Breaking Down a Common Marketing Scourge

It’s widely known that silos—broadly defined as the lack of coordination and integration—are ubiquitous in many marketing departments. In some ways, they can be seen as the scourge of the marketing world. After all, there are so many factions and moving parts, from advertising to digital to public relations – and many times it’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to get them to work together.

A new study by Forbes Insights (in partnership with Teradata ), Breaking Down Marketing Silos: The Key to Consistently Achieving Customer Satisfaction and Improving Your Bottom Line, looks at this phenomenon and what some companies are doing to fix it. According to Teradata, 74% of marketers say that marketing and IT are not strategic partners in their company. As Brad Books, CMO of Juniper Networks put it, “If you get more than three marketing people in a room, you get silos.”

We knew that silos can have a corrosive effect on employee morale and create turfs and office tension, but we wanted to examine silos from another perspective: the impact of silos on the customer—the end users who may not realize their experience with a product or company is being hampered by marketing silos. So we spoke at length to five leading CMOs from a wide range of industries (Mike Volpe, HubSpot; Kelly Davis-Felner, Wi-Fi Alliance; Steve Daheb, Citrix, Brad Brooks, Juniper Networks, and Scott Eagle, Conversant) about how they’ve broken down silos in their own companies.

Here’s a sneak peak at a few things we learned —much more can be found in the full report:

• Create new groups to span silos. When CMO Steve Daheb started at Citrix over a year ago, the company had a very common structure: each product group, whether it was security or networking, had its own marketing manager. “But there was a gap and lack of integration across all these product groups,” recalls Daheb. So he created a new department—what he describes as an "overlay"—called Corporate Solutions and Product Marketing. “It was about being greater than the sum of its parts. You need to have a point where it all rolls up and is presented to the market in an integrated way.”
• Create a unifying message to rally around the customer. Until recently, Juniper Networks’ marketing operations were fractured into many different enclaves and dispersed. In addition to tweaking the reporting chain of command, Brooks, the company’s CMO, said that he has a new, customer-centric message to keep his department moving in the same direction. "Let’s think about what the customer experiences."
• Create new seating arrangement. A few years ago HubSpot found that a number of its customers were unhappy because they felt there was a big difference between what was promised to them and what was delivered, recalled Mike Volpe, the company’s CMO. Volpe decided a physical restructuring was necessary. Today marketers are not housed in a specific part of the building; they are integrated with other departments. “We’ll have the sales and customer service teams sit together,” says Volpe. The end result is more integration and, ultimately, satisfaction among customers.
• Create a data-driven case. Scott Eagle, from Conversant, says he is able to avoid silos, like offline versus online, and foster more collaboration by marshaling the numbers. “Data is our biggest weapon. It aligns departments behind the right decisions, and CMOs are in a unique position to break down silos with data,” said Eagle.