Revenue Pods: Top GTM Teams Organize Around Buyers, Not Org Charts

Here’s what “alignment” looks like at most B2B companies: Marketing presents a quarterly readout to Sales. Sales nods politely. Both teams go back to optimizing for their own metrics. Three months later, they do it again.
This isn’t collaboration. It’s theater.

The problem isn’t effort — it’s architecture. When your org chart splits Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success across departments, you build walls your buyers will never see or care about. They don’t know who reports to whom. They just know whether you’re useful.

Hailey McDonald, SVP of Growth Marketing at Marigold, spent 15 years circling this problem until she managed both Sales and Marketing in one role. “Every time I got closer to sales, my results were better,” she says. “And I realized we’re all working around the org chart instead of with it.”
What she built instead: revenue pods. Not alignment. Connection.

The Question That Changes Everything

Most GTM dysfunction starts with one wrong question: What do we need right now?
Leads. Pipeline. Attribution. MQLs. SQLs. Ratios.

All of them are actual business needs, but when they drive the structure, teams drift away from the buyer. Marketing chases volume. Sales complains about quality. BDRs grind through accounts to hit activity goals. Everyone is orbiting internal metrics instead of the buyer.

After years inside that circle, Hailey McDonald realized that the obsession with “what do we need” made the business efficient at generating numbers, not at reading intent. When she flipped the question to what the buyer need right now, everything changed.

Campaigns got smaller and sharper. Spend went where buyers were already paying attention. Marketing stopped optimising for handoffs; Sales stopped treating outreach as a quota sport.

Being buyer-centric isn’t optimizing for reporting. When you organize around buyers instead of dashboards, everything changes. Marketing asks what accounts need to move. Sales work side by side with Marketing to identify the right accounts and shape the message for each stage of the deal.
BDRs focus on a smaller set of accounts, using shared buyer signals to decide when and how to engage.

Most companies don’t have a pipeline problem — they have an ego problem. They design for their own process, not the buyer’s.

Revenue Pods: Proximity as Strategy

At Marigold, each pod includes an Account Executive, a BDR, and a Field Marketer. They meet weekly to work the same accounts, not quarterly to share slides, but to move accounts forward and to decide what needs to happen next.

The proximity changes everything. Information doesn’t have to travel across departments or live in decks. Everyone already knows what’s happening with each account because they’re working the same list, with the same context, toward the same goal.

It’s a structure that forces shared ownership, and progress becomes collective — pipeline quality improves, outreach gets sharper, and execution speed increases because nobody is waiting for permission to act.

This rhythm changes how the business felt. Conversations get shorter because context is shared. Field and BDRs stop working in parallel and start working in sync. Sales work side by side with Marketing to identify the right accounts and shape the message for each stage of the deal. BDRs focus on a smaller set of accounts, using shared buyer signals to decide when and how to engage.

The Incentive Problem

Structure can fix proximity, but not behavior. Incentives determine how people show up.

Many companies pay BDRs to create opportunities, not to see them through. Book a meeting, pass it on, move to the next name. It made sense on paper — activity looked measurable — but it trained teams to chase motion instead of momentum.

But if you look at your pipeline data, the pattern is obvious. Deals probably aren’t dying from lack of leads; they are dying from lack of continuity.

So, let’s flip the model.

BDRs stay connected to the accounts they open, supporting AEs as deals move through the cycle. Compensation follow progress, not volume.

This model improves conversion rates because BDRs care about what happens after the meeting and Marketing begin planning around deal velocity.

The point is to establish new rhythm on the comp plan where everyone gets paid for progress, and “alignment” starts being self-interest.

The Operating System: ICP and Playbooks

Proximity only works if everyone’s looking at the same map. That’s where most GTM structures collapse — Marketing, Sales, and RevOps each define “the right account” differently, so even shared rhythm produces mixed results.

To keep pods focused, the foundation has to be explicit: a shared ICP and a clear playbook.
The ICP defines who belongs in the conversation. The playbook defines how to engage them.

If Sales and RevOps own the named accounts, while Marketing identify ICP and Pods own both lists as one territory; teams gain flexibility without losing focus.

The playbook turns the strategy into muscle memory. For every buyer stage — awareness, consideration, decision, purchase — there is structured ABX plays in one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many formats. Pods could pick what matched their territory instead of waiting for HQ campaigns.

That balance between structure and autonomy keeps this model alive. The framework is tight enough to create consistency, but loose enough for field judgment. The result is more coherence. Everyone knows who matter, how to reach them, and when to act.

What It Looks Like in Practice

Once the structure and rhythm are set, the pods take on a life of their own.
Meetings every week with the one goal of moving accounts forward.

The Account Executive brings the deal reality — what is close, what is stalled, where blockers live.
The BDR brings the outreach data — who had engaged, which doors had opened, which had gone silent.
The Field Marketer brings context — upcoming programs, messaging shifts, competitive noise.

Together, they decide how to adjust. Sometimes it mean tightening focus on a few high-potential accounts. Sometimes it mean pulling in Product Marketing to reframe a value prop or running a target event to accelerate late-stage deals.

It isn’t magic. It is repetition. The more they meet, the less they have to “align.” Context build up. Decisions get faster. Everyone speaks the same buyer language.

Proximity produces a shared instinct.

Why This Works Now

Revenue pods aren’t a new idea. Cross-functional teams have existed since ever. What’s different now is how fast buyers move — and how slowly most GTM systems still react.

Quarterly planning cycles made sense when buying cycles were predictable. Today, by the time that data surfaces in a report, the opportunity’s already gone.

AI has made that volatility sharper. Buyers can explore alternatives faster than sellers can coordinate. In that world, alignment is a timing problem.

Revenue pods solve for speed. When Marketing, Sales, and BDRs operate in the same rhythm, they can respond to change. Instead aof a Slack thread, a new signal triggers a coordinated move.

Another reason it works is leadership proximity. When the heads of Sales and Marketing operate as partners instead of silos, everyone else mirrors that behavior, because cultural alignment follows structural alignment.

The pod model is relevant now because it’s adaptive, and shrinks the distance between signal and action.

The bottom line

Revenue pods close the gap between what your org chart says you do and what your buyers actually need.
Traditional alignment optimizes handoffs. Pods optimize progression.
Traditional comp rewards volume. Deal-progression comp rewards outcomes.
Traditional planning happens in silos. Pods bring the people closest to revenue into the same room every week.
This isn’t about tearing down org charts. It’s about working around them when they get in the way of revenue.
If you want to test it:

• Pick one territory.
• Assign one AE, one BDR, one Field Marketer.
• Meet weekly for 30 minutes.
• Review accounts: what do they need right now?
• Track pipeline and win-rate change in 90 days.

You don’t fix alignment through meetings. You fix it by putting the people who move revenue in the same room every week.
“Proximity breeds collaboration, and collaboration drives results,” McDonald says.
Your buyers don’t care about your org chart. They care whether you’re helpful.
Revenue pods don’t make teams friendlier. They make them accountable to the same buyer.

Revenue pods Takeaways