Every marketing team was designed for a particular moment. A certain number of products, a certain set of markets, a certain way of selling. The structure, roles, reporting, and decision-making all made sense for the business it was built to serve.
Then the business changes. It launches new products, enters new regions, acquires a company, or shifts its go-to-market strategy. The marketing team grows to keep up, adding people, programs, tools, and shifting responsibilities and reporting lines. For a while, that works. Then, gradually, it doesn't.
The team is busier than ever, often larger than ever, but impact is harder to see. Leaders outside marketing start asking what they are getting for the investment. Good people get frustrated. Nobody did anything wrong. The business has simply scaled past the operating model it was built on, and the Marketing function is no longer aligned.
I have been brought in to solve this problem many times across global brands and growing businesses. The details differ, but the fix always comes back to four things: alignment to business strategy, clear metrics, clear ownership, and clear value articulation.
Few organizations decide one day that their marketing operating model is broken. It shows up in symptoms first:
Activity is rising, but contribution and results are unclear. The team runs more campaigns, events, and content than ever, but nobody can say with confidence what it all adds up to.
Ownership is blurred. Two teams think they own the same thing, or nobody thinks they own something important. Work gets duplicated or dropped.
Every region or business line does it differently. What began as healthy local flexibility has become a collection of separate marketing functions under one name.
The commercial teams have stopped asking marketing for help, or treating them as a service function. Sales and product teams work around marketing rather than with it, or come to marketing with the requirement for execution.
Reporting describes effort, not outcomes. Reports count emails sent, social engagement and events held, not pipeline, revenue, or retention.
Good people are burning out or disengaging. The team is stretched across too many priorities with no clear way to say no.
If three or more of these sound familiar, adding headcount or tools won't help. The structure underneath needs to change.
As Divisional CMO at S&P Global, I led global marketing, conferences and customer experience for the division, with a team that grew to 120 people, delivering £9M in direct revenue and a £24M P&L. Whilst the topline numbers looked good, the team was stretched thin, with everything a priority, and the business was asking for efficiencies to be delivered. The core of that work was restructuring and redefining the marketing team, so it matched what the business needed it to be. Our starting point was to understand the current business expectations and goals, not what they had been, but what they were now, and what success looked like for marketing. From there, we then had the opportunity to rebuild the function with the right roles to support the jobs that needed to be done, enabling marketing to clearly demonstrate its value within the business.
Start with stakeholder interviews and engagement to understand what the business really needs to achieve and, in turn, the role marketing needs to play to deliver against goals. Engage your stakeholders across all functions, and gather feedback all the way down through the organization - not just at the Executive level. Categorize the stakeholders into key partners, customers, and support groups to enable the feedback you hear to be prioritized.
When you’re clear about what the business needs marketing to deliver, then choose a small set of measures that reflect it. For most B2B organizations, that means some combination of pipeline contribution, revenue, retention, and customer experience, with acquisition and benchmark measures underneath
The point is not more reporting. It is a shared definition of success that the marketing team, the executive team, and the commercial teams all recognize all built into a single, simple dashboard. Once that exists, prioritization gets much easier because you can judge every program against the same measures.
An operating model is really a set of answers to the question "who owns what, and in what context do i contribute?" When a function scales without revisiting those answers, ownership drifts. Roles accumulate responsibilities that no longer fit, and gaps open up between teams.
Rebuilding means defining roles and responsibilities deliberately: who owns each part of the buyer and customer journey, each market, each program, and each measure. It also means deciding how marketing works with sales, product, and customer success, and gaining shared understanding across the functions so it doesn't depend on individual relationships.
This is often where organizational design and leadership development meet. A new structure only works if the leaders are ready to lead differently, so restructuring and coaching usually go hand in hand.
The final piece is being able to explain, simply and credibly, what marketing contributes to the business. This matters inside the marketing team, where people need to see how their work connects to outcomes, and outside it, where executives and the board decide how much to invest.
A marketing function that can articulate its value in commercial terms gets invited into commercial conversations. One that can't will be treated as a cost to be managed.
Every restructure is different, but a few principles apply almost everywhere:
Anchor on business strategy. The new model should reflect where the business is going, not where it has been. Align marketing's structure to the go-to-market strategy first.
Agree on measures early. Settle what success looks like before you settle the structure. It makes every later decision easier to defend.
Define the jobs that need to be done to support the goals, not roles. An org chart shows roles and reporting lines. People need to know what tasks they own, what they influence, how they are measured, and how decisions get made.
Diagnose before you design the org chart. Talk to the marketing team, the commercial teams, the executive team, and other key stakeholders before drawing a new org chart. The symptoms people describe will show where the current operating model is breaking down.
Invest in the leaders. The people running the new structure need support to work in new ways, especially if they've been promoted into bigger roles.
Set a review rhythm. Operating models drift again over time. Regularly reviewing measures and ownership keeps the model honest as the business keeps changing.
There is nothing wrong with a marketing team outgrowing its operating model. It usually means the business has grown, which is the point. The problem comes when the structure doesn't keep up, and the team works harder and harder inside a model that no longer fits.
Recognizing that moment early and rebuilding around business strategy, clear metrics, clear ownership, and clear value turns marketing back into what it should be: a business enabler, not a cost center.
If your marketing function is feeling the strain of a model it has outgrown, I'd be glad to talk it through.
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