Sarah Polk

Picture of Sarah Polk
With deep senior level management and marketing expertise, Sarah leads businesses through international expansion initiatives, difficult transitions, mergers, acquisitions, and turnarounds. Adept at recognizing growth opportunities, strategic positioning, creative conceptualization, new product launches, and brand management, she builds and expands extensive marketing departments to maximize ROI and shareholder value. Also skilled at product marketing, she works with engineering teams to craft products that meet the market's needs. With an ability to inspire and lead cross-functional global teams, Sarah builds productive, long-lasting business relationships.
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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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