Marketing

The Sales-Marketing Flywheel Prevails

Sales and marketing don't live on separate islands. They're two halves of a single flywheel, and the best B2B companies operate this way.

By Gail Moody-Byrd | Big Wheel Performance · 2026-05-27

Sales and marketing don't live on separate islands. They're two halves of a single flywheel, and the best B2B companies operate this way.

I learned this at SAP, and again at LinkedIn. I learned it most clearly as CMO of Noodle.ai, where, as a Series B startup, we didn't have the luxury of letting them work independently. Every dollar of pipeline had to come from sales and marketing rowing in the same direction.

Three companies, three growth stages, one truth: sales and marketing build pipeline together, firmly rooted in customer truth, a strong product story, and go-to-market motions that convert.

That's the thesis I'm bringing to Big Wheel Performance as a Senior Advisor, starting today.

Why Big Wheel Performance, and Why Now?

I've known Fred Soller and Bill Ryan for ten years. We worked together at SAP in 2016, so I've seen them operate up close, building businesses grounded in a masterful understanding of market dynamics and customer pain points, creating opportunities through skillful articulation of their solutions, and leading high-performing teams by demonstrating excellence at every turn. They're the most experienced B2B sellers I know. Not theorists. Not pundits. Operators who have closed the deals, built the playbooks, crushed quarters, and missed quarters, always building the engines to make the next quarter better.

What I respect most about what Fred and Bill have built at Big Wheel Performance ("We Build Investor-Grade Revenue Engines") is that the firm is allergic to slide-deck consulting. The Big Wheel work is actionable. It means diagnosing where a client's GTM engine is broken, then digging in to make the necessary adjustments, not in theory, but in practice. That's the only kind of GTM advisory that really works.

Where I Fit on the Team

Big Wheel's bench is deep in B2B sales: market opportunity identification, pipeline build, deal strategy, revenue operations, and the discipline of the sales motion itself. Big Wheel helps companies scale revenue without burning capital. The piece of the flywheel I'm adding is often overlooked in early-stage companies due to the fierce urgency to grow: category strategy, competitive positioning, messaging, product marketing, and sales enablement. This is the work that determines whether your sales team walks into rooms armed with a clear point of view or shows up with pitch decks that fail to connect.

I've spent twenty-plus years building these levers inside companies like SAP, LinkedIn, and Noodle.ai, and the last few months bringing the same discipline to founders and CEOs through Distill.Works, my advisory practice. I've seen enough to state with conviction: when you fix the positioning and the sales enablement layer, deals move faster, win rates go up, and the flywheel turns.

What Clients Can Expect from Me at Big Wheel Performance

If Big Wheel pulls me into your engagement, here's what I'll push on:

Whether you actually have a category, or are in need of a defensible position.
Whether your messaging is doing the work your sales team needs it to do.
Whether your sales enablement is built on the buyer's questions or your product's features.
Whether your marketing org is sized and structured to feed your sales motion.

These aren't theoretical questions. They're the ones I'll be asking, alongside Fred, Bill, and the team, on every client engagement I'm part of.

What's Next

I'm a few weeks into the Big Wheel orbit and a few client conversations deep. In the meantime, if you're a B2B founder or VC/PE investor and the sales-marketing seam in your business feels like it's costing you pipeline, that's exactly the kind of conversation we're here to have.

— Gail Moody-Byrd