Unlocking the Full Potential of Marketing as a Growth Engine

By Brock Pernice
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Connect with me on LinkedIn

For years, marketing has often been boxed into a narrow role. It’s been seen as the department responsible for brand awareness, promotional campaigns, and driving top-of-the-funnel activities. But this one-dimensional view underserves marketing’s true potential and hinders an organization’s ability to thrive.

Instead of being a siloed function, marketing should be a cross-functional powerhouse that works seamlessly across departments to drive demand, acquire leads, and retain customers. For organizations unwilling to reimagine marketing as a comprehensive growth driver, the consequences are profound—not just for marketing, but for sales, customer success, and leadership.

The reality is that transforming marketing isn’t just a problem for the marketing team to solve. It demands commitment and integration across all levels of a business. Business leaders, sales, and retention teams must collaborate with marketers to create a unified strategy that fuels measurable growth.

This post explores the barriers holding marketing back and highlights why tearing down these impediments is a shared responsibility. It’s time to leverage marketing’s full potential—not as a cost center, but as a critical growth engine for your entire business.

Barriers Standing in the Way of Growth Marketing

Despite unprecedented access to data, technology, and tools, many companies are stuck in outdated marketing paradigms. For regulated or legacy-oriented industries, the barriers are even steeper. These challenges aren’t marketing’s alone to solve; they reflect broader organizational struggles. Here’s what’s stopping marketing from evolving and how it impacts every department:

1. Siloed Departments and Misaligned Goals

When marketing, sales, customer success, and other departments work in isolation, miscommunication and inefficiencies run rampant. For instance, marketing might focus on generating leads, but without aligned criteria agreed upon with sales, those leads are often disqualified, wasting resources and frustrating teams.

This disconnect extends beyond lost leads. It slows pipelines, creates friction, and undermines trust between departments. Collaborative, cross-functional alignment isn't just good for marketing; it’s essential for ensuring the entire business operates efficiently toward shared outcomes.

What’s at stake? Missed revenue opportunities, slower deal velocity, and a fragmented customer experience.

2. Outdated Tools and Processes

Legacy systems and scattered tools are commonplace in many businesses, particularly in regulated industries. Over half of marketing leaders report challenges with fragmented systems and poor data integration. What this really means is that no one—from marketers to sales teams to customer success pros—has consistent visibility into customer behavior.

Without modern tools or the ability to measure performance across the pipeline, marketing can’t adapt effectively. Worse, sales teams lose access to high-quality insights that strengthen their outreach efforts, while retention teams struggle to tailor experiences that encourage long-term loyalty.

What’s at stake? Limited decision-making capabilities that prevent proactive growth strategies.

3. A Lack of Trust in Experimentation

Regulated industries often maintain risk-averse cultures, where experimentation is discouraged or outright prohibited. Less than 30% of companies actively encourage structured testing in marketing, despite evidence showing that experimentation leads to better outcomes. Yet, marketing isn’t the only function hurt by this fear of failure. Sales innovation stagnates, and customer success teams are left without the creative solutions needed to combat challenges like churn.

Innovation requires collaboration across teams. Businesses that don’t provide room for experimentation will see growth not just slow—but stop.

What’s at stake? A stagnant, reactive organization unable to stay competitive.

4. The Shrinking Influence of CMOs

Marketing leaders, particularly Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), find themselves burdened with enormous expectations to drive full-funnel growth. Yet, without operational frameworks or executive buy-in from leadership, their ability to deliver on these expectations is undermined. This creates friction not just for marketers, but for all stakeholders who rely on a cohesive vision for growth.

What’s at stake? Ambitious growth goals remain out of reach without organizational alignment and business-wide support.

5. Resistance to Change

Change management is critical, but often lacking. A mere 15% of marketing leaders report that their organizations effectively manage change. Siloed teams and legacy systems aren’t just operational setbacks; they reflect organizational inertia that holds everyone back from progress.

Marketing transformation requires more than tools and strategies. It demands company-wide collaboration, a shared vision, and leadership-driven efforts to build a culture oriented toward sustainable growth.

What’s at stake? A business that struggles to grow because it is shackled by its inability to adapt.

Why This Is Everyone’s Responsibility

The consequences of leaving marketing siloed go beyond the marketing team. When marketing fails to reach its potential as a growth driver, the entire organization feels the fallout:

• Sales Struggles: If marketing isn’t providing qualified leads backed by proper data, sales teams waste time on low-potential prospects. This slows pipelines and hinders revenue momentum.

• Retention Challenges: Without marketing’s support post-conversion, customer success teams bear the full weight of retention strategies. Personalized engagement suffers, churn increases, and long-term value is lost.

• Decreased Leadership Confidence: Leaders frustrated by a lack of measurable impact often reduce budgets and influence, leaving marketing stuck in a support role without the resources required to improve.

• Competitive Disadvantage: Competitors who modernize their marketing practices and align cross-functionally will pull ahead, winning customers while you scramble to catch up.

The solution? Evolve marketing into a strategic partner across the entire company. This requires a collective effort from leadership, marketing, sales, and customer success. Together, these stakeholders must create a truly integrated, full-funnel approach to growth.

Building an Integrated Growth Engine

Shifting marketing from an isolated function to a core strategic driver demands deliberate action and collaboration across departments. Here’s how to make it happen:

1. Bridge the Gap Between Teams

Align marketing, sales, and customer retention efforts around shared metrics, priorities, and a single view of the customer. Marketing must deliver sales-ready leads. Sales teams must relay feedback on lead quality. Retention teams must ensure those customers stay engaged.

2. Empower Marketing with Technology

Invest in modern, real-time data tools that sync seamlessly across all departments. Data alignment allows sales to target strategically, marketing to refine its messaging, and retention teams to proactively manage churn risks.

3. Create Room for Innovation

All stakeholders must foster a culture where experimentation isn’t feared but supported. Structured, low-risk testing in marketing and sales will spark innovation, keeping teams agile in the face of shifting customer behaviors.

4. Adopt a Framework for Success

Frameworks like TrueVoice’s Full-Funnel Growth Framework guide organizations through alignment and growth. They ensure that marketing, sales, and customer retention share capabilities and goals, enabling measurable growth at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

5. Secure Leadership Buy-In

Transformation starts at the top. Leadership must articulate the importance of cross-functional collaboration, support marketing’s evolution, and champion efforts to foster alignment across teams.

The Future of Growth Starts Now

Your business can’t afford to keep marketing stuck in neutral. Success hinges on the willingness of sales, marketing, leadership, and customer retention to collaborate, modernize, and innovate together.

Marketing has the potential to drive demand, acquisition, and retention—but only if we treat it as a collective responsibility. The path to sustainable growth requires a holistic, organization-wide effort.

The question is, are you ready to work together to unlock growth? If so, the time to act is now. Businesses that invest in integrated approaches today will thrive tomorrow. Will yours be one of them?