CMO and CRO as One
Lina Tonk was CMO of Recurly, the subscription management platform, and is now CMO of Smartling. Her philosophy is that CMOs who only report on marketing pipeline are thinking too small: she reports on all pipeline, including outbound and partner pipeline, because marketing’s influence runs through all of it. On day one at Recurly, she set MQL-to-pipeline conversion at four percent. They hit six.
“The most important relationship a CMO can have is with the CRO. When you share the same metrics as sales, everything changes.”
Lina Tonk is Chief Marketing Officer of Smartling, the AI-powered language and translation platform, having previously served as CMO of Recurly, the subscription management and billing platform, from April 2024 to March 2026. At Recurly, she led the go-to-market function across demand generation, product marketing, brand, content, and marketing operations, tripling the company’s MQL-to-pipeline conversion rate and growing marketing’s pipeline contribution to 50%.
Before Recurly, Lina spent nine years at isolved, the HCM technology company, growing from Marketing Manager to SVP of Marketing to CMO. She also spent a short period in sales at isolved, which she credits with giving her a permanent empathy for what sales teams carry and how they think about their role every day. That experience is the foundation of her belief that the CMO-CRO relationship is the most important relationship in any B2B company.
Her signature programmes at Recurly include Pipeline Warriors, a combined sales and marketing working group that meets two to three times a week to build pipeline together, and the What’s Next event series, which brings customers and prospects together to learn from each other across Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Miami, Chicago, and New York. She also brought in industry experts who work with competitors to speak at Recurly events, arguing that making the market better overall is a more powerful positioning move than any competitive campaign.
“If you don’t have a group like Pipeline Warriors, sales and marketing together two or three times a week changes everything.”
“Some CMOs have said to me, are you nuts? It’s a heavy lift.”
Lina’s single most powerful structural decision at Recurly was to report on all pipeline rather than just marketing-sourced pipeline. The logic is straightforward: marketing’s influence runs through every pipeline motion, whether or not marketing gets the attribution credit. When the CMO owns accountability for total pipeline, the CRO relationship becomes genuinely collaborative rather than territorially defensive. When it works, the two teams run with identical metrics and talk to boards with one voice. The Pipeline Warriors programme, where sales and marketing leaders meet together two to three times a week to build pipeline jointly, is the cultural expression of that structural decision.
“The shift from acquisition to retention has completely changed the game. Pausing is tremendous.”
The subscription market reached a tipping point where the cost of acquiring a new subscriber exceeds the value of retaining an existing one with any reasonable degree of care. Lina’s read on Recurly’s data is that the merchants growing fastest are those who have built subscription experiences that give subscribers reasons to stay: immediate box swaps for clothing rental, pause rather than cancel options, creative loyalty structures. The acquisition mindset treats the subscriber as the goal. The retention mindset treats them as the beginning.
“The first team I always build is product marketing. They own positioning. Everything else streams from that.”
Lina’s team structure is consistent across every company she has built: product marketing first, then content, then demand generation, then design, then ops and martech. The logic is linear. Product marketing owns positioning. Positioning feeds content. Content feeds demand generation. Design serves all of it. If positioning is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong. Starting with demand generation in the absence of solid positioning is how companies generate high-volume, low-quality pipeline that breaks the CMO-CRO relationship and takes months to undo.
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