Stat of the Week. Only 16% of business-to-business companies use marketing data for real-time decisions, the evidence BCG gives for one of three obstacles it attributes to running sales, marketing, and customer success as separate functions. (BCG, September 2024.)
The last few articles have focused on the key number: what marketing tracks and misses, whether media measurement can be trusted during budget shifts, and where growth funding sits in the budget. Each issue is important to solve, but even fixing all three might not create real change because the main problem is structural. The number that would show improvement usually spans three different teams, so no one owns it. The next section explains the simplest way to fix this, and it does not require reorganizing.
Everyone is accountable for a proxy
Think about how accountability is divided. Marketing is responsible for pipeline created, sales for closed deals, and customer success for retention or renewal rates. Each metric has a clear owner and reflects what matters to the business, but none of them fully capture it.
BCG points out that marketing, sales, and customer success teams often work in separate silos, each with their own processes and metrics, and few of these have a real impact on the bottom line (BCG, September 2024). The 16% figure is a sign of this problem, since data stuck within one team cannot inform decisions fast enough. While BCG does not disclose the sample size for this number, it references nearby surveys and its own benchmarks. Anyone who has tried to align three dashboards will recognize this challenge.
This leads to a situation where everything appears successful. Each team reports strong results, every metric moves in the right direction, but the overall outcome those metrics are supposed to reflect does not change. No one is at fault, and no one is truly accountable.
BCG suggests a very simple solution. Assign a small cross-functional team to focus on one main metric that is tied to a real business outcome, like revenue growth or return on marketing spend, and make that team responsible for moving only that number (BCG, September 2024). The rule of focusing on 'nothing else' is important, since cross-functional projects often fail when they try to track too many metrics at once.
The unit is a team, not a program
According to BCG, a demand squad is a small, agile team made up of people from sales, marketing, and customer success. They work in two- to three-week sprints. Squads are organized based on what matters most to the business, such as region, customer segment, or another key area (BCG, September 2024).
What makes demand squads easy to adopt is that, according to BCG, they do not need extra budget, resources, or major changes to the organization. This is rare for an operating model change, since most fixes require a reorganization, a new department, or a new platform, which often makes them hard to implement. A squad simply shifts focus and can be started by a director without needing to hire anyone new.
This approach is also easy to reverse. If a squad does not achieve results in two quarters, it can be dissolved without disrupting anything else. This makes it easier to get approval to try.
Evidence, and what it is worth
It is important to be honest about the evidence, since this idea has been around long enough to pick up the usual consulting hype.
At one medical-device company, the problem was clear. The marketing team met its lead goals, sales hit its targets, and clinical support met every service-level agreement. Yet, over four quarters, the time from first purchase to first reorder increased by about seven weeks. No team was responsible for this gap, since marketing stopped at the handoff, sales moved on after closing, and clinical support only tracked its own response times. The first squad focused on this interval as its main metric, met weekly with members from all three teams, and closed most of the gap in two quarters by changing what happened in the first 10 days after delivery. They did not need extra budget, just someone to take ownership.
Another example comes from a large tech company that created two demand squads, one for each main region, and these squads identified, tested, and scaled 16 growth ideas. This led to one-year revenue gains of 15% to 30% in the company’s main business areas (BCG, September 2024).
When a company that advises others on operating models reorganizes itself this way, it shows how thinking has evolved. In 2025, Accenture combined five separate service lines—strategy, consulting, Song, technology, and operations—into one integrated unit under a single leader, while keeping its geographic and industry structures the same (Accenture, June 2025).
Where squads fail
There are four main ways squads can fail, and each one shows warning signs early if you know what to look for.
Sometimes the main metric is just another proxy. For example, if a squad is responsible for 'marketing qualified leads accepted by sales,' it has simply recreated the handoff it was supposed to eliminate. You can spot this when the metric improves but the actual business outcome does not change.
Another failure is when the squad lacks authority. If a cross-functional team has to get approval for every change, it becomes just another meeting. This is clear when the first two sprints only produce recommendations that need someone else’s sign-off.
A squad can also turn into a standing committee. This happens when they stop working in sprints and start adding more metrics to their agenda. Adding a second or third metric is an early warning sign.
Another problem is measuring activity too soon. Real results take a quarter or two to show up, but impatience often leads to requests for activity reports by the third week, such as asking how many use cases have been tested.
The main issue in all these failures is dilution. Each one adds more tasks to the squad’s responsibilities, which is why BCG’s rule of focusing on 'nothing else' is so important.
Your first squad
There are three steps you can take this quarter, and none of them require extra budget.
First, pick the metric. Choose one that no single team can influence alone and that your finance partner would see as a true business outcome. Examples include time to reorder, first-year revenue per account, or yield on a specific spend line. Pipeline volume does not meet these criteria.
Next, choose the two teams most involved with that metric. While three teams is ideal, starting with two is fine. Make sure the people who actually do the work are included.
Then, set the sprint schedule and stick to it. Plan for two to three weeks per sprint, hold regular meetings, and enforce one key rule: do not add anything else to the agenda. Protecting this focus is the main point, and it is often the first thing to slip during a busy quarter.
Over the past decade, marketing has improved its measurement, which was needed and, as discussed here, is still not complete. The next improvement is structural and is available to anyone ready to give one number to one team and let them focus on it.
What is the one metric in your business that spans three teams but is not owned by any of them? Reply and share your answer.
Sources
BCG, “An Overdue Upgrade for B2B Go-to-Market Functions,” September 2024 (the 16% figure carries NO disclosed sample base or methodology in the published article, though adjacent figures are sourced to a BCG survey and to BCG’s own benchmarking analysis, so the precise claim is an undisclosed base; the 15–30% incremental-revenue result is ONE unnamed large technology company, self-reported to BCG, stated as gains “in the company’s main business segments” with no statement of what the range spans).
Accenture, “Accenture Changes Growth Model to Reinvent Itself for the Age of AI,” June 2025 (corporate announcement, changes effective September 1, 2025; self-reported with no outcome data and a forward-looking-statements disclaimer, cited only as evidence of adoption).