Silos Only Hurt

I’ve been thinking a lot about silos lately. In my new role as a consultant / agency person, I get a clear outsider’s view of the silos in a company. It’s amazing and mind boggling to me. Half the time, my “clients” have never interacted with departments outside of their marketing realm let alone know the leaders of those departments.

To me, it’s eye opening. It also makes me realize how truly lucky I was to work at the places and with the people that I did. While it took time, the organizations I worked for had few, if any silos. The call center supervisor who had the graveyard shift knew my name and I knew hers. She also knew what to route to me and I knew what to route to her. In my naivety, I thought that was a standard practice. Low and behold, most brand marketers haven’t even met the person that runs corporate internal communications (yikes!?).

It’s part of why I love to watch companies embrace social media. If they’re doing it the right way, then brand marketers discover that they need to break down a whole lot of silos to be successful. Ultimately, it’s helping to make stronger marketers. It’s also helping to make others better at their jobs.

The piece that I’m even more grateful for is my experience with embracing and including other departments. Mention PR or IT to a marketer and the reaction garnered is more often than not a groan and a face twisted in dread. These three departments are usually battling each other. In fact, when I tweeted at a conference that IT should be a key stakeholder in a successful test and learn culture, I started a mini revolt. All too frequently, we’re fighting internal battles vs. coming together to fight and solve for external ones.

While we’d like to think so, we as marketers aren’t experts at everything. We haven’t been in the IT or PR day-to-day trenches for 10+ years. We don’t nor do we have the experience (yet) to see the world through their eyes. It’s why I think it’s integral to have them at the marketing roundtable from the get go.

Today, I came across this article and the below chart. Coming from a direct response, data laden organization, I’ve been touting some of the metrics on the left (and more similar to those) for over three years. Why? Because I’ve worked at companies where IT, PR, Database/CRM and Marketing all had seats at the same table. Over the years, they’ve taught me to start seeing the world the way they do and vice versa. Together, it’s made us all stronger in our own areas and as a whole, it’s allowed the company to excel well past its competitors. I think if we all did more sharing and including of other departments we’d come to the conclusion of charts like the below a whole lot faster than we’re doing today.