Too many companies still treat marketing as a silo: a function to make ads, write copy, or churn out a slide deck. The cost is real: money wasted, customers confused, growth stalled. I firmly believe that marketing only works when it is woven into the fabric of the company, connecting product, sales, finance, and leadership. Anything less and you get noise instead of momentum.
This is also why companies need senior marketing leadership, even if only part-time. Contractors and junior staff can execute campaigns. But only someone with cross-functional authority can sit in a board meeting one day and a sales call the next, and turn both into a strategy that actually sticks.
Marketing and Product: Building the Bridge
It’s not enough for marketing to polish presentations. The real work is bridging user needs, product realities, and market opportunities.
At one client, our North America team realized our enterprise product could reach a whole new segment if we built a template following industry best practices. That insight didn’t come from a brainstorm: it came from sitting with the product team, understanding what they were experimenting with, and recognizing that those prebuilt templates could unlock new customers.
In the process, we cut rollout time for clients, reduced implementation costs, and opened an entirely new market for the company. Everyone won. That shift came from marketing being in the room early, speaking product’s language, and building a bridge between engineers and customers.
So what? When marketing works with product, rollout time drops and adoption rises.
Marketing and Sales: Listening on the Ground
If marketing isn’t occasionally on the conference floor or in a sales call, it’s flying blind. Sales hears what excites prospects, what stalls deals, and what competitors are promising. When I join them, I’m not just observing: I’m selling too. It’s the fastest way to understand what works in the field and what language customers actually use.
That perspective reshapes everything. Once, we turned our booth into a live demo so sales reps could show our platform in action rather than describe it. I saw firsthand what made buyers lean in, what lost them, and what surprised them. That insight flowed directly into our messaging and training.
So what? When marketing works with sales (in the field, not from a distance), stories close faster, relationships deepen, and growth feels real.
Marketing and Finance: Strange Bedfellows, Natural Allies
Finance isn’t just the team that says no: it’s the team that knows where every dollar lives. When I’ve partnered with finance, the goal hasn’t been to defend spend but to learn together. We’ve built dashboards that tie marketing metrics to renewals and revenue, creating a shared view of impact.
But the real collaboration comes from looking forward. Marketing often sees shifts in the market, from buying behavior and pricing pressure to audience sentiment, before they show up in the books. When finance and marketing share those early signals, we can plan ahead: adjust budgets, time investments, and move proactively instead of reactively.
So what? When marketing partners with finance, the data gets smarter, the timing gets better, and decisions start coming from insight instead of hindsight.
Marketing and Leadership: Reality Check and Connector
Leadership is where every ambition and constraint meets: the CEO’s growth goals, the CRO’s revenue targets, the product team’s new roadmap, and the CFO’s budget realities. It’s easy for each to be right in isolation but misaligned in practice. Marketing’s job is to bring them together, to translate vision into motion.
That means helping leadership see the whole picture. I’ve had conversations where the CEO wanted to launch into a new market, the product lead wanted to double down on development, and finance wanted to freeze hiring. None of those instincts were wrong. But when we put the data, story, and goals side by side, a clearer strategy emerged: one that balanced speed with sustainability and gave everyone a stake in success.
The best leadership partnerships happen when marketing is trusted to bridge those perspectives honestly. Sometimes that means saying “not yet.” Sometimes it means pushing for a bigger leap. Either way, the role is the same: keep the company moving in a shared direction while making sure every decision connects back to why the company exists in the first place.
So what? When marketing works closely with leadership, vision turns into strategy and alignment becomes a habit, not an accident.
Lessons from Nonprofits
These dynamics aren’t just for tech: nonprofits face the same silos. At Northwest Harvest, finance was focused on budgets, development on donors, advocacy on politics, and operations on logistics. Each was right in its own way, but pulling in different directions. Marketing became the connective tissue, listening across teams and shaping a unified plan. It wasn’t always easy, but the same principles applied: integration beats isolation, and clarity beats noise.
The Takeaway
Marketing is not a department off to the side. At its best, it is the connective tissue across a company: aligning product, sales, finance, and leadership, and reminding everyone that they’re in it together. That’s why I often start by drafting a corporate manifesto, even if it stays tucked in a leadership drawer. It’s a reminder: the work is shared, the mission is shared, and the impact belongs to everyone.
And sometimes, the most important marketing insight doesn’t come from a dashboard or a campaign. It comes from noticing the raised eyebrow in a sales meeting, or the way a volunteer argues with a development officer. Those little signals are where the real work begins.
Looking ahead: The companies that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that stop treating marketing as a silo and start treating it as connective tissue. The sooner leaders recognize this, the sooner growth and resilience can emerge.