Pay Marketing on Revenue and the Sales Blame Game Ends | Ralf Paschen

Marketing should be paid on revenue, not impressions

The fight between sales and marketing is a compensation problem. Marketing is bonused on impressions, CPC, CAC and ROAS while sales is paid on revenue, so the two teams work to different scoreboards. Ralf's fix, applied in every marketing team he has run, is to pay the marketing bonus on revenue, and that same operating view drives his advice on Germany's committee buying and on what AI can and cannot do.

Takeaways

• Pay marketing on revenue, not impressions. In every marketing team he joined, Ralf switched bonuses from impressions, CPC, CAC and ROAS to revenue. Once the bonus tracked deals, marketers cared about deals moving forward and MQL quality. He says the CMO's first alliance should be with the CFO, not the CRO.
• German enterprise deals are decided by committees. US playbooks fail in Germany because no vendor sits in the room where the buying group decides, and legal can overrule the CEO. Deals of $2,000 to $20,000 move fast, while $100,000 to $200,000 enterprise deals run on trusted-advisor relationships.
• AI outbound is burned in enterprise. He refused an investor's request to run AI voice agents and AI outbound, because enterprise buyers ignore mass voicemails and every outbound channel is burned. When people post about booking 100 meetings with AI, he asks how much revenue resulted and never gets an answer.
• AI produces 60%, the person adds 40%. He trains LLMs as marketing buddies on persona, pain, solution, benefit, ICP and target industries. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all sound the same, so the differentiator is repurposing years of expert-written content. From 20 minutes of audio he pulls 30 insights and makes 40 pieces.
• AI cannot replace a ten-person marketing team. He warns against downloading 500 skills from ChatGPT or Claude and building agents to replace a 10-person marketing team. Warming 45,000 contacts and then sending eight AI emails a week produces fast unsubscribes. Layoffs, he says, are strategic profit decisions rather than AI replacement.
• Go-to-market is the CEO's job. GTM Consult advises CEOs and COOs rather than VPs of sales, and works with companies from $3m to $75m ARR scaling between the German-speaking and US markets in both directions. He says understanding what a company solves takes one or two months.

Motions Ralf still rates in B2B

• Event-led. Ralf names events among the motions still working in B2B.
• Community-led. Community leaders and influencers get into rooms a vendor never will.
• Partner-led. Partner selling also makes his short list of motions that still work.
• Answer engine optimization. Buyers take two to four recommendations from LLMs instead of from Google, so vendors now optimise for that.