For the first three years of Tiffany Sieve’s career, the market delivered a verdict every payday. She sold on 100% commission. When business moved, she got paid. When it did not, there was no soft-focus brand study to admire while waiting for next quarter. The arrangement was severe, educational and wonderfully free of euphemism. It taught her that attention has to travel somewhere.
That early sales experience became the useful splinter in her marketing career. It kept her close to the person carrying the quota and suspicious of work that could not explain what happened next. Sieve would go on to hold marketing roles at LexisNexis, spend more than a decade rising through Paycor, become chief marketing officer at Paycor and Paychex, and, in October 2025, take the global marketing brief at Xactly.
There is a pleasing circularity to the latest appointment. Xactly builds software for sales planning, incentives and performance. Its CMO began her working life learning those pressures without software between her and the result. Some careers zigzag. This one bends back toward its first lesson.
The department learns to show its math
When Sieve joined Paycor around 2014, she later recalled, marketing was a team of roughly seven. The company did not yet have Salesforce or Marketo in place. Marketing made websites, logos and sales materials. That work had value, but its contribution to revenue was difficult to see. The familiar corporate joke was hovering nearby: marketing makes things pretty. Sieve’s team set about making it countable.
Salesforce and Marketo went live in the same week, a compact phrase for what must have been a fairly untidy stretch of organizational life. Sales, operations, product and marketing had to agree on processes and definitions. Program management and product marketing roles took shape. The team began calling itself revenue marketing. A campaign could be followed from a marketing-qualified lead to a first appointment, through the sales funnel, and on to average deal size, win rate and overall contribution.
The point was not to reduce every human decision to a cell in a spreadsheet. It was to give marketing an operating language shared with the rest of the business. Brand awareness could still matter. So could a clever piece of creative. But when the chief sales officer asked what changed, the answer no longer had to be a mood.
By 2019, Sieve estimated that roughly three quarters to four fifths of marketing’s contribution came from new business, with the balance coming from opportunities among existing clients. She was careful to distinguish the marketing view from the company’s overall revenue mix. It is a small qualification, but a revealing one. Operators know that a number without a denominator is just a well-dressed rumor.
The machinery also brought a useful constraint. Every new technology had to fit the systems already doing the accounting. Personalization, chat and account-based programs could be exciting, but only if their signals found their way back into the shared record. Otherwise the company acquired one more blinking dashboard and no clearer idea of what a customer wanted.
“Marketing plays a critical role in connecting our brand to customers and driving revenue.”
Over time, Sieve’s remit widened. As senior vice president of marketing and communications, she and her team worked on the naming-rights partnership that put Paycor’s name on Cincinnati’s football stadium. They optimized Paycor.com as a growth channel and launched Connect+, the company’s first customer conference. Brand, demand and customer retention were not separate islands. They were different stretches of the same journey.
Four walls, six customers and no hiding place
One of Sieve’s customer-journey exercises was gloriously physical. Her team selected six clients, printed the emails, event invitations, webinar details and white papers each had encountered, and covered all four walls of a room with the evidence. They compared timing, job titles, company sizes and industries. The abstract “buyer journey” became a room one could walk around.
The exercise had a second act. Data could reveal what customers did, but not how the experience felt. The team added interviews, focus groups and surveys. It examined the handoff into implementation, the path toward advocacy and the opportunities for existing customers to buy more. Sieve’s instincts were quantitative, but not bloodless. Numbers were the map; conversation supplied the weather.
She used the same method with sales alignment. Marketers had quarterly development goals that included “ride-alongs.” Sometimes that meant sitting in a car and attending a meeting. Sometimes it meant putting on headphones beside a telephone seller and listening to a demo. People returned with real questions prospects had asked, competitors they had mentioned and campaign ideas that would have been difficult to invent from a conference room.
The ritual also shaped Sieve’s hiring taste. She looked for go-getters rather than immaculate corporate pedigrees: people who had built from the ground up, worn several marketing hats, brought new ideas, attached results to those ideas and persuaded an organization to change. Fast growth, in her telling, made yesterday’s formula a poor guarantor of tomorrow’s result. Adaptability had to be more than a line under “skills.”
That preference makes sense in the context of her own progression. Sieve’s work crossed lead generation, client upsell, events, digital programs, testing, field marketing and channels before it acquired a chief’s title. Specialization can make a career legible. Range can make an executive useful. Her public conversations suggest she values the latter, particularly when the work calls for translating among sales, product, operations and the customer rather than winning an argument inside marketing.
Old mail, new signals
Sieve has never sounded especially sentimental about channels. Email could work, until the inbox became a thicket. Events could work, until the buyer had no time to leave the office. In 2019, while everyone else was busy declaring direct mail dead, her team was sending three-dimensional packages to prospects. The old-fashioned object was connected to modern plumbing: when delivery occurred, marketing technology notified the salesperson, who could call while the package was fresh.
The package was merely the knock on the door. Timing and coordination did the clever work. The same practical curiosity led her team toward website personalization, account-based marketing and online chat. She spoke of moving beyond the individual marketing-qualified lead toward a marketing-qualified account, acknowledging the five or six people who might influence a B2B purchase. Each needed a message suited to a role; sales needed a say in which accounts deserved the effort.
This is Sieve’s version of innovation: less costume, more connective tissue. A new tool is interesting when it shortens the distance to a worthwhile sales conversation. An old tool is interesting when it can do the same. Fashion is not a strategy, even when it arrives with an impressive booth at a conference.
The brand may open the door. Sieve wants to know who walked through, what they needed and whether anyone followed up.
The long build reaches the C-suite
Paycor promoted Sieve to chief marketing officer in August 2024. The mandate included brand awareness, demand generation, product marketing and customer retention, with an explicit role in the company’s path toward $1 billion in revenue. She joined the executive committee after more than ten years inside the business. It was the promotion of a builder who knew where the pipes ran.
When Paychex completed its acquisition of Paycor in 2025, Sieve became Paychex CMO. The chapter was brief but substantial, placing her atop marketing for a larger company during integration. Regional recognition followed: a Cincinnati Business Courier C-Suite Award and selection among its 2025 Women Who Mean Business. She also joined the volunteer leadership board of United Way of Greater Cincinnati, extending a local record that has included mentoring students and co-founding Paycor’s Women’s Inspiration Network.
The civic work supplies a counterweight to the funnel charts. Sieve has spent years around mentoring programs, from classrooms to employee networks, and the theme is consistent with her comments on hiring: find people with appetite, expose them to the real work and help them climb. A revenue leader can be exacting about measurement without imagining that people are merely inputs. In fact, the better ones tend to notice who has not yet been invited into the room.
Then came Xactly. Announced in October 2025, the role put Sieve in charge of global marketing strategy, brand growth, customer engagement and revenue. Her public ambition was straightforward: connect the brand to customers, build on the company’s foundation and accelerate growth worldwide. The language was polished for an appointment notice, but the operating idea beneath it was the same one that had survived every promotion.
Marketing should help create the next conversation. It should listen before it announces. It should know the difference between activity and progress. And, wherever possible, it should show its work.
A commission-only paycheck is a blunt teacher. Sieve spent the rest of her career making its lesson more sophisticated: better systems, wider journeys, more humane customer listening and a brand large enough to sit on a stadium. Yet the original test remains visible. Somewhere, a seller is about to make a call. Did marketing give that person a reason to be welcomed?