Rebuilding the Commercial Credibility of an International Marketing Function
How I helped turn a fragmented marketing department into a more commercially focused function while removing more than £150,000 in unnecessary annual agency costs
Marketing rarely loses the confidence of a leadership team because of one bad campaign or a single poor decision. More often, it happens gradually. Different parts of the function begin pursuing their own priorities, reporting becomes increasingly focused on activity rather than meaningful business outcomes, and marketing is involved later and later in decisions that it should have helped shape from the outset. Over time, the department can remain exceptionally busy while its influence, credibility and ability to contribute commercially continue to decline.
That was the situation I faced when I assumed wider responsibility for marketing within an international investment and financial services group. I had already spent approximately 12 months inside the organisation before the change in marketing leadership took place, which meant I understood the people, the brands and many of the underlying issues before taking responsibility for addressing them. What was required was not simply a new campaign plan or another marketing strategy document. The function needed to rebuild its relationship with the wider business, demonstrate a clearer connection between marketing activity and commercial outcomes, and regain the right to be involved in decisions rather than simply being asked to execute them.
A capable team operating without enough collective direction
The group operated across multiple brands and international markets and already had a substantial internal marketing capability. The department included three Marketing Managers, two Marketing Executives, web developers, copywriters and a marketing data analyst, so the fundamental problem was not an absence of skills or resources. There were good people in the function and a considerable amount of work was being produced, but the department was no longer operating with enough consistency as one marketing team.
The wider marketing strategy had become fragmented. Different Marketing Managers were responsible for different brands and were increasingly pursuing their own priorities, approaches and interpretations of what marketing needed to achieve. Although this created a great deal of activity, there was insufficient coordination around a common group direction and too little connection between individual marketing priorities and the commercial objectives of the wider organisation.
At the same time, the perception of marketing within senior leadership had deteriorated. Marketing was increasingly regarded as a cost function rather than a commercial department, and that view had begun to spread across the wider senior leadership team. The consequence was not simply a reputational problem for marketing. It affected where the function was involved, how decisions were made and ultimately how effectively marketing could contribute.
The department had gradually been removed from meetings where its input should have been valuable. Instead of helping shape propositions, customer journeys, commercial priorities and routes to market, marketing was increasingly receiving decisions that had already been made elsewhere and being asked to execute them. People outside the function were effectively determining what marketing should do because they believed they understood the answer better, leaving the marketing team responsible for delivery without always having sufficient influence over the decision that had led to the work.
The effect on the team was becoming increasingly visible
This gradual loss of influence had an inevitable impact on morale. Talented members of the team who had previously taken pride in their work were becoming frustrated by the lack of ownership and by the perception that their professional judgement carried less weight than it should. Some good people had started to leave, while others became more withdrawn and less inclined to challenge decisions or contribute ideas.
That created a damaging cycle. As the department became less involved in the commercial conversations taking place elsewhere in the organisation, it had fewer opportunities to demonstrate the value of good marketing judgement. Because the value of the function became harder for senior leadership to see, marketing was trusted with fewer meaningful decisions, which pushed it even further towards becoming an execution department.
The solution could not therefore be to ask the team to produce more work. The department was already busy. The more important challenge was to change how marketing operated and how the rest of the organisation understood its contribution. That meant establishing a much stronger connection between marketing decisions and the commercial outcomes the business actually cared about.
Moving the conversation from marketing activity to commercial contribution
One of the first priorities was to change the way performance was understood. Within an investment business, a lead is not the ultimate objective. A lead only has meaningful commercial value if it progresses through the organisation and contributes towards investment. Reporting therefore needed to move beyond simply describing how much activity marketing had generated and start showing how that activity related to the way the business made money.
I began tracking measures that were much closer to the commercial outcome, including the marketing cost per pound of investment generated. This provided a much stronger basis for understanding which activity was contributing meaningful value and helped shift the conversation away from marketing metrics that could look positive in isolation but did not necessarily explain whether the business was receiving an appropriate return from its investment.
This was an important change because it allowed marketing to communicate with senior leadership in the language of the business. Rather than expecting directors to interpret a collection of channel metrics, campaign statistics and lead volumes, we could begin connecting marketing expenditure to the outcome the organisation ultimately cared about. It also gave the marketing team a better basis for challenging its own decisions, because activity could increasingly be assessed against a shared commercial objective rather than simply against the performance metrics of an individual channel.
Creating a stronger connection between sales and marketing
Improving the reporting was only part of the work. Marketing could not become a genuinely commercial function if it defined success independently from the teams responsible for progressing and converting the opportunities it generated.
I therefore introduced more regular communication between marketing and sales, creating structured opportunities to understand what sales teams were seeing, which enquiries they considered valuable, where they believed marketing was performing well and where they felt there were gaps. These conversations were not intended to create a forum in which one department defended itself to another. They were designed to give both sides a better understanding of what was happening across the complete journey from initial marketing activity through to a meaningful commercial opportunity.
A particularly important part of this work was creating greater consistency around the definitions of Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads. If marketing and sales have different interpretations of what represents a good opportunity, both departments can produce evidence suggesting the other is underperforming. Marketing may be able to demonstrate strong lead volumes while sales maintains that those leads are poor quality, and both positions can appear reasonable because the two teams are measuring different things.
Working with the heads of wider departments helped create greater alignment around those definitions and around the objectives marketing was expected to support. This gradually reduced the gap between departmental reporting and created a much stronger basis for assessing performance against shared outcomes.
Rebuilding trust by becoming more useful to the wider business
Restoring the credibility of marketing required more than producing better reports. The function needed to show other departments that it understood their objectives and could help them achieve them, rather than operating against a separate marketing agenda that only made sense within the department itself.
I spent time working with leaders across the wider organisation to understand what they were trying to accomplish and how marketing could contribute. This helped move the relationship away from one in which departments simply submitted requests to marketing and towards one in which marketing could become involved in understanding the problem before determining what activity, if any, was required.
As the approach became more consistent, the wider business began to see that marketing decisions were not being made simply for the sake of maintaining activity. There was increasingly a rationale behind what was being prioritised, how success was being measured and where marketing resource was being used. That started to rebuild trust because the conversation was no longer about marketing asking the business to value its work. Marketing was demonstrating its value by becoming more relevant to the commercial priorities of the people around it.
This was particularly important because marketing can only make its strongest contribution when it is involved early enough. If the proposition, audience, commercial objective and route to market have already been decided before marketing enters the conversation, the function is inevitably limited in what it can influence. Rebuilding its credibility was therefore also about demonstrating why marketing should be involved before the execution stage rather than simply being brought in afterwards to communicate somebody else’s decision.
Bringing the department together as one marketing function
The internal team already contained a broad mix of specialist skills, but those capabilities needed to operate as part of a more joined up department. I introduced regular weekly marketing huddles to give the team greater visibility of what was happening across the function, where priorities sat and how individual work connected with the objectives of other colleagues and brands.
The meetings did not receive universal enthusiasm immediately, which was understandable. The department had become accustomed to a more fragmented way of working and another recurring meeting could easily have been perceived as additional administration rather than an improvement. Building genuine participation therefore took time.
The purpose was never to create meetings for the sake of meetings. It was to rebuild collective ownership. The team needed to understand what colleagues were working on, where dependencies existed, what the priorities were and how individual responsibilities contributed to the wider direction of marketing. Gradually, that operating rhythm helped create a stronger sense that marketing was one function with shared responsibilities rather than a collection of people delivering separate tasks across different brands.
Challenging a longstanding full service agency relationship
The same scrutiny applied to the way external marketing support was being used. The organisation had maintained a relationship with a full service marketing agency for a number of years and was paying an ongoing retainer of almost £13,000 per month.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a longstanding agency relationship. The right external partner can provide specialist expertise, additional capacity and valuable independent thinking. The problem was that changes within the internal team meant the relationship was no longer being reviewed with sufficient rigour. Staff turnover had removed some of the historic knowledge around why particular services had originally been outsourced, while the capabilities available within the internal marketing department had increased substantially.
The business had effectively continued with an established operating model without regularly revisiting whether that model still reflected what it actually needed. At the same time, the quality of the service relationship had changed. Turnaround times for requests had become increasingly slow, and it was clear that the organisation was no longer receiving the level of priority it may once have received from the agency.
This created an obvious commercial question. The issue was not whether an agency should or should not be used. It was whether the business was still receiving sufficient value from almost £13,000 of monthly expenditure when much of the capability being purchased externally was now available within the internal team.
Removing more than £150,000 in annual marketing expenditure
I reviewed the capability available internally against the work the organisation continued to purchase through the agency. The conclusion was that the internal team had developed considerably and much of the historic dependency was no longer necessary.
Removing the agency retainer took almost £13,000 of recurring monthly cost out of the marketing budget, representing more than £150,000 in annualised marketing expenditure. However, the decision should not be viewed simply as a cost reduction exercise. Removing external support purely because it is expensive can quickly become a false economy if the business loses capability, quality or capacity as a consequence.
In this case, the more important finding was that the organisation had continued paying for an operating model that no longer reflected its internal capability. Work that might once have required external support could increasingly be owned by the people already employed within the marketing function, while the existing agency service had become slower and less aligned with the needs of the business.
Bringing greater ownership back into the department therefore achieved two things simultaneously. It removed a high recurring cost, but it also gave the internal team greater responsibility for the work it was capable of delivering. That supported the wider transformation because a marketing function seeking greater influence within the business also needed to demonstrate that it was willing and able to take greater responsibility for its own performance.
The outcome was greater than the cost saving
The most obvious measurable outcome was the removal of more than £150,000 in annual agency expenditure, but I do not consider that the most important part of the transformation.
The more significant change was that marketing began to operate with a stronger understanding of the commercial outcomes it existed to support. Marketing and sales were communicating more regularly, definitions around lead quality were becoming better aligned, and performance was increasingly assessed against commercially meaningful measures such as the cost associated with generating investment.
Internally, the department was also developing a more consistent operating rhythm and a greater sense of collective ownership. The capability that already existed within the team was being used more effectively, while work previously purchased externally could be challenged against the value it genuinely provided rather than continuing simply because it had always been done that way.
Most importantly, marketing began to rebuild trust within the wider organisation. The function had been moving steadily towards a position in which it was viewed primarily as an execution resource and a cost to be controlled. Reversing that perception required marketing to demonstrate that it understood how the business operated, could measure what genuinely mattered and was capable of making responsible decisions about where money, people and effort should be invested.
The £150,000 annual saving provided a very visible commercial result, but the greater achievement was helping restore marketing’s credibility as a department capable of contributing to business decisions rather than simply implementing them.
What this experience demonstrates
When senior leadership loses confidence in marketing, there is a temptation to assume the answer must be another campaign, a different agency, a new senior hire or more detailed reporting. Any of those things may eventually form part of the solution, but none of them will necessarily address the real reason the function is underperforming.
In this case, the problems were interconnected. The strategy had become fragmented across brands, marketing and sales did not have enough shared understanding of success, the team was becoming frustrated by its declining influence, external expenditure was continuing without enough challenge, and leadership increasingly saw marketing as a cost rather than a source of commercial value.
Addressing one of those issues in isolation would not have been enough. Replacing the agency without fixing the team’s direction would simply have moved more work into a fragmented function. Producing better reports without agreeing what a valuable lead looked like would have created more data without resolving the disagreement between sales and marketing. Writing a new strategy without restoring trust across the wider business would have produced a document that marketing lacked the influence to implement properly.
The work therefore had to address the marketing function as a connected system of strategy, people, performance, sales alignment, suppliers, capability and leadership. That is also why I approach marketing underperformance as a business problem first. The visible issue may be poor campaigns, expensive agencies or weak reporting, but those symptoms often sit on top of a much more fundamental problem with how marketing is being led.
Is your marketing function busy but struggling to demonstrate its value?
If your business has an established marketing team, significant agency expenditure and plenty of activity, but the leadership team still cannot confidently explain what marketing is contributing, increasing the volume of activity is unlikely to solve the problem.
The first requirement is usually to understand what is happening beneath it. That may involve the strategy, the way the team is structured, the relationship between sales and marketing, the quality of reporting, the use of agencies, the systems supporting the function or simply an absence of sufficiently senior marketing leadership to bring those elements together.
My Marketing Function Review provides an independent assessment of marketing strategy, leadership, people, agencies, systems, data and performance, helping identify where the underlying problems actually sit and what should change first.
Where a business needs somebody to remain involved and take responsibility for implementing those changes, my Fractional CMO services provide ongoing senior marketing leadership without the immediate commitment of recruiting a permanent CMO.