David MacIntosh

Picture of David MacIntosh
Dave’s revenue career has covered a broad spectrum from growth strategies and sales execution across various sales channels (enterprise, SMB, partnerships, resellers, eCommerce, etc.) and international markets to systems/processes and talent management. He has more than 25 years of experience in Revenue Strategy, Execution and Management. His operator experience in private equity portfolio companies coupled with delivering M&A deal value, has demonstrated significant success to increase revenues and company valuations.
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Recent Posts

What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business

What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business

Thu, Jul 9, 2026 | Posted by Michael Lang

 

Executive Takeaways

  • Marketing is a core enterprise capability, not a support function, and deserves the same CEO-level engagement as Finance and Operations.
  • Without a unifying system, individually reasonable decisions accumulate into random acts of marketing.
  • Modern tools make execution faster, but they don't create strategic clarity, so the gap between activity and alignment keeps widening.
  • CEOs can't delegate marketing entirely. Leading it means ensuring insight, strategy, and execution stay connected.

This blog is part of Chief Outsiders’ Marketing Leadership for CEOs series, an ongoing examination of the critical dimensions of Marketing (the capital “M” is intentional, as you’ll see) that every CEO needs to understand.

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