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You’ve probably noticed marketing is becoming increasingly complex. It requires diverse skill sets and close coordination with colleagues within and beyond the marketing team.
But even in this cross-functional world, many teams struggle with internal silos — departments or individuals operating in isolation, hindering efficiency, consistency and results.
Let’s explore six silos we regularly see in marketing and revenue teams. Because it’s hard to break down silos (otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about them so often) we’re, we’ll also provide actionable strategies for fostering collaboration and tips for getting crucial buy-in.
In other words, we’re going to develop a plan for breaking down each of the six silos.
1. Campaign planning in a vacuum
Marketing teams often plan and execute campaigns in isolation, without much input from teams like sales, product or customer success. This results in campaigns that fail to align with sales goals, product launches or customer needs.
The alternative: Integrated campaign workshops with the revenue team
From the beginning, you need to involve key stakeholders from sales, product development and customer experience (CX) in the campaign planning process.
Start with one upcoming, high-priority campaign. Instead of the usual planning meeting, invite a representative from sales leadership, a product manager and a customer success manager to a dedicated “Campaign Kick-off and Alignment Workshop.”
Before the workshop, circulate a clear agenda and initial campaign brief (even if it’s a rough draft). Ask attendees to come prepared with their team’s priorities, challenges and insights related to the campaign’s theme.
Use the workshop to discuss target audience, key messages, sales enablement needs, product features to highlight and potential customer pain points.
How to get buy-in
For your sales leadership, emphasize how early involvement ensures campaigns generate qualified leads that sales can close, reducing wasted effort on both sides. Highlight the opportunity to shape messaging that truly resonates with prospects.
Stress to the product team that their input guarantees campaigns accurately represent product features and benefits, preventing miscommunication and setting correct customer expectations. It’s also a chance to gather early market feedback.
Explain to CX and customer success how their participation ensures campaigns address common customer questions or pain points, leading to a smoother post-purchase experience and reducing support tickets.
Dig deeper: 7 vanity metrics marketers should avoid, and 7 to replace them
2. Website content is only a job for marketing
Marketing often takes sole ownership of website content. As a result, you miss valuable insights and resources from subject matter experts in areas like product, engineering, customer service and legal. This lack of diversity in topics and voices can lead to generic, less authoritative content or missed opportunities to improve SEO and distribute thought leadership.
The alternative: Distributed content creation with centralized governance
Instead of leaving website content solely to marketing, empower and enable experts across the organization to contribute content. Marketing’s role is to provide strategic oversight, editing and distribution of that content.
Begin by identifying your experts. Find the individuals or teams in your organization with deep knowledge on topics relevant to your audience that marketing might not cover in detail.
Next, develop clear, simple guidelines for content submission (e.g., topic suggestions, outline templates, desired tone, etc.).
Then work with one enthusiastic SME to co-create a high-value piece like a technical blog post or an industry trends article. Marketing handles the editing, SEO optimization and promotion.
Be sure to showcase the SME’s contribution and its positive impact, such as high engagement, traffic or expert credibility.
How to get buy-in
Subject matter experts and department heads should use content contributions to build personal and departmental thought leadership, enhance the company’s reputation, and directly contribute to business goals. Offer marketing support to minimize their time investment.
For leadership, demonstrate how this approach scales content creation, leverages internal expertise for more authoritative content and will help improve SEO and brand perception. Show them examples of how competitors feature internal experts on their websites.
3. ‘My budget, my metrics’
Large marketing organizations include teams such as demand gen, brand, content and operations. Each team often tracks and reports on its isolated metrics, optimizing for different outcomes. This makes it challenging to understand overall marketing effectiveness or attribute success across the customer journey.
The alternative: Shared marketing dashboards with full-funnel KPIs
Develop unified dashboards that present key performance indicators (KPIs) across the entire marketing funnel, showcasing how different activities contribute to shared business objectives.
Start the transition by gathering leaders from various marketing functions and even sales and CX to define what a qualified lead means, what customer acquisition cost truly entails, and the key milestones in the customer journey.
Agree on three to five high-level, business-oriented KPIs everyone contributes to (examples include marketing-sourced pipeline, customer lifetime value, cost per MQL).
Then build a prototype dashboard using an existing BI tool or a spreadsheet, pulling data from various sources to visualize the agreed-upon KPIs.
Schedule recurring meetings to review the shared dashboard, fostering discussions about how each team’s efforts impact the collective goal.
How to get buy-in
Explain to individual team leads how shared metrics provide a clearer understanding of their team’s impact on overall business success, justifying their budget and resources more effectively. It also helps identify bottlenecks that might not be visible from their siloed view.
For marketing leadership, focus on improved transparency, better resource allocation and a unified view of marketing’s contribution to revenue, moving beyond individual campaign metrics to strategic business impact.
Dig deeper: The anatomy of marketing funnel automation
4. The tech stack as a solo playground
Some marketing operations teams manage marketing technology in isolation, without sufficient input from other marketing teams, IT, sales or revenue operations. That leads to underutilized features, integration issues or a tech stack that doesn’t fully support the needs of other teams.
The alternative: Collaborative martech governance and roadmap planning
Establish a cross-functional committee or regular forum to review the current martech stack, identify new needs and collaboratively plan future investments and integrations.
Start by soliciting input from all key users of martech about their current pain points, desired functionalities and integration needs.
Next, form a small working group with representatives from marketing ops, IT, marketing and sales or revenue ops. Meet regularly to review current tools, discuss issues and prioritize upcoming projects.
Then develop a visual roadmap for martech improvements, upgrades and new tool evaluations, ensuring everyone understands the plan and their role in it.
How to get buy-in
For your marketing team, highlight how their direct input will lead to tools that better serve their needs, reduce manual work and improve campaign performance. Frame the conversation as, “your chance to shape the tools you use.”
For the IT team, you’ll want to emphasize how early collaboration reduces shadow IT, improves data security, streamlines integrations and avoids last-minute fire drills. Show how a proactive approach saves them time and resources in the long run.
When talking to sales operations or revenue operations, point out how better integrated and optimized marketing tools lead to cleaner sales data, improved lead routing and more effective sales enablement assets.
5. ‘My data, my interpretation’
The various teams in your organization collect, store and interpret data in different, inconsistent ways. Your marketing team might use one definition for a lead, while sales uses another. Customer service data might not integrate with marketing data, creating gaps in the view of the customer. The result is conflicting reports and inefficient handoffs.
The alternative: Unified data definitions and a centralized data hub
Establishing common definitions for key marketing and sales terms (e.g., MQL, SQL and opportunity) will help you work toward a single source of truth for customer data, often relying on CRM and marketing automation integration.
Start by creating a simple, shared glossary of common marketing and sales terms with agreed-upon definitions. Distribute it widely and review it regularly.
Next, conduct a high-level audit of data fields in your CRM, marketing automation platform and other key systems to identify inconsistencies and redundancies.
Then prioritize one critical integration (e.g., lead qualification data from marketing automation to CRM) to ensure consistency in lead definitions and scoring.
In the future, implement routine checks for data hygiene and completeness, with assigned ownership for different data sets.
How to get buy-in
Highlight for your marketing and sales teams how consistent data leads to more accurate reporting, better targeting, smoother handoffs and ultimately — the thing everyone wants — more revenue.
Emphasize to your leadership how a single source of truth enables more reliable forecasting, better strategic decisions, and a holistic view of the customer journey, reducing data-related conflicts and wasted time.
Your data analytics teams should recognize how this streamlines their work. They will no longer have to constantly reconcile disparate data sets, allowing them to focus on deeper insights.
6. The marketing-sales handoff abyss
One of the long-standing silos in business silos is the relationship between marketing and sales, specifically the part where marketing throws leads over the fence to sales without clear communication, agreed-upon Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or feedback loops. The result is lost leads, frustration and a blame game.
The alternative: Joint marketing and sales SLAs and shared feedback loops
You need to formally define the responsibilities of both marketing and sales at each stage of the lead lifecycle, and establish clear expectations for lead quality, follow-up times and feedback mechanisms.
Begin with a joint SLA workshop that brings marketing and sales leadership together to define each of the following:
- What constitutes an MQL and a sales accepted lead (SAL).
- Expectations for sales follow-up times for MQLs/SALs.
- Feedback mechanisms for sales to provide insight into lead quality.
- Marketing’s commitment to nurturing leads that aren’t ready for sales.
Next, ensure your CRM and marketing automation platforms are configured to support the agreed-upon handoff process, including automated notifications and status updates.
Schedule weekly or bi-weekly meetings between marketing and sales managers to review pipeline, discuss lead quality and address any handoff issues.
How to get buy-in
Show your sales leaders how clear SLAs lead to higher quality leads that are acted upon faster, increasing conversion rates and sales efficiency. Emphasize the gains from reduced time wasted on unqualified leads.
Explain to your marketing leaders how a formal handoff process improves accountability, reduces the number of lost leads, and provides valuable feedback to optimize marketing efforts and prove ROI.
Individual team members in both sales and marketing need to see how clear expectations reduce frustration, improve communication and help everyone focus on their respective strengths to achieve shared revenue goals.
Dig deeper: CMOs, CEOs and marketers are all struggling with martech data issues
MarTech is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
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