Jason M. Lemkin advises that VPs of Sales (particularly below ~$20–40M ARR) must learn core marketing skills to survive: become at least a bit of a marketer, learn outbound tactics and how to build an outbound team, collaborate closely with a VP of Marketing, understand what constitutes an MQL, lead, and opportunity commit, know the demand-gen playbook, and create their own sales collateral.
What do I mean is as a VP of sales you've got to learn a little bit about marketing at least below 20, 30, 40 million in revenue to survive. First of all you've got to become a bit of a marketer yourself because everyone's doing outbound, you're going to have to learn how to do outbound. Unless you're in the smallest of SMBs, you're going to have to learn how to add that to the sales playbook. But you're also going to have to know how to work closely with a VP of marketing, how to know what a good MQL is, what a lead is, what an opportunity commit is. You're going to have to learn a bit of the demand gen playbook. You're going to have to create your own collateral. You want to want to meet with a great VP of marketing one on one and if you don't know how to do a little bit of this yourself, you won't know what's great. So become a little bit of marketer yourself and make sure you know how to build an outbound team to get going.
