Marketing Leadership Charts: How well Marketing collaborates with 7 other departments

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From May 15^th to 24^th, 2024, Prophet fielded an online survey to 304 senior marketing leaders in North America, equally divided between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations, as part of its Brand & Demand Report.

The following data was not published in that report and was provided exclusively to MarketingSherpa. In addition to the data in the article, I reached out to marketers and entrepreneurs to get their experiences as well, so anyone quoted in this article who does not work at Prophet was not involved with the study.

Sales gets along with Marketing (and Finance doesn’t)

Chart #1: How would you characterize your marketing organization’s level of partnership with other key functions at your company?

Senior marketing leaders were given three choices to explain their level of partnership with other teams in their organization:

• Marketing operates independently of this function
• Marketing has a limited partnership with this function
• Marketing has a strong, collaborative partnership with this function

The departments in these charts are organized from most to least for the answer of ‘strong partnership.’

Marketers were most likely to have a good partnership with Sales, with about half (48%) of senior leaders saying it was a strong partnership.

Finance was the most challenging relationship, with only 31% saying the partnership was strong and 26% saying their department operated independently from Finance, the highest of any department for that response.

Leading marketing departments have the strongest partnership with Product, Sales, and IT, weakest partnership with Operations

Chart #2: How would you characterize your marketing organization’s level of partnership with other key functions at your company? (leading marketing departments)

Overall, leading marketing departments tended to see the bigger picture and be less siloed.

“We found that among leading marketing organizations, they were 3X more likely to have fully integrated brand and demand. This applies to budgeting, planning and execution. Strategic planning that is inclusive of brand building and demand generation, and that builds from overall corporate strategy and business growth goals, to brand strategy and then marketing plans,” explained Kate Price, Partner, Prophet.

In the ‘Limitations’ section below, you can see how leading and laggard organizations were determined.

Specifically, leading departments had strong partnerships with Product (55%), Sales (54%), and Information Technology (54%).

What does this look like in practice? Let's take peer inside a public software company. “Our marketing campaigns are crafted with direct inputs from the product team to ensure alignment on features and user benefits, while feedback from the sales and customer success teams helps refine our messaging and approach based on direct customer interactions and insights,” said Michelle Suzuki, Chief Marketing Officer, Glassbox.

When I asked Suzuki for an example, she told me about the company's account-based marketing strategy. "[The] Business Insights [department] enhanced our data analytics capabilities, allowing us to segment our market more precisely. Marketing then utilized these insights to develop customized content and tailored messaging, while Sales used the data for more effective conversations with potential clients. We saw a marked increase in ROI among our ideal customer profile (ICP) from our ABM campaigns, and the feedback from our sales team about the quality of leads and interactions was overwhelmingly positive."

Leading marketing departments had weaker ties to Operations, with a still robust 43% saying they had a strong partnership, but 33% saying they operated independently from Operations – the highest for any department. "

Lagging marketing departments had strongest partnership with Sales, but Finance falls behind

Chart #3: How would you characterize your marketing organization’s level of partnership with other key functions at your company? (lagging marketing departments)

Sales and Marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly, chips and salsa, a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper. Even for the laggard marketing departments, the top pairing was with Sales, with 43% saying they had a strong partnership.

Finance was the weakest relationship, with only 27% saying the partnership was strong and 25% saying their department operated independently from Finance.

Key Takeaway #1: Leading marketing departments partner more with other departments

As you would expect, leading marketing departments are better partners. Just look at the leading and lagging charts next to each other, and you’ll see the ‘strong partnership’ bars are higher for leading departments.

And the difference is pretty drastic – the department that the fewest leading marketers had a strong partnership with (Corporate Strategy at 42%) had almost as many strong partnerships as the department lagging marketers had the most strong partnerships with (Sales at 43%).

Note that I’m focusing on the strong partnerships. While this data also shows limited partnerships – for example, while only 27% of lagging marketing departments have a strong partnership with the finance team, 48% do have a limited partnership – in truth, how much does a limited partnership get you really?

It’s like being half married: It can provide some benefits and coordination, but lacks the depth and full commitment necessary to achieve mutual long-term goals and overcome challenges together.

“To go beyond connectivity to true integration,” said Adam Tremblay, Partner, Prophet, “alignment on goals helps align incentives and maintain shared focus…coordination with marketing activities and executions over time based on a shared customer journey and customer experience helps ensure marketing activities are complementary, and brand and demand mutually reinforce each other.”

Key Takeaway #2: Interdepartmental partnerships are far from universal and there is plenty of room for improvement

While leading organizations partnered better than lagging organizations, there is still plenty of room for improvement. I scaled these charts to 100%. See all the white space at the top? That’s a whole lot of missed opportunity.

Less than half of marketing departments had a strong partnership with most teams in the organization across all three charts. Even the top performer leaves a lot to be desired – 55% of leading marketing departments had a strong partnership with the Product team…which means that 45% of departments did not have a strong partnership with the Product team.

And that’s too bad, because there are opportunities in these partnerships. “A key part of our strategy is holding monthly brainstorming sessions with our marketing, product, and sales teams,” said Rodger Desai, CEO, Prove.

For example, Desai told me, “A recent brainstorming session that brought together our marketing, product, and sales teams had a tremendous impact on our campaign for the FinTech Futures' Banking Tech Awards. This collective effort generated buzz around our campaign and significantly boosted engagement across our social media channels, especially on LinkedIn.”

Key Takeaway #3: Leading departments drive integration with IT and Product to meet customer needs

Here are the biggest differences between leading and lagging marketing departments when it came to strong partnerships with other teams within the organization:

• IT: 54% of leading marketing departments had a strong partnership, 31% of lagging departments – a 23% difference
• Finance: 45% for leading, 27% for lagging – an 18% difference
• Product: 55% for leading, 39% for lagging – a 16% difference

The difference for finance tells me that leading departments are better able to get the budget they need and align their goals to the goals of the company (like revenue).

The difference for IT and Product makes me think that leading departments may be customer-first marketers, more able to work with the IT and Product teams to build what the customer needs (and fix it when it’s not a great user experience). So instead of just communicating and selling value, they are helping to create value.

Key Takeaway #4: Lack of interdepartmental partnerships are an opportunity for small businesses

I hear all the time from small businesses who bemoan their situation compared to larger brands – less budget, less brand awareness, less resources to build things.

But does Key Takeaway #2 point to an opportunity for the small business entrepreneur? After all, interdepartmental collaboration is not a top challenge for them.

“One of the best things about running a small business is that we have great lines of communication between departments. Our whole office is three rooms, so consulting with production, sales, or marketing is usually a matter of walking down the hall at most. This helps us to keep everyone on the same page and produce marketing content that accurately reflects our services and our sales goals,” said Rafi Friedman, President, Coastal Luxury Outdoors.

When I asked what this collaboration looked like, Friedman told me, “We recently launched a campaign to emphasize our work on outdoor kitchens. They're an increasingly popular amenity for us. Our marketing team had some good ideas about how to proceed here, but by working directly with our designers and our purchasing department, they were able to feature designs, materials, and appliances that are much more affordable for us to implement. This will lead to higher profit margins and shorter turnaround times on these projects.”

Related resources

CMO-CPO Collaboration: Bridge Marketing and Product for collaborative growth (podcast episode #95)

Marketing and Brand: Embrace healthy friction (podcast episode #48)

Team Building: Loyalty, relationships, pre-selling, and other keys to marketing management success (Podcast Episode #16)