Taylor Thomson believes most companies are wasting money on marketing. Not because they’re spending on the wrong channels or targeting the wrong audiences, but because they’ve organized their teams around the wrong assumptions.
“The biggest challenge will be standing out as a brand without relying on big-name artists,” Thomson explains, borrowing an analogy from the music industry. “Once you discover a unique venue or a standout marketing idea, it can quickly be replicated.”
Thomson would know. As Head of Finance at WITHIN—a Denver-based agency that works with Nike, Ben & Jerry’s, and The North Face—he’s spent the past several years rebuilding how companies think about the relationship between marketing, sales, and revenue generation.
His thesis: the traditional separation between “brand marketing” and “performance marketing” creates artificial barriers that prevent businesses from understanding what actually drives customer behavior.
The Problem With Siloed Teams
Most organizations structure their marketing and sales functions separately. Brand marketers focus on emotional connection, awareness, and long-term perception. Performance marketers focus on clicks, conversions, and immediate ROI. Sales teams focus on closing deals. Finance tracks it all but rarely integrates the data in meaningful ways.
This separation made sense 20 years ago when channels were distinct and measurement was limited. Brand advertising happened on TV and in print. Direct response happened through mail and telemarketing. Digital changed everything by making attribution possible, but many companies kept the old organizational structure.
“Marketing teams are basically for all intents and purposes, they care about getting a lead in the door and then they kind of wash their hands and they’re like, great,” Thomson says. “If you’ve got a business development team that’s only purpose is to support that initiative or that effort, well you’re misaligned with the entire rest of the sales or revenue org.”
The result? Marketing generates leads that sales can’t close because the messaging attracted the wrong prospects. Sales closes deals that client success can’t retain because expectations weren’t properly set. Finance tracks it all but can’t explain why results vary so dramatically month to month.
Thomson experienced this dysfunction firsthand during his time at Custora, a customer data platform later acquired by Amperity. As Sales Director for the mid-market segment, he watched companies pay for sophisticated analytics tools but struggle to translate insights into action because different teams optimized for different metrics.
When he joined WITHIN in March 2021 as Director of Revenue Operations and Business Development, he had the opportunity to build something different.
Building a Unified Revenue Engine
Thomson started with a simple question: what if we organized around the customer journey instead of internal departmental structure?
He created WITHIN’s first comprehensive revenue model—a dashboard that tracked not just marketing metrics or sales metrics, but how they connected. How many marketing-qualified leads converted to sales-qualified leads? How long did that process take? Which lead sources produced customers who actually renewed? What was the lifetime value of customers acquired through different channels?
The dashboard revealed patterns that individual departments couldn’t see. Some marketing campaigns generated high volumes of leads but low conversion rates because they attracted tire-kickers rather than serious buyers. Some sales tactics closed deals quickly but produced customers who churned within six months because expectations weren’t aligned.
“We developed the company’s first-ever comprehensive revenue model and dashboard, providing invaluable insights to executive leadership and supporting overall business strategy,” Thomson explains.
He implemented Service Level Agreements across departments—not as punitive measures but as coordination mechanisms. Marketing committed to delivering a certain number and quality of leads. Business development committed to follow-up timeframes. Sales committed to handoff protocols. Client success committed to onboarding standards.
The SLAs created shared accountability and revealed bottlenecks. If marketing delivered 100 qualified leads but only 20 became opportunities, either lead quality was poor or business development wasn’t following up effectively. The data made the diagnosis clear.
Most importantly, Thomson restructured compensation to align incentives. Instead of marketing being measured solely on lead volume and sales solely on bookings, everyone’s compensation included components tied to customer lifetime value and retention.
The Marketing Problem
Companies waste money on marketing, Thomson argues, because they optimize for the wrong metrics and organize around the wrong structure.
“Have marketing be marketing, have marketing drive thought leadership and drive ideas and drive content and really be information,” Thomson says. “Free information online. The more that marketing can do that, I think the better everybody’s going to be at their jobs because it’s just information sharing and knowledge sharing.”
His critique challenges how most B2B companies approach demand generation. The typical playbook: create gated content, capture email addresses, nurture leads through automated sequences, hand qualified leads to sales. The assumption: prospects need to be identified and tracked before they can become customers.
Thomson sees this as backwards. The best marketing doesn’t trap prospects behind forms—it demonstrates expertise generously. It provides value without asking for anything in return. It builds trust before asking for attention.
WITHIN implemented this philosophy by launching tools like the Marketing Pulse, which provides real-time trends in different industries regarding CPMs and revenue driven from social channels. Anyone can access it. No registration required. No sales follow-up.
“We give it out, we don’t need anything from it,” Thomson explains. “The more of that that marketing teams can really do, where you don’t have to enter the sales funnel, you don’t have to become one of the little leads in Salesforce that you’re just going to get a bunch of calls and emails about, but just you can get people that information.”
The approach requires patience that most companies lack. Giving away valuable information without immediate attribution or conversion tracking feels risky. CFOs want to see ROI. Marketing leaders want to prove their campaigns drove pipeline.
But Thomson believes this short-term thinking undermines long-term value creation. “You need six months to get a BDR team really to drive ROI value to see any of the value that a BDR team is going to drive,” he notes. “You need six months, nine months maybe, depending on your sales cycle.”
Companies that can’t wait six to nine months for results will optimize for vanity metrics—email open rates, form fills, meeting bookings—rather than actual business outcomes.
The Technology Trap
Thomson is not anti-technology. WITHIN uses Salesforce for CRM, Outreach for sales engagement, Pathmatics for competitive intelligence on social media spend, and a range of other tools.
“I’m a huge fan of automation,” he says. “We’re lucky here in that we have a really great tech stack.”
But he’s witnessed the dark side of automation: the temptation to scale before you’ve figured out what actually works.
“There’s temptation when you get to that point of, oh, I’ve got to triple my outbound outreach because I don’t have anybody driving me interest,” Thomson explains. “Without that, you fall into the trap of, oh, I’m just going to send a bunch of emails.”
He’s watched email open rates decline from 50% to 20% or lower when teams prioritize volume over relevance. The math seems appealing: if you double your outreach, even with lower engagement rates, you might generate more total responses. But the calculation ignores second-order effects.
Lower quality outreach damages your brand. It trains recipients to ignore your messages. It attracts worse prospects who require more hand-holding. It burns out your team. It creates a treadmill where you need ever-increasing volume to maintain results.
The alternative requires patience and coordination. Marketing creates genuinely useful content that demonstrates expertise. Business development uses that content to start relevant conversations with well-researched prospects. Sales focuses on understanding customer problems rather than pushing products. Client success ensures customers actually achieve their goals.
“The more marketing you get, the wider a birth you have to swing as a BDR team,” Thomson says. “The less your emails sound good, the less your phone calls matter. You run out of bandwidth.”
What Finance Can See
Thomson’s migration from revenue operations to finance gave him a broader perspective on how companies waste money. Marketing waste is visible and measurable. But sales waste, operations waste, and strategic waste are often harder to identify.
He spends 15-20 minutes each morning reading industry newsletters—Modern Retail, Glossy, Morning Brew, and sector-specific publications. He’s hunting for signals about market shifts, competitive dynamics, and customer challenges. Then he curates the most relevant articles into a Google sheet for his team.
“I think you can just pull so much interesting information from how people are thinking, what they’re doing, what their challenges and pain points are,” Thomson explains. “If I see that a startup is IPOing, I know that that’s not only going to affect that startup, but also every one of their competitors.”
That daily intelligence gathering informs how his team approaches prospects. Rather than generic pitches about WITHIN’s services, they can reference specific challenges facing specific companies at specific moments. The personalization doesn’t require fancy AI tools—it requires paying attention.
Thomson also oversees client satisfaction surveys that achieve over 50% quarterly response rates and designs dashboards for analyzing that feedback. Most companies send satisfaction surveys and ignore the results or struggle to act on them. Thomson built systems to surface insights and connect them to operational decisions.
“We spearhead robust client satisfaction survey initiatives, achieving an average response rate of over 50% quarterly; designed company-wide dashboards for comprehensive analysis and reporting of survey results,” he notes.
The survey data reveals which promises WITHIN keeps and which it breaks, which services deliver value and which disappoint, which clients are at risk and which are expansion opportunities. That information should flow back to marketing (what messages resonate?), sales (what expectations should we set?), and operations (where are we falling short?).
Most companies don’t close this loop. They treat client feedback as a customer success problem rather than an organization-wide opportunity to learn.
The Results Speak
Thomson’s unconventional approach produced measurable results. Average annual contract values increased 620% over 24 months—from $250,000 to $1.8 million. Trial-to-term conversion rates improved by 33 percentage points, generating $7.6 million in incremental annual revenue. Client satisfaction surveys maintained above 50% response rates quarter after quarter.
But perhaps the most significant validation came in the form of career progression. Thomson was promoted from Director of Revenue Operations to Head of Revenue Strategy and Operations in January 2024, then to Head of Finance in June 2024.
The promotions reflect an organizational bet: that finance leadership should understand revenue mechanics deeply, that CFOs should know how business development actually works, that financial planning should connect to customer behavior rather than living in abstraction.
“I exist in a lot of different places,” Thomson says, describing how his role spans business development, sales, marketing, and client success. “That’s good to talk about how they all kind of come together.”
His trajectory suggests that the future of finance leadership may look different than its past. Not just number-crunchers ensuring compliance, but systems thinkers who understand how different functions create or destroy value.
“At the end of the day, as we all know, all anybody cares about is new clients and profit,” Thomson says. “The revenue org is there to make the company money. It’s not a secret. And so if what we’re all doing isn’t aligned to drive revenue, then we’re all kind of wasting our time.”
Most companies are wasting time and money because they’ve organized around outdated assumptions about how marketing, sales, and finance should work. Thomson represents a different model—one where finance leaders understand customers as deeply as spreadsheets, where revenue operations drive strategy rather than merely execute it, where the goal is coordination rather than control.
Whether that model can scale beyond agencies to larger enterprises remains to be seen. But for companies willing to question conventional structures, Thomson offers a roadmap: start with the customer journey, align incentives across functions, measure what matters rather than what’s easy, and give away value before asking for anything in return.
It’s not complicated. But it is different. And in a world where most companies waste money on marketing because they’re solving the wrong problems, different might be exactly what’s needed.