From Marketer to Revenue Owner: What Tara Salmon's Journey Tells Us About the Future of GTM Leadership

Most marketers say they care about revenue. Very few actually own it.

Tara Salmon has spent two decades closing that gap. She's now Chief Revenue Officer at Firmable, one of Australia's fastest-growing B2B data companies. She's been inside two major tech exits. She helped manage a $250M Oracle acquisition from the inside. And she built Firmable's entire go-to-market function from scratch, going from a team of one to over 30 in under two years.

When Tara joined me on Growth Unlocked, I wasn't expecting such a clear, grounded view of what modern revenue leadership actually looks like. No hype. No corporate polish. Just a founder and operator who has done the work.

Here's what I took from that conversation.

Revenue orientation isn't a title. It's a mindset.

Tara started as a marketing graduate at Aconex. Within her first year, she had to choose a specialisation. She picked digital, not because it was the flashiest option, but because it had the clearest link to the bottom line. Attribution. Measurement. Real impact.

That decision shaped everything that followed.

She's never been a marketer who thinks revenue is someone else's problem. Even in the early years, she was asking: how does what I'm doing connect to what the business actually needs to grow?

That orientation, built early, is what eventually led to her stepping into the CRO role. It wasn't a leap. It was the logical next step of a career spent leaning into accountability rather than away from it.

The lesson here isn't just for marketers. It's for anyone early in their career: own your connection to the outcome. The people who do that consistently are the ones who get given more responsibility.

Key takeaway: Revenue orientation is a habit of thinking, not a job description. Build it early, and build it deliberately.

The CMO to CRO shift is bigger than it looks.

I asked Tara what actually changed when she moved from CMO to CRO. The answer was more nuanced than I expected.

At Firmable, the CRO role spans sales, marketing, customer success, and rev ops. That's four functions under one roof. And the real shift isn't just the scope. It's the way you're forced to think.

As CMO, you're on the executive team, and you're expected to bring a whole-of-business perspective. As CRO, that's just the floor, not the ceiling. Every decision has downstream implications across multiple teams. A big deal that doesn't fit the ICP creates problems for customer success six months later. A new positioning shift affects how sales has conversations this week.

Tara described it as being forced into a "whole of business" approach to every call, every hire, every engagement. You can't optimise for one function without thinking through what it does to the others.

That's the real skill gap between most CMOs and the CRO role. It's not about knowing sales. It's about being able to hold multiple competing priorities at once and make decisions that are right for the business, not just your function.

Key takeaway: The CRO role demands systemic thinking across the entire revenue cycle. If you're preparing for it, start thinking in second-order consequences now.

Alignment is a structural decision.

One of the things that comes up almost every time I speak with a go-to-market leader is the same problem: marketing and sales don't talk, sales and customer success don't talk, and everyone's optimising for their own number.

I've been shaking my head at this for years. Tara's approach at Firmable is worth looking at closely.

The structure itself does a lot of the work. When marketing, sales, customer, and rev ops all report into one person, with shared revenue goals and a single North Star, the incentive to silo disappears. Everyone is working towards the same thing.

But beyond structure, Tara talked about the importance of culture and hiring. Bringing in people who think beyond their own remit, who ask "how can I help the team around me?" rather than just "how do I hit my number?" That orientation has to be screened for during interviews, not trained in after the fact.

One practical thing she mentioned that I thought was worth sharing: their annual kickoff isn't a sales kickoff. It's a go-to-market kickoff. Every function, same room, same message. That might sound like a small thing, but it signals something important about how the organisation sees itself.

Key takeaway: Alignment is a structural and hiring decision first, and a communication decision second. Build the conditions for it, don't just schedule for it.

What being inside a $250M acquisition teaches you.

Tara's Chief of Staff role at Aconex is one of the most interesting chapters of her career, and one that I think most people underestimate when they look at her CV.

She landed in the role on a Sunday. The Oracle bid came in on the Friday. That was the week.

What followed was six months of due diligence, stakeholder management across banks and internal teams, and then the entire integration process for a company with over 1,000 employees and roughly $250M in revenue. All while keeping most of it under wraps internally.

The thing that stood out to me wasn't the scale of it. It was what she said about decision-making. During the period between announcement and change of control, every significant decision across the business had to go through a structured approval process, and that process funnelled through her.

New hires. Role changes. New technology. All of it required a business case, a clear reason for the timing, and sign-off from multiple layers.

What that forced her to develop was the ability to weigh competing requests from different functions, understand what was genuinely urgent versus what could wait, and manage the expectations of senior stakeholders who didn't always get what they wanted.

That's a muscle most executives take years to build. Tara built it in six months under real pressure.

Key takeaway: If you ever get the chance to sit inside a complex acquisition or transformation process, take it. The decision-making exposure alone is worth it.

Customer obsession is a cliché until you see what it actually looks like.

I'll be honest: when I hear "customer-centric" from a founder or executive, I usually brace myself for a platitude. Everyone says it. Very few have the stories to back it up.

Tara had the stories.

At Aconex, they used to put every single person in the company on the help desk for a day, once a quarter. Not just customer-facing roles. Everyone. Including marketers, ops people, finance. You'd shadow for the first hour or two, then you were fielding real calls.

That's a strong commitment. And it works precisely because it breaks down the mental model that customer problems are someone else's job. When you've personally helped someone log in or resolve an issue, you think differently about product decisions, marketing messaging, and sales conversations.

At Firmable, they're building that same muscle into the culture from the start. Direct feedback loops from customers feeding into product development. Partners treated as part of the feedback system, not just a distribution channel.

Tara made a point I've been thinking about since: partners are at the front line with your customers. If they share your ICP and your values, they're one of the best sources of honest, real-world feedback you have. Most businesses don't treat them that way.

Key takeaway: Customer obsession needs to be a structural practice, not a value on a wall. Build the specific rituals that force every part of your org into contact with the customer.

The first hires set everything.

Firmable hit 1,000 customers. They've gone from one person in GTM to over 30. They've expanded into Southeast Asia. And they did a lot of that in under two years.

When I asked Tara what she'd credit those results to, one of the first things she came back to was hiring.

Two years ago, she was the entire go-to-market function. The first sales hire was one of the most important decisions she made. And she was deliberate about it, not just hiring for skill but for the attitude that would set the standard for the culture being built around them.

Those early hires shape the organisation in ways that are hard to undo. The pace they set, the standards they hold themselves to, the way they treat customers and each other. That all compounds.

She also talked about putting HubSpot in place before the first sales call was ever made. Before the first sales hire existed. That kind of systems-first thinking from day one means you're not retrofitting process into a team that's already operating without one. You're building with structure from the start.

Key takeaway: Hire early hires for culture as much as capability. And build your systems before you think you need them.

Salespeople should be selling. Most of them aren't.

This is something I think about constantly. The data is pretty consistent: most salespeople spend somewhere between 25 and 35% of their time actually talking to customers or prospects. The rest is admin, research, CRM updates, prep work.

That's an enormous efficiency problem. And it's one that Firmable is trying to solve both internally and for their customers.

Tara described what it looks like when it's working: you open the sales team's calendar and it's just blocked out with demos and customer conversations. That's it. No gaps filled with Googling for contact information or manually updating records.

The way you get there is by removing the prep friction. Good data at the point of outreach. Signals that tell you when it's the right time to reach out, not just the right person. Context about an account available before you pick up the phone.

She mentioned that Firmable is building AI signal agents that run in the background, monitoring relevant triggers, and then pushing tasks directly into HubSpot. So instead of a salesperson having to check a separate tool and then manually action something, the system does the thinking and the rep just responds.

That's the direction everything is heading. The question for most revenue leaders is how quickly they're willing to build toward it.

Key takeaway: Sales efficiency isn't about working harder. It's about removing the friction between a salesperson and the conversation they should be having.

The future CRO will need to be technical, not just strategic.

I asked Tara where she sees the CRO role heading over the next five years. Her answer was direct.

The CRO of the future won't just own sales. They'll own the go-to-market engineering function. They'll be the AI champion in the organisation. They'll have hands-on accountability for the systems and processes that make the revenue function run, not just the outcomes those systems produce.

That's a significant shift from how most CROs operate today.

I'd go further: the leaders who will thrive over the next decade are the ones who can combine strategic thinking with genuine technical fluency. Not necessarily building the tools themselves, but understanding how they work, what they make possible, and where the gaps are.

I'm not a marketer or an engineer. But right now, with the tools available, I can execute what used to require a team of four or five people. That's the kind of multiplication that changes how you build an organisation.

The CROs who lean into that, who understand the systems underneath the strategy, are going to have a structural advantage over those who don't.

Key takeaway: Start building technical fluency now. The CROs with strategic thinking plus systems understanding will be the most in-demand leaders of the next decade.

Work-life balance isn't a soft topic. It's a performance variable.

I want to end on something Tara said that I thought took real honesty to share.

When I asked what she'd do differently earlier in her career, she didn't talk about strategy or skills or missing opportunities. She talked about work-life balance.

She worked like a dog for years. And she's quick to say that it probably opened doors. But she also acknowledged that you can only bring your best self to work when you're actually taking care of yourself. Sleep. Breaks. Time away that's planned, not just hoped for.

She now plans her major breaks at the start of each year. Not as an afterthought when she's already running on empty, but as a deliberate part of how she manages her own performance across twelve months.

That's a shift in framing I think more founders need to make. Rest isn't the opposite of ambition. It's a condition for sustaining it.

Key takeaway: Plan your recovery the same way you plan your goals. Energy is the resource that everything else runs on.

Closing Reflection

What I took from this conversation with Tara is something I come back to often on Growth Unlocked: clarity about what you're building, conviction in how you're building it, and the optionality that comes from building it sustainably.

Tara didn't stumble into the CRO role. She built toward it across twenty years by staying close to revenue, taking on unusual experiences like the Oracle acquisition, hiring deliberately, and keeping customers at the centre of everything.

That's not a shortcut. But it is a system.

And it's the kind of system that compounds.

Key Takeaways

1. Revenue orientation is a mindset built early in your career, not a title you earn later. Start owning your connection to outcomes now.
2. The CMO to CRO shift is a structural one. Success requires thinking across functions, not just optimising your own.
3. Alignment between GTM teams is a structural and hiring decision. Build the conditions for it; don't just schedule for it.
4. Being inside a complex acquisition or transformation process is one of the best compressed leadership educations available. Take the opportunity if it comes.
5. Customer obsession needs rituals, not just values. Build the specific practices that force every part of your org into regular contact with the people you serve.
6. Hire early team members for culture as much as capability. They set the standard for everything that follows.
7. Sales efficiency is about removing friction, not adding pressure. Get the right data, signals, and systems in place so your team can focus on conversations.
8. The most in-demand revenue leaders of the next decade will combine strategic thinking with genuine technical fluency. Start building that now.
9. Plan your recovery deliberately. Energy is the resource that makes every other resource usable.