You see it in the subtle eye-roll from the product lead when marketing requests a feature that would make for a great campaign narrative.
You hear it in the skepticism from finance when reviewing marketing’s budget requests (after a level of scrutiny that somehow never materializes for other departments).
You feel it in the exasperation of sales teams who mutter that marketing’s “qualified leads” wouldn’t recognize a purchase decision if it came with a neon sign.
And perhaps most painfully, you witness it when customer service representatives deal with the gap between what marketing promised and what the product or service actually delivers.
The tension at the heart of these interdepartmental interactions suggests some fairly fundamental differences in how these individuals view the world, measure success, and approach their missions.
Why is it like this?
One reason might be that marketing often operates within perception and potential—in narratives, impressions, and especially the ephemeral concept of “brand.” Success metrics often involve terms like “awareness” and “engagement,” which other departments might find suspiciously unquantifiable. When marketing celebrates a campaign that generated a million impressions, the CFO is already formulating the question: “But did it sell anything?”
Other departments—sales, finance, customer service—function in a world where success and failure are (usually) clearly defined. With sales, you either close the deal or you don’t. Finance measures profit and loss in unambiguous spreadsheets. Customer service resolves specific problems for specific customers.
To these departments, the abstractions and nuances at the heart of marketing often feel like a failure to commit to measurable outcomes.
The Translation Challenge
Communication among these departments, then, has something of a translation problem. Marketing speaks a language that can sound like meaningless jargon to other departments, while the more immediate, black-and-white metrics on a spreadsheet may seem myopic and too granular to marketers.
Intensifying this divide is an attribution problem. When business is good, every department can claim credit—sales closed more deals, operations delivered efficiently, and so on. But when business turns south, marketing’s budget is often the first target precisely because its impact can be the hardest to quantify. This vulnerability is reflected in the data, with 44.6% of budget cuts disproportionately affecting marketing departments.
Without clear attribution models that connect marketing activities directly to revenue, CMOs find themselves constantly defending their budgets while being asked to deliver more with less.
Building Bridges
The burden of interdepartmental translation falls on marketing precisely because their work inherently spans these functional boundaries. Marketers must learn to speak multiple organizational languages before such tensions calcify into dysfunction.
If those tensions are beyond control, external marketing partners can help, often commanding the respect internal teams might hope for and bringing fresh market perspective unburdened by internal politics. We can deliver difficult messages more effectively and provide specialized expertise when organizations need to pivot quickly or supplement internal resources. An external perspective can help dismantle long-standing barriers that internal advocates might not overcome alone.
From Translation to Transformation
The most successful marketing leaders are moving beyond mere translation to true organizational transformation. They’re creating shared dashboards that connect marketing activities to revenue metrics that finance understands. They’re establishing regular cross-functional working sessions with sales, product, and operations teams to ensure alignment on priorities and messaging. And they’re building attribution models that demonstrate the full customer journey—from first touch to final conversion.
As the CMO survey above reveals, marketing budgets have shrunk to 10.1% of company budgets, but strategic investments are still growing in areas like customer experience (+5.6%) and branding (+7.0%). This apparent paradox highlights a fundamental truth: companies that view marketing as a strategic driver rather than a cost center continue to invest in its capabilities, even during challenging economic times—which is something our own Jim Cota has said many times in his career.
The Invisible Thread
Perhaps the most powerful realization is that these divides are fundamentally artificial. The customer doesn’t experience your business through organizational charts or departmental budgets. They experience it as a single entity, through touchpoints that weave together the work of every department.
In this light, marketing’s challenge isn’t just defending territory in budget battles. It’s revealing the invisible threads that connect each function to the customer experience. When marketing metrics are reframed as customer relationship milestones rather than departmental achievements, the conversation shifts from “whose budget” to “which investment best serves our shared purpose.”
Companies that thrive despite economic headwinds have discovered this secret: The path forward isn’t about winning internal arguments. In the discovery of shared meaning lies not just organizational harmony, but the authentic voice customers actually want to hear.
Ready to take flight with a winning marketing strategy? Rare Bird can help your business soar.
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