- Workshop 1: Growth Snapshot
- Workshop 2: Growth Roles
- Workshop 3: Brand, Tech, & Tools
- Workshop 4: Priority Markets
- Workshop 5: Ideal Profiles
- Workshop 6: Review & Recommend
What Are Growth Roles?
Growth Roles define who is responsible for driving and sustaining a company’s growth, and whether the right roles hold that responsibility today.
Most organizations have org charts, not growth charts. Titles, departments, and reporting lines exist, but they rarely show who actually owns the work that moves revenue forward.
Growth Roles cut through hierarchy to reveal the real structure of accountability — who starts new relationships, who protects existing ones, who creates demand, and who clears the path.
Measured in Millions® defines Growth Roles as the distinct functions that own the critical levers of business expansion:
- Marketing – Responsible for creating visibility, credibility, and demand in the right markets — turning awareness into inquiry.
- Business Development – Responsible for starting new qualified relationships that could change the trajectory of the business.
- Account Management – Responsible for expanding and deepening existing relationships to increase margin, loyalty, and share of wallet.
- Leadership – Responsible for setting strategic direction, aligning priorities, and removing friction between the functions that drive growth.
When these roles are clearly defined, accountability becomes visible and scalable.
When they’re blurred, growth stalls — not because people aren’t working hard, but because no one can see who’s truly responsible for what.
Note: Owners are not a Growth Role. Their responsibility is to empower, support, and stay out of the seats that drive daily growth.
The MiM® Lens
Traditional organizational design tends to reward busyness, not impact. People stay active, calendars stay full, but the work that actually drives growth becomes blurred across too many seats.
Companies often blend critical functions — sales and account management, marketing and operations, leadership and ownership — in ways that dilute focus and accountability.
Most mature generational companies slowly turn into account management organizations. Teams spend most of their energy servicing existing customers and very little on intentionally acquiring ideal new ones. Over time, account management becomes the black hole of relationship development. Without clear separation, salespeople inevitably drift toward account service because it’s easier, familiar, and immediately rewarding.
When a leader says, “We need more customers,” the reflex is to hire more salespeople. But if the structure isn’t right, the new hire gets dropped into a hybrid role — part business development, part account management. To make the hire feel “busy,” they’re assigned low-value accounts. Then they’re told to go build new business. This impossible blend leads to predictable outcomes: little acquisition, stalled momentum, disappointment on both sides, and eventually churn or role stagnation.
New customer acquisition is hard. Servicing existing accounts is the path of least resistance. That gravitational pull is exactly why blended roles never work and why clarity must come first.
Through the MiM lens, structure is strategy. When roles are unclear, results become unpredictable. When accountability blurs, performance becomes impossible to diagnose.
MiM defines Growth Roles around the specific levers they control, not their job titles:
- Business Development and Account Management must be separate roles.
- Likewise, new channel development and channel management must be separated; one builds, the other maintains.
- Accountability is not reporting. It is the measurable connection between action and revenue.
- Clarity delivers progress; ambiguity breeds frustration.
- Sales engineering is evolving — in many companies, an engineering-led proof-of-concept model supported by business operations outperforms the traditional salesperson-plus-engineer pairing.
- Owners must be removed from growth seats. Sitting in these roles reduces accountability, weakens structure, and decreases enterprise value during an earnout.
The Growth Roles framework helps leaders see their company as a growth system instead of a collection of job titles. It exposes where responsibility is tangled, where roles are overloaded, and where structure must evolve to support scale. When every seat has a clear purpose, measurable outcomes, and visible alignment to revenue, the organization gains the clarity required to grow with intention.
Measuring the Four Growth Roles
A growth system only works when every role has clear ownership of the levers that move revenue. When metrics blur, accountability disappears. When each role has a defined scorecard, growth becomes predictable, scalable, and diagnosable.
Most companies measure activity, not impact. They track busyness instead of outcomes, and they reward effort instead of progress. The result is confusion: hybrid roles, unclear expectations, and teams who feel productive but fail to advance the business.
Measured in Millions® defines accountability through role-specific metrics — clear indicators tied directly to each function’s responsibility in the growth engine. No shared metrics. No overlapping scorecards. No ambiguity.
Below is the MiM® approach to measuring each Growth Role.
Marketing
Marketing exists to create visibility, credibility, and demand — the fuel the rest of the system needs to grow. Their job is to spark interest from the right audiences, not to close revenue.
Primary Metric
- Quality Connections
Supporting Metrics
- Website sessions from priority markets
- Time on page / content engagement depth
- Conversion rate on key pages (forms, CTAs, downloads)
Not Their Metrics
These belong to Sales and Account Management.
- Closed-won revenue
- Account retention
- Service-level metrics
Business Development
Business Development owns new relationship creation. Not retention. Not account service. Not “helping with existing accounts.” Their impact is measured by how effectively they start meaningful, qualified relationships that can change the trajectory of the business.
Primary Metric
- Qualified Relationships
Supporting Metrics
- Conversion rate from Quality Connections → Qualified Relationships
- Buying committee identified (percentage of accounts where BD has mapped key decision-makers)
Not Their Metrics
Those belong to Account Management.
- Account retention
- Revenue expansion
- Customer satisfaction
Account Management
Account Management owns relationship depth, health, and growth inside the portfolio. Their responsibility is margin, loyalty, and lifetime value — not new logo acquisition.
Primary Metric
- Net Revenue Expansion
Supporting Metrics
- Account retention rate
- Share of wallet growth
Not Their Metrics
These belong to Business Development.
- New customer acquisition
- Early-stage pipeline creation
- First-time relationship development
Leadership
Leadership owns the environment in which growth happens. They drive clarity, remove friction, align priorities, and ensure the system functions as intended. Leadership does not “own the numbers” — they own the conditions that produce the numbers.
Primary Metric
- Top-Line Revenue Growth
Supporting Metrics
- Operating Margin (profitability driven by strategic clarity + structural decisions)
- Customer Retention Rate (AM owns the work — leadership owns the environment that supports it)
- Employee Retention/Engagement (a major predictor of execution capacity)
- Budget Allocation to Growth Priorities (percent of operating budget aligned with strategy)
Not Their Metrics
These belong to the operators of these functions.
- Business Development quotas
- Expansion revenue
- Marketing lead counts
Why It Matters
Most organizations have org charts, not growth systems.
People work hard, but it’s rarely clear who is actually responsible for driving growth or how their work connects to revenue. Roles blend, priorities tangle, and when growth slows, teams fall back on activity instead of accountability.
Two patterns cause most of the problems: hybrid roles and owners sitting inside growth seats, sometimes in one, sometimes in all of them. Both create confusion, slow decisions, and make it impossible to see where growth is truly stuck.
- Salespeople end up balancing new business and account management.
- Marketing operates like a service desk instead of a demand engine.
- Owners try to steer, sell, protect accounts, and remove friction all at once.
Measured in Millions® believes structure is strategy. When roles are unclear or shared, results become unpredictable. When accountability blurs, performance becomes impossible to diagnose.
That’s why Growth Roles are defined by the specific levers they own, and why each role is measured with distinct, non-overlapping metrics. No shared targets. No blended responsibilities. No ambiguity.
When every role has a clear purpose and a clean scorecard, accountability becomes visible, performance becomes measurable, friction becomes diagnosable, and growth becomes repeatable.
This clarity turns the organization from a group of busy people into a coordinated growth engine — one where the right work sits in the right seats, and scale becomes possible.
The Role of the MiM™ Coach
The MiM™ Coach facilitates this conversation as a diagnostic mirror, not a reorganization.
The goal is to help leadership see what is true right now — how growth responsibilities actually sit inside the business — before deciding what must evolve.
The Coach surfaces critical insights such as:
- Where hybrid roles (like Business Development plus Account Management) create conflicting priorities
- Where owners are sitting in growth seats and slowing scale
- Where accountability is shared, duplicated, or missing entirely
- Where metrics reward activity instead of progress
- Where roles lack clear alignment to the company’s growth levers
Through this process, the Coach equips leaders to reimagine their organization as a growth system — one where responsibility, data, and decision-making flow clearly and purposefully, without prematurely reorganizing structure or titles.
How This Philosophy Comes to Life
This philosophy comes to life in Workshop 2: Growth Roles, where the MiM Coach guides leaders in mapping their current roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities to the company’s true growth levers.
The result is a clear blueprint of who drives growth today, where roles overlap, where accountability breaks down, and how structure can evolve over time to support scale.
This workshop does not reorganize the company.
It reveals the truth of how growth work is happening today — so future decisions can be made with clarity, not guesswork.
To learn how to facilitate this workshop, click below.