Give your marketing team a real shot at success

Give your marketing team a real shot at success

The most common thing I hear from overstretched heads of marketing is some version of, 'We need more resource.'

It usually comes from someone wearing five different hats: content, campaigns, brand, events, social, sales enablement. Shifting priorities, no real strategy and a budget they have to justify line by line. Little time to do any of it properly.

The instinct to ask for more people or more budget is entirely understandable. It usually doesn't work. Because headcount isn't always the problem, and adding people to a structure that was never built to let marketing succeed just gives you more people failing inside it.

What a structural marketing problem looks like

It tends to have three components, and they often appear together:

Marketing doesn't own its budget.

The head of marketing has to justify every spend individually, often to a CEO without a marketing background or a CFO who treats it as a cost centre. Without a planned, dedicated budget, you can't build a function. You can only respond to requests. Marketing becomes reactive by default. Not because the team isn't capable. Because there's no financial foundation to build anything on.

Marketing doesn't have a real voice, or seat, at the leadership table.

The head of marketing may attend some leadership meetings, or they may not. Either way, they're not genuinely embedded in how the business makes strategic decisions. They're consulted occasionally, briefed after the fact or treated as a service function. They rarely see the commercial realities that should actually be driving marketing strategy: pipeline pressure, sales feedback, the numbers behind the plan. When marketing isn't at the table, it can't set direction. It can only react to what the table decides.

The head of marketing doesn't have the standing to push back. 

This isn't a criticism of the individual. It's a function of the role and the environment around it. A head of marketing without budget ownership or enough gravitas, reporting into a CEO who doesn't fully trust or understand marketing, is in a structure that sets them up to fail. They may have real capability and excellent instincts, but they can't get strategy approved, can't challenge direction and can't make a compelling case for investment in a room full of commercially minded people who are sceptical about what marketing actually delivers.

In that environment, even a talented marketer ends up asking for the only lever available to them: more resources, be that more money or more people.

It's an architecture problem, not a headcount problem

The fix isn't hiring more people underneath an overstretched head of marketing. It's changing the architecture around them.

That means giving the marketing leadership genuine budget ownership and a real seat at the leadership table. Not as a courtesy. As a function of how the business makes decisions. If the head of marketing is senior enough to hold that position, they need the authority to run with it. If they're capable, but don't yet have the seniority or commercial standing to hold their own with the leadership and board, the business needs someone senior enough to fill that gap who can make the commercial case for what marketing needs, set the strategy and mentor the team.

That person needs to be credible in the room where decisions get made: a commercially-minded leader who can help the whole leadership team understand what 'good' looks like in marketing, make the case for investment in language that lands with the rest of the C-Suite and give the head of marketing the structure and air cover to actually do their job. I’m not talking about a consultant who drops in a strategy deck. I’m talking about someone with enough exec-level experience to be trusted, handle push back and bring the senior team and the marketing team along on the journey. 

Whether that comes from promoting internally, restructuring reporting lines or bringing in senior leadership on a fractional basis, it is a decision every CEO of a scaling business has to make for themself. What matters is that the layer exists.

If it becomes clear that the head of marketing actually isn't right for the role, that's a different conversation. Structural fixes won't solve a capability problem, but a structural issue may be setting up an otherwise capable marketeer to fail. So it's worth considering the structural causes first. This way you have a chance of fixing it without losing good people unnecessarily.

When headcount is the right answer

Sometimes more resource is the answer. If the structure is right and the team is genuinely stretched on execution or specialist skills required for your stage of growth, hire. The point isn't that headcount is never the answer. It's knowing which problem you're actually solving and not compounding a different one.

A note on AI

It's worth calling out AI, because it's changing pretty much everything. In larger marketing teams, AI is shifting where the value sits, towards a smaller, senior-led teams that can direct AI tools well and know which decisions still need a human call, rather than a bigger team doing more of the same. In smaller businesses, where one person is carrying the whole function, the opportunity is more about efficiency and freeing up time rather than replacing the need for better structure. Either way, it doesn't change the architecture question, and it makes getting that structure right more important, not less.

The question to ask before you post a job spec

The team you already have may be perfectly capable. The question is whether the structure they're working in is giving them any real chance of succeeding.

If this feels familiar, or cuts a bit too close to the bone, it's worth pausing before you reach for recruitment as the answer: does marketing need more resource, or does it need a different kind of leadership and structure around it?

Get in touch if you want to talk about what 'good' looks like.