Silo - A Dirty Word No Good Marketer Should Tolerate

The word “silo” is such a dirty word in the business world. No one wants to be part of an organization that is siloed because it means that it isn’t working collaboratively. To not work collaboratively means that you’re excluding points of view that could have relevance. It means that many decisions are being made by a single person, not a collective group of people with a single goal.

But it’s much more than that. Collaboration itself isn’t the only qualifying criteria to avoid being in a silo. You can be collaborative with your peers within your business discipline (marketing, sales, product management, etc.), but not cross-functionally. Here’s where the attention needs to be focused.

In this blog, I’m going to focus on the marketing aspect of cross-collaboration because that’s where my experience lies. However, I suspect there may be similarities in other disciplines as well.

Marketing, especially as an organization grows in size, tends to become more and more siloed, both in terms of not interacting with other parts of the organization but also within its own boundaries. It often morphs into a services organization that fulfills tickets and tactics. When putting a campaign together, each group is responsible for different aspects, but only takes action when the baton is passed to them. It may start with the campaign strategist receiving messaging and materials from a product marketing colleague, constructing the campaign plan, then passing it to a content strategist who does their magic and then passes it to the next person in the relay that could put graphics together, then to the next person who creates a landing page, and so on and so forth. Media buys, search campaigns, SEO, events, etc. It goes on down the line.

But where in this chain of tactics does the entire group get together to talk about the campaign? When do SEO and search managers get to collaborate with the product marketing person to share performance data or new strategies to getting to a new audience that may need consideration when crafting the messages and copy? When does the content strategist meet with the product management lead to share the benefits that prospective customers are looking for so that it can be fed into the roadmap?

So what am I suggesting?

We all have jobs to do. It can be hard to even get input from your colleagues in the specific area you work, much less from someone in another discipline, I get it. Sometimes your head is down just cranking out work that you forget to look up until your coffee is long cold. However, taking the time to talk to others in your organization to share your findings and hear theirs, to add context to the work you’re producing, makes everyone a more well-rounded employee.

We can avoid big mistakes, big investments, and big wastes of time by talking to each other without the boundaries of job responsibilities. Most big companies leave this cross-functional talk to the group leaders and have that information trickle down. But the information required by a VP is very different than that needed by a more junior employee. We must expect cross-functional discussions to happen at this level.

Four Suggestions to Break Out of a Silo

At the minimum, I have the following suggestions. Again, this is based on my experience in both small/startup environments to the very large enterprise.

• Collaboration starts with familiarity: When you’re working on a new campaign, bring the team that will be developing and executing on the campaign together and discuss. Bounce ideas off each other, share best practices that lead to big results, be clear on what the needs will be. Establish goals and timing.

• Don’t set and forget: Share weekly updates, feedback, and suggestions across the team. Campaigns must be monitored constantly and information shared with all team members so they can learn, fine-tune, and impact the current campaign and learn for the next one. So many people walk away to the next “thing” without doing the work to learn from the last “thing.” Don’t be that person.

• Choose one goal that everyone is measured on: Ok, ok, don’t yell at me on this one. I get that every team will have different goals based on what they contribute to the business. However, if the entire team isn’t aligned to a singular, clear goal that drives the business’ top-line, it’s all for naught. For instance, if Marketing’s goal is to deliver a certain number of MQLs, and Sales is tasked with closing business, those are NOT aligned. If Engineering must develop a certain number of features and Customer Success is tasked with reducing the number of cases that it deals with each week, those are NOT aligned.

• Marketing MUST be in regular communication with product teams: While it feels like this line was written earlier in this post, I cannot overemphasize this one enough. So many times I see the execution piece of a campaign well underway without the marketing team ever going back to the product teams (product marketing or product management) and talking about revenue or ARR goals for the product or service, or what’s coming up on the roadmap, or how this fits in with other activities that are already in market.

Marketing isn’t fluffy, nor is its intention to “make things pretty.” It is a strategic function and only staying close to those that own the product, shepherd prospective customers to buy, and those who help customers remain customers will make you the most successful marketer. 

Silos are holding you back!

If you’re reading this and shaking your head saying “no way, this would never work,” why? Or, you’re nodding because you’ve seen this work or want it to work because it’s a tide that would raise all ships? I want to hear from you. Leave me a comment.