Team Structures That Remove Marketing Silos
- Jade Faulconbridge
- Apr 9, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 11, 2024
We're big advocates of eliminating marketing silos. Sales, product or customer service are not the enemy, they're colleagues and you're all working towards the same goals. Or at least you should be. If this isn't the case, start there.
If your marketing team isn't aligned with what the other teams are doing, one or both of you are going to be thinking the other isn't pulling their weight, or even devaluing the work they do. You don't want to spend 6 months working on a campaign only to find out that sales don't see the value in it, they're not receiving commission for selling the product, or product teams would rather flog their latest upgrade. This sounds extreme but it does (and has) happened when core teams aren't working in sync.
The problem for a lot of leaders is that they don't have time to teach their teams how to build stakeholder management skills when they're focused on the day to day. If they're lucky, an individual in their team will hear and understand the request for greater collaboration and take it upon themselves as a challenge. But getting this rolled out across your whole team (and the other teams/s you want to be engaging with) is near impossible. People will default to prioritising their own areas.
However, if we bring this back to marketing, leaders with an operational mindset are adept at removing themselves from the day to day and taking a step back. This ability to think of the big picture and build a holistic plan whilst still delivering the agreed priorities is the perfect blend of tactical and strategic. So how do you take this learning and apply it further?
There are two ways we've seen this work successfully.
Operations-led structure
If you've been following recent business trends over the last few years you'll have seen the term "revenue operations" becoming more and more popular. The concept is simple, a new "super team" is formed to bring together all operational areas for revenue generating roles. This team won't include the tactical roles (social media, campaign managers, account managers) as they'll remain separate but still under the same overarching executive. The org chart below paints a clearer picture.
You'll notice that three areas are brought together: client/customer service, marketing, and sales. The purpose of revenue operations is to bring together all data and resource to build one overarching strategy that is followed by other teams. One of their biggest remits will be to make sure this strategy is clear, agreed, and shared with the other leaders, so they can prioritise their own activities. This alignment is imperative for success.
This should start with the insights team - working out what's trending, important, who's buying, and what's adding value to clients. This should be done with data, not assumptions. With the insights the strategy team would look at the business goals (e.g. £1 million revenue) and decide how this will be achieved.
The result of the strategy team's work might show £400k in annual recurring revenue and a growth gap of £600k. They would break this gap into new business or existing client revenue potential alongside best fitting products or services (collaboration with product teams is crucial for this part). Once clear, these goals should be shared widely with marketing, sales, and client services to ensure alignment and prioritisation of activities. It would be up to leadership to ensure consistency and focus, making sure silos don't appear due to requests or priorities from other business areas.
Growth-led structure
The concept of being growth-led isn't too different from the idea of general "collaboration", but with a fancy title. You'll see from the example image below that operations and campaigns are combined in order to drive leads. This is supported by corporate marketing and a product team that focuses on specific product campaigns and sales enablement.
In this set up there's still a big separation with other areas of the business, however, all revenue driving activities (growth) is managed singularly. It is the growth team's responsibility to work with product marketing, product and sales to understand priorities and build the relevant strategies across all of the different areas. Everything should be aligned from a marketing perspective because it's centrally controlled.
These two examples aren't the only ways to ensure collaboration but they're the ones we've seen be successful in multiple scenarios.
If you have a preferred method let us know on LinkedIn.
Not got the skills in-house? Send us a message and we can chat through what you need and see if we can help.
