Key Takeaways:
- Building a team around outcomes, not effort, ensures accountability.
- Skills must align with strategy – otherwise, make the change quickly.
- A results-driven culture starts with who you hire, keep, and reward.
- Pay-for-performance is the only sustainable growth model in B2B marketing.
Build Teams Around Strategy, Not the Other Way Around
“Battle 10 compels you to commit to building a pay-for-performance team around your strategy; not vice versa.”
— The B2B Marketing Revolution®
This battle of the 12 Battles™ Framework puts your team under the microscope. It forces you to ask the uncomfortable questions: Do I have the right people to deliver my strategy? Or have I built a strategy constrained by the people I already have?
That’s the trap most middle-market CEOs fall into. They settle for what their team can do instead of holding out for what their strategy requires. The result? A watered-down plan doomed to underperform.
Your research-backed strategy is a roadmap. Your team must be assembled to drive that roadmap forward, not the other way around.
Why Effort-Based Teams Fail
An effort-driven culture feels safe. You reward loyalty, hard work, and time on task. But in business, effort without outcomes is just wasted payroll.
The Hidden Costs of Rewarding Effort Over Results
- Growth stagnates. People stay busy, but the scoreboard doesn’t move.
- Excuses dominate. “We worked so hard” replaces “We hit the target.”
- Profit erodes. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) climbs because ineffective execution burns budget while outcomes lag.
- Accountability disappears. If effort is enough, why chase results?
It’s harsh, but true: companies that reward effort instead of outcomes slowly rot from the inside. Mediocrity becomes cultural.
Battle 10 isn’t about working harder. It’s about working smarter with the right people, in the right seats, driven by the right incentives.
Redefining Accountability Through Outcomes
Accountability doesn’t mean punishing people when things go wrong. It means making results visible, measurable, and tied to ownership. Every player on your team should be able to point to a specific outcome they are responsible for and show how it contributes to CAC, marketing return on investment (MROI), or customer lifetime value (LTV).
How to Align Talent With Strategy
- Define outcomes first. Decide which metrics matter most for your growth engine: CAC reduction, LTV expansion, or MROI improvement.
- Identify required skills. Does your strategy demand advanced digital targeting? Customer journey mapping? Research fluency? Map the capabilities before you map the org chart.
- Audit the roster. Compare your current team to the skill set required. Be brutally honest; good intentions don’t equal good execution.
- Close the gaps decisively. Train where training will work. Augment with agency expertise where speed is critical. And where neither is sufficient, make the change.
This is what it looks like to build around outcomes. Strategy dictates the skill set. The skill set dictates the team.
Three Decisions That Shape Culture
Culture isn’t built in mission statements. It’s built in the decisions you make about people.
Who You Hire
Hire for outcomes, not resumes. A candidate who has “managed campaigns” isn’t enough. You need proof of delivered results: lowered CAC, increased MROI, accelerated revenue.
- Ask for specific metrics.
- Verify they can explain how their work tied to business outcomes.
- Prioritize agility and adaptability, skills that keep pace with constant change.
Who You Fire
If someone consistently misses outcome-based goals, you can’t keep them just because they try hard or have been loyal. Failing to act sends the message that results are optional.
- Don’t drag out the process. Lingering underperformance poisons accountability across the team.
- Be transparent: the standard is outcomes, not effort.
- Replace quickly with someone aligned to your strategy.
Who You Reward
Recognition and compensation shape behavior. If you reward activity instead of results, you’ll get more activity. If you reward outcomes, you’ll get more outcomes.
- Tie bonuses directly to hitting projections.
- Publicly celebrate team members who deliver measurable impact.
- Create visible scorecards so everyone knows the targets and the results.
Together, these three decisions define culture more than any vision statement ever will.
Pay-for-Performance as a Growth Engine
Pay-for-performance is not a management fad; it’s a growth model. It transforms accountability from abstract theory into personal motivation.
Benefits of Pay-for-Performance
- Sharper focus. When compensation ties to MROI, people pay attention to the right metrics.
- Stronger ownership. Success or failure is no longer someone else’s problem. It’s theirs.
- Aligned incentives. Company growth and individual growth move in lockstep.
Many leaders resist pay-for-performance because they want pay to feel “fair.” But fairness isn’t about rewarding effort. It’s about rewarding value created. True fairness means the people who generate outcomes see the upside. The people who don’t, don’t.
Think about it: if your marketing leader’s bonus depends on lowering CAC, you don’t need to beg them to optimize. They’ll drive it because it hits their paycheck. That’s the alignment Battle 10 demands.
Avoiding the Talent Trap
Battle 10 is as much about what you stop doing as what you start doing. One of the deadliest mistakes CEOs make is clinging to underperformers.
Common Signs You’re in the Trap
- You catch yourself saying, “But they’ve been with us forever.”
- Your strategy discussions are limited by your current team’s abilities.
- Bonuses are being paid out despite missed projections.
Every time you let one of these scenarios slide, you erode accountability. You teach the rest of your team that outcomes don’t really matter. And once that belief takes root, it’s almost impossible to undo.
The harsh truth? If someone isn’t aligned with your outcome-driven culture, you’re not being kind by keeping them. You’re holding them and your company back.
The CEO’s Responsibility
Battle 10 in the 12 Battles™ Framework isn’t about HR checklists. It’s about leadership. As CEO, you decide whether your culture rewards effort or outcomes. You decide whether strategy drives your team, or your team limits your strategy.
Your responsibility is to:
- Define the outcomes that matter.
- Build the team to achieve them.
- Remove the people who can’t or won’t deliver.
- Reward the people who drive measurable impact.
That’s how you build a team capable of executing a research-backed, results-guaranteed strategy. Anything less, and you’re subsidizing mediocrity.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution™: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
The above insights are part of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing Revolution™: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 Battles™ Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing Revolution™ is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts, and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
