
Where to start in a new marketing leadership role
A fourteen-day audit of team, channels and effectiveness
Ten questions to ask the chief executive early
The action plan for the first thirty days
Assembling a competitive analysis quickly
Estimating a competitor's unit economics
Where insight comes from and how to turn it into a decision
Building a strengths and weaknesses table that is actually used
Building a strategy the executive team will approve
The frameworks: 4P, STP, the Ansoff matrix, customer journey
Linking business goals to marketing indicators
The annual strategy document and its one-page summary
Building a marketing budget and defending it
The key metrics: CAC, LTV, ROMI, CLV
Reallocating budget between channels on evidence
The report format for finance and the chief executive
Developing the value proposition
Brand architecture and managing a product portfolio commercially
Preparing a complete brand plan
The template: indicators, initiatives and budgets
The digital funnel from lead to revenue
The channels: search, paid media, social, email, CRM, content
Performance marketing: attribution, optimisation, measurement
What a marketing dashboard has to contain to be useful
Building a department that matches the company strategy
The roles: brand, performance, analytics, communications, product marketing
Indicators and reporting for the team
Working with sales, product and the chief executive
Where AI genuinely helps: content, targeting, analytics
A selection of the leading services
Building an AI roadmap for the department
Cases of integration into a working business
How modern selling differs from what most people were taught
How the most successful companies actually sell
The characteristics of a salesperson who performs
How chat-based selling replaced the telephone
Which characteristics separate outstanding from adequate
Building the selection tools step by step
Creating a candidate scorecard
Preparing the interview questions
Searching on LinkedIn
Making contact so the message gets a reply
Sourcing through your own team
Active search, and the basics of recruiting for this role
Who to start with when building from zero
Conducting the interview
Identifying real motivation
Selling the role to the candidate, and the onboarding programme
Developing the training programme
The core elements of the sales process
How customers actually buy, which is rarely how sellers assume
Building the programme, and training on BANT qualification
Teaching salespeople what their customers actually do all day
Helping a salesperson build their own reputation
Why customers do not trust every salesperson, and what changes that
Coaching from performance metrics rather than from impressions
Introducing a coaching culture
Building the coaching plan together with the person
An example development plan, and assessing whether the coaching worked
A plan for acquiring new customers, and one for retaining them
A plan built on customer engagement
Evaluating a bonus scheme before it produces the wrong behaviour
Whether to involve salespeople in designing it, levels, promotions and contests
Defining what a leader is in this function
Developing a leadership programme
The requirements the role actually places on someone
The problems a first-time sales manager reliably runs into
The sales flywheel as a model
Getting customers to look for you rather than the reverse
Reaching the top of search, and how that mechanism works
Creating content, using social platforms, and one practical shortcut
What marketing is actually responsible for
How to score leads, and how not to
The buyer journey matrix and the buyer avatar
The right script, prioritising leads, and shifting from outbound to inbound
A cooperation agreement between sales and marketing
Developing a marketing SLA and a sales SLA
What each side commits to, in writing
Speeding up work with leads through technology
Accelerating the search itself
Accelerating engagement
Automating the reporting nobody wants to write
Generating ideas worth testing
Best practice for implementing them
How to tell a result from a coincidence
A partner programme that worked
An updated lead qualification matrix
What both changed in the numbers
What is changing in how buying happens
Current research in the field
What that implies for how you build the team now
What revenue operations is and why a growing business needs it
How it differs from sales, marketing and service operations
Where the remit starts and ends
Owning the end-to-end funnel, and the models for startup, scale-up and corporation
Revenue funnel versus sales funnel, and why the difference matters
The stages: lead, qualified lead, opportunity, deal, revenue, retention
Where revenue most often leaks
Transition criteria between stages, and SLAs between the three functions
The North Star metric for revenue
Marketing, sales and service metrics in one system
CAC, LTV, payback period, churn and expansion
Leading versus lagging indicators, and connecting team metrics to the profit and loss
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Most companies do not have a growth strategy. They have a growth target, and a hope that everyone will try harder to reach it.
Trying harder works once. After that you need machinery, and machinery is built rather than motivated.
Why growth stalls at a predictable point
Marketing generates leads and sales calls them unqualified, because nobody has written down what qualified means. The best salesperson is the one who was best at selling, promoted into managing five people they now coach entirely by instinct. Compensation was copied from a previous employer and now quietly rewards the wrong behaviour.
Then volume rises, the processes that carried the smaller company buckle, and the fix is more people — which is how a growth problem becomes a cost problem.
Demand, and the team that converts it
Forty-four lessons. Eight on marketing leadership: a fourteen-day audit, competitive diagnosis including a competitor's unit economics, strategy with 4P, STP and Ansoff, budget defence with CAC, LTV, ROMI and CLV, the brand plan, the digital funnel with attribution, department structure, and an AI roadmap.
Then sixteen on building a sales organisation — the largest block, and the one most growth courses skip entirely. Hiring against a scorecard, five traits that predict performance, sourcing and outreach, the first hire, onboarding, a training programme built around how buyers actually buy, BANT, metric-based coaching, compensation design that produces the behaviour you intended, growing first-time sales managers, the lead flywheel, scoring and the buyer journey matrix, the SLA with marketing, sales technology, structured experiments, and what is changing in how buying happens.
Connecting it, and carrying the weight
Then six on revenue operations, which is where the two functions stop arguing: the end-to-end funnel from lead to retention, where revenue leaks, internal SLAs, a metric system tied to the profit and loss, CRM as a single source of truth, AI forecasting, and a ninety-day rollout you can sell upward.
Then eight on operations, because growth breaks the processes underneath it: why the function is needed past fifty people, mapping and knowing where not to formalise, input and outcome metrics with owners, bottlenecks and waste, operating rhythms, managing chaos during scaling, and the tooling.
And six on workforce planning: FTE, gap analysis, demand forecasting with extrapolation and Delphi, role design, workload analysis, optimisation through automation and outsourcing, and end-to-end cost-benefit. Growth that ignores headcount economics simply relocates the problem.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — companies that grew fast enough for every one of these machines to be tested.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
One diagnostic
Ask your marketing lead and your sales lead, separately, to define a qualified lead. If the definitions differ, no amount of additional spend at the top of the funnel will produce growth, and that gap is where this course starts. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.