The First Big Thing I Did as CMO Was "Eliminate" the Marketing Division Walls

Is this the ultimate career-limiting move, lame clickbait, or a tragic Jerry Maguire moment? If you knew me well, you should guess the latter. But, you would be wrong.

Once I showed I was willing to "eliminate" my department as an standalone things, the VP of Sales and CS were willing to "eliminate" theirs also. Design, Engineering, and Product extended the wave they were already riding and dissolved their boundaries too.

At our recent exec offsite in Bangalore we, like all management teams, wanted to increase alignment and decrease silos. Blew 6 of the silos up. Pile of rubble. Done. No one shed a tear.

Two big functions the customer sees and cares about are the product/solution and the demand/maintenance/renewal interactions. Design, Engineering, and Product became DEEP after test-driving the doomed names PEDlers and PEDers. Sales and Marketing became Smarketing, which made me both elated and cringe whenever we said it, and we needed to represent Customer Success and Accounts, so we evolved it to MACS.

Getting the alignment and naming of wider functions right built momentum. We smiled every time someone said DEEP or MACS; it was our inside story full of hope and anticipation that we were about to transform from a box of Legos into a clicked-in smooth-sided Lego building of alignment.

This is a not a Jerry Maguire moment--it is a return to the basics. Founding CEOs started their companies with 1-4 people and each of them did 4 or more functions. When we get bigger we create divisions that reduce teamwork and alignment when we should be creating additions. The growth to 9 or more divisions is not just anathema, it does not make sense to them. That’s why we blew it up. Because it sucks. Because it’s artificial and fatally flawed.

Fine. Let’s do Q2 OKRs and watch these triplet groups eat each other alive. We reduced six divisions’ OKRs to two slides and two 1-hour discussions. It reduced both gaps and overlaps. Not a single finger-point or shuck-and-jive blame dump. Oh, and it shaved hours off the OKR alignment meetings.

Ok, the good vibes existed among the exec team, but how would the rest of the org react? It’s not easy to describe, but for most it was relief. They suffer from gaps and silos more than the execs do. The heads of ex-Sales Deepak Lamba , and ex-CS Yuvraj Saxena and I ex-Marketing sat together in front of 68 people at the offsite and reviewed our shared goals: 1 page, five objectives, and 19 key results. They were all kinda quiet with few questions. We covered the umbrella OKRs for 71 people in 90 minutes. At the end of the meeting they…applauded. Tell me the last time that happened in your siloed OKR rollout.

Needless to say, our CEO, Vaibhav Jain is happy. He was sitting in the rollout meeting mostly silent unless we tossed to him. Later that night at the offsite party the CEO said it was a grand slam.

If you are serious about alignment, consider eliminating most of your divisions; it will help remind the team that we all work for the brand.

It's right there in the name. Divisions are divisive.