Can You Tie this to Revenue?

The CMO sits at their desk. It’s 5:27pm. They’ve got Slack pings from 3 sales leaders, 7 custom deck requests overdue, and a budget review on the calendar with the CEO in 33 minutes.

Then the knock comes early.

CEO:
“We’re spending close to $1M/year on marketing. Can you show how that ties to revenue?”

CMO (eyes tired):
“…Not exactly.”

Silence.

Because the answer is never clean.
Because the team’s too small for the support they’re giving.
Because there’s no system that connects the dots between brand activity and revenue reality.

The CEO means well.
The CMO is doing everything they can.
But now the department looks like a cost center — not a growth engine.
And the resentment starts to creep in on both sides.

I hear this story all the time.

CMOs who feel more like in-house agencies than brand leaders.

Week after week, they:

• Field one-off content asks from 40+ sellers

• Scramble to stay compliant

• Try (and fail) to prioritize corporate marketing strategy

They’re drowning in ad-hoc design tickets and social media favors…
…while losing the very visibility that would make the marketing department’s value obvious.

And the wild part?

Even if they added five more people — it wouldn’t fix the system.

Because there is no system.

No scalable way to support hundreds of sellers who all want to build personal brands
No attribution model that ties content to conversations to closed revenue
No dashboard that lets a CEO see which stories drive which deals

Salespeople want support.

But they don’t want to leave the sales floor.

CEOs want visibility for their firm (and often themselves).
But they can’t justify budget they can’t defend to the board.

And CMOs are caught in the middle — slowly burning out while their job description multiplies like rabbits.

This isn’t just an enterprise problem.

At Arcbound, I’ve seen the same pattern with individual brand builders:

Someone spends $70K/year to launch their personal brand.
They love the experience — at first.
But 8 months in, they pause. Why?

Because they can’t see the ROI.

Even when it’s working, they can’t prove it.
And that erodes confidence.
Slowly, they “peel back.”
Or stop altogether.

And now we’re seeing the same dynamic on a bigger, riskier scale.

• CMOs with no line of sight from post to pipeline

• Sales teams with no time to brand themselves

• CEOs stuck approving budgets they can’t defend to the board

Everyone wants to do the right thing.
No one has the tools.
And incentives aren’t aligned.

Here’s the truth:

This isn’t sustainable.

And it’s not a matter of if this changes — but when and how.

We need a new way. A Personal Brand Operating System built for:

-Scaling seller brands without bloating headcount
-Keeping content compliant and on-message
-Connecting CRM pipelines to content libraries to ROI dashboards
-Making CMOs strategic again with tooling for attributable revenue
-Making CEOs confident again
-And making sales leaders visible without dragging them into marketing land

This system hasn’t existed before.

So here’s my question:

If you could build the solution to this —
What would you include?

I’d love to hear yours.

Hit reply.

One Ask:

Forward this to a Marketing leader or CEO you know. Don’t be afraid to do it on a Sunday. Start your week (and their week) thinking about what you can do to solve this problem.

Community Notes

Meet top executives like Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, Founding Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Chief People & Systems Officer at Roblox as well as founders of Higgsfield AI and Mithril at the DECODE Conference on Nov 15.

Sign up now with promo code ARCBOUND for 30% off.

Jerel and Shuo, the leaders of DECODE are great people and would highly recommend!