Sales Strategy
Why Most Transformations Fail in the Coordination Phase
Andrew Urteaga
Senior Partner, Public
October 19, 2025
9 min read
Every CEO has seen this pattern. The transformation launches with momentum—strategic plan approved, initiatives chartered, resources allocated. Executive alignment looks solid. Everyone's committed to execution. Then three months in, everything slows down. Initiatives miss milestones. Dependencies create bottlenecks. Cross-functional coordination becomes a negotiation. And nobody can explain exactly why progress stalled—just that "things are complicated."
The problem isn't strategy. Most transformations fail in the coordination phase—the moment when independent initiatives must work together to deliver business outcomes. This is where theoretical alignment hits operational reality. Where sequencing matters more than speed. Where a dependency between Sales and Marketing can derail both initiatives if nobody's managing the handoff.
Why Coordination Fails
Traditional transformation governance isn't designed for coordination. Steering committees meet monthly to review status. Initiative owners report progress in isolation. And when dependencies create conflicts, there's no forum to resolve them in real-time. The coordination failures compound:
- •Initiative owners optimize locally. Marketing launches campaigns before Sales has capacity to handle inbound volume. Product releases features before Customer Success can train clients. Everyone hits their deadlines—but the business gets no value because the pieces don't fit together.
- •Dependencies go unmanaged. The GTM redesign needs new territories defined before hiring can start. But the territory model depends on market segmentation that Marketing hasn't finalized. Nobody knows the dependency exists until both initiatives are behind schedule.
- •Resources get overcommitted. The VP of Sales is assigned to four initiatives. RevOps supports six workstreams. When competing priorities collide, whoever escalates loudest wins—not whoever delivers most value.
- •Alignment degrades over time. Executives aligned on strategy in January. But by March, when market conditions shift, there's no mechanism to realign priorities. Initiatives keep executing against the original plan even when it no longer makes sense.
None of these failures indicate bad strategy or incompetent execution. They're coordination problems—and traditional governance structures don't solve them because they weren't designed to.
How the RGO Solves Coordination
The Revenue Growth Office is purpose-built for coordination. It sits between strategy and execution, managing the dependencies, sequencing, and alignment that determine whether transformation delivers value or just creates activity.
1. Dependency Mapping & Management
The RGO documents every initiative's dependencies at charter creation—what it needs from other workstreams and what others need from it. Then they actively manage these dependencies through bi-weekly cross-functional syncs where initiative owners coordinate handoffs, resolve conflicts, and sequence deliverables. This prevents the silent dependencies that derail timelines.
2. Sequencing & Priority Management
Not all initiatives can execute in parallel. Some must sequence—territories before hiring, segmentation before targeting, process before technology. The RGO creates the master timeline that sequences initiatives based on dependencies and resource constraints. When priorities shift, they resequence the entire program to maintain coherence.
3. Resource Arbitration
When three initiatives need the same RevOps resource, the RGO makes the call based on program priorities—not who escalates loudest. They maintain visibility into every team member's capacity across all initiatives and prevent overcommitment before it happens.
4. Cross-Functional Alignment
The RGO ensures every function stays aligned around revenue outcomes. When Marketing wants to accelerate campaign timing but Sales lacks capacity, the RGO facilitates the tradeoff discussion. When Product pushes a feature release but Customer Success needs training time, the RGO brokers the sequencing decision. They make coordination unavoidable.
5. Real-Time Issue Resolution
When coordination issues surface—and they always do—the RGO doesn't wait for the next steering committee. They convene the right stakeholders immediately, drive decision-making, and keep initiatives moving. This real-time problem-solving prevents small coordination failures from becoming program-level delays.
What Coordination Discipline Enables
When coordination works, transformation velocity accelerates. Initiatives hit milestones because dependencies are managed. Resources flow to highest-priority work. And when market conditions shift, the entire program can realign without losing momentum.
This is why PE-backed companies increasingly mandate RGO structures. They've learned that speed to value depends on coordination discipline. A well-coordinated program executing 7 initiatives delivers more value than a chaotic program running 15. The RGO makes that coordination systematic rather than heroic.
The Bottom Line
Most transformations fail in the coordination phase because traditional governance structures don't solve coordination problems. They create forums for status reporting, not mechanisms for dependency management, resource arbitration, and cross-functional alignment.
The Revenue Growth Office is the coordination engine. It manages dependencies. It sequences work. It aligns every function around revenue. And it makes coordination unavoidable through operating cadence, visibility mechanisms, and decision-making authority.
If your transformation is slowing down three months in—if dependencies are creating bottlenecks, resources feel overcommitted, and cross-functional alignment is degrading—the problem isn't your strategy. It's coordination. And coordination requires an execution engine purpose-built to solve it.