the Revenue Team. We all have one goal in common.

In practice, our agenda covers a few things. We look at dashboards together — anything off track, what are we doing about it. We review deals in HubSpot. SQLs, sales appointments. We check in on marketing activities: MQLs, email performance, what campaigns are live, what’s coming. And we close with to-dos, owned by specific people, carried into the next week.

There’s something important about having to come back to a meeting seven days later and reporting on what you did that changes how you spend your week. I already noticed it after our first session. Things got done that we had been sitting on. Proposals went out. Pipeline got updated. Changes got made to our sales process.

That’s the accountability dynamic kicking in. When you know you’ll be in the room next week talking about what’ moved’s changed, you want to have something to report.

As CEO, I’ll own the meeting for now — building the agendas, making sure the to-dos land, keeping the rhythm going. Will I always run it? No. This is the kind of thing that needs to be established properly before it gets handed off. But the goal is to get it to a point where it just runs, week after week, as part of how the business flows.

The other thing I’ll say: we’re a remote team. We don’t share an office. We don’t bump into each other in a corridor. And there’s something about everyone coming together around this one shared thing — revenue, clients, growth — that actually feels good. It’s energising in a way that a general team meeting sometimes isn’t. There’s a clarity to it. We all know why we’re there.

Seven years of doing this with other organisations, and I still think it’s one of the highest-leverage things a business can do. Get sales and marketing in the same room, talking about the same goal, every single week. Before the problems start. Before the silos harden. Before anyone’s saying “I didn’t know that campaign was running.”

🗣️ 👀

Chris.