Building a Marketing Team That Earns Its Seat at the Table

Building a marketing team is one of the most consequential decisions a business makes, and one of the most poorly executed. Get the structure right and you have a function that drives growth, holds its own in commercial conversations, and compounds value over time. Get it wrong and you end up with a collection of specialists who produce activity without impact, report upward without clarity, and quietly cost more than they return.

The difference between the two is rarely about talent. It is about how the team is designed, what it is accountable for, and whether the people running it understand the business they are supposed to be serving.

Why Most Marketing Teams Are Built Backwards

The standard approach to building a marketing team goes something like this: hire a head of marketing, add a content person, bring in someone for social, bolt on a paid media specialist when the pressure to generate leads increases, and eventually wonder why nothing feels joined up. It is a reactive accumulation of roles rather than a deliberate design.

I have seen this pattern across dozens of businesses. When I was growing an agency from 20 to nearly 100 people, the temptation to hire reactively was constant. A client wins a new piece of work, the pressure to resource it immediately is real, and the long-term structural consequences get deferred. The result is a team shaped by short-term pressure rather than long-term purpose.

The better approach starts with a question most businesses skip: what does this team actually need to achieve? Not “what marketing activities do we need to run” but “what commercial problems are we solving, and what capabilities do we need to solve them?” Those are different questions with very different answers.

If you are building or rebuilding a marketing function, the broader context of marketing operations matters here. The team structure does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a set of processes, systems, and accountability frameworks that either enable or constrain what the team can do.

What Should a Marketing Team Actually Be Responsible For?

Before you hire anyone, you need a clear answer to this. And the answer is not “marketing.” That is circular and useless.

A marketing team should be responsible for specific, measurable commercial outcomes. Depending on the business, that might mean qualified pipeline, customer acquisition cost, brand consideration among a defined audience, retention rate, or revenue contribution from specific channels. The point is that the outcomes need to be named, agreed with the rest of the business, and used to shape every hiring and structural decision that follows.

When I was at lastminute.com, the expectation was clear: campaigns needed to generate bookings. There was no ambiguity about what success looked like. I ran a paid search campaign for a music festival that generated six figures of revenue within roughly a day. That clarity of purpose, knowing exactly what the team existed to produce, made every decision faster and sharper. You knew what good looked like, so you could build toward it.

Most in-house teams do not have that clarity. They have a vague mandate to “drive awareness” or “support the sales team” without any agreed definition of what those things mean in commercial terms. That ambiguity does not just make measurement hard. It makes hiring hard, because you cannot build a team around an outcome you cannot define.

The marketing process and the team structure need to be designed together. One without the other produces either a well-structured team with no clear workflow, or a clear workflow with the wrong people running it.

Generalists First, Specialists Later

If you are building a marketing team from scratch, or from a very small base, the instinct to hire specialists early is understandable but usually wrong. A specialist hired before the foundations are in place will either be underutilised, frustrated, or forced to operate outside their actual expertise to fill the gaps.

Early-stage teams need people who can hold multiple things at once. Someone who can write, think strategically, understand data, and manage a campaign from brief to result without needing a coordinator, a strategist, and a project manager to function. That person is harder to find and harder to retain, but they are worth considerably more to a growing team than a deep specialist who cannot operate without a full supporting structure around them.

The transition from generalist to specialist-heavy structure should happen when volume demands it, not when it feels like the right time to look more professional. I have seen businesses hire a full specialist team before they had the volume of work to justify it, and then watch that team become demotivated because there was not enough of the right work to keep them stretched. Specialists need volume and variety within their domain. Without it, you are paying for capability you cannot fully use.

A useful way to think about this: generalists build momentum, specialists compound it. You need momentum before you can compound anything.

The First Hire Is the Most Important Decision You Will Make

Whether you are a founder hiring your first marketing person, or a CMO rebuilding a function, the first hire sets the tone for everything that follows. Their standards become the team’s standards. Their way of working becomes the default. Their relationship with the rest of the business shapes how marketing is perceived for years.

That is not an exaggeration. I have watched businesses hire a technically competent marketer into a first role who had no commercial instinct, no ability to communicate in the language of the business, and no interest in understanding the P&L. Within 18 months, marketing was seen as a cost centre with a credibility problem. Rebuilding that perception took longer than building it correctly would have.

The first marketing hire needs three things above almost everything else: commercial grounding, the ability to operate without a complete support structure, and the credibility to hold their own in a room with senior stakeholders. Technical skills can be developed or supplemented. Those three things are much harder to train.

One more thing worth saying: do not hire someone whose primary skill is managing agencies if you do not yet have agencies to manage. That is a coordination role, not a building role. Early-stage teams need builders.

In-House, Agency, or Hybrid: How to Think About the Build

Not every capability needs to live inside the business. Some functions are better bought than built, particularly in the early stages when volume does not justify a full-time hire and when the required expertise is highly specialised.

The decision about what to keep in-house and what to outsource should be driven by three factors: strategic sensitivity, volume, and speed of iteration. Work that is strategically sensitive, meaning it shapes how the brand is positioned or how the business is perceived, should generally stay close. Work that requires high volume and consistent quality but is relatively standardised can often be outsourced effectively. Work that needs rapid iteration based on live data is harder to outsource well, because the feedback loops are too slow.

There is a reasonable case for outsourcing parts of marketing operations, particularly in areas like campaign execution, content production, and channel management, when the internal team does not yet have the depth. Outsourcing marketing operations can work well when the brief is clear, the governance is tight, and the internal team retains ownership of strategy and performance management. It fails when businesses use outsourcing to avoid building internal capability they will eventually need.

The hybrid model, a small internal core with external specialists brought in for specific capabilities, is often the most practical structure for mid-sized businesses. The internal team owns strategy, brief quality, and performance accountability. The external team delivers execution at scale. That only works if the internal team is strong enough to brief, manage, and evaluate the external partners properly. Weak internal teams produce poor external work, regardless of how good the agency is.

How to Structure the Team Around the Customer, Not the Org Chart

Most marketing teams are structured around internal logic: channels, functions, or budget lines. Content team. Paid team. Brand team. The problem with this structure is that customers do not experience your marketing by channel. They experience it as a sequence of interactions with your brand, and those interactions need to feel coherent even when they are produced by different parts of the team.

A more useful structural principle is to organise around the customer experience, or more precisely, around the commercial moments that matter most within it. Where does the business win or lose customers? What are the highest-value transitions, from unaware to interested, from interested to considering, from considering to buying, from buying to returning? Build the team’s accountability framework around those transitions, and the structure will follow more naturally.

BCG’s work on agile marketing organisations makes a related point: the most effective marketing teams are structured to move quickly around customer opportunities, not to maintain internal process efficiency. That requires a different kind of leadership and a different kind of accountability than most marketing functions are built around.

Understanding how your team interacts with the customer at a granular level is worth investing in early. Tools that help you understand behaviour, like those used by marketing teams to analyse user experience, can surface the moments where your current structure is creating friction that customers feel even if your internal reporting does not.

The Three Capabilities Most Teams Underinvest In

After two decades of building and evaluating marketing teams, there are three capabilities I consistently see underinvested in, particularly in mid-sized businesses where the team has grown beyond a handful of people but has not yet reached enterprise scale.

The first is marketing operations. Not in the sense of campaign management, but in the sense of the systems, processes, and data infrastructure that allow the team to function at scale without chaos. Most teams build this reactively, adding tools and processes as problems emerge, rather than designing it intentionally from the start. The result is a patchwork of systems that nobody fully understands and that produces data you cannot fully trust. The three Ps of marketing operations, people, process, and platform, need to be designed together, not assembled separately over time.

The second is commercial translation. The ability to take marketing performance data and translate it into the language the rest of the business uses: revenue, margin, customer lifetime value, payback period. This is not a reporting skill. It is a strategic skill, and it is what separates marketing teams that earn influence from those that are tolerated. I spent years running agencies where the ability to present marketing results in commercial terms was the single biggest factor in whether clients renewed, expanded, or walked. The same dynamic applies inside a business.

The third is brief quality. The quality of the brief is the single biggest predictor of the quality of the output, whether that output comes from an internal team member or an external agency. Most marketing teams write poor briefs: vague on objectives, silent on constraints, and disconnected from the commercial context. Investing in brief quality, as a skill, as a process, as a cultural standard, pays back faster than almost any other capability investment you can make.

Accountability Without Micromanagement: How to Run the Team

The structural question and the management question are different, but they are connected. You can have the right structure and still run it badly. The most common failure mode I have seen is a leadership style that oscillates between two extremes: either total autonomy with no clear expectations, or close supervision that produces compliance rather than judgment.

Neither works. Total autonomy without clear commercial expectations produces creative activity that drifts from business priorities. Close supervision produces people who wait to be told what to do rather than developing the commercial instinct the team needs.

The model that works is clear outcomes with genuine autonomy on method. You set the commercial target, you agree the constraints, you define what good looks like, and then you get out of the way and let people find their own path to the result. That requires trust, and trust requires evidence. Build the evidence base early: regular performance reviews, honest conversations about what is and is not working, and a culture where raising a problem is seen as competence, not failure.

Early in my career, I was told no when I asked for budget to build a new website. Rather than accepting that, I taught myself to code and built it anyway. That kind of resourcefulness, finding a way when the obvious path is blocked, is exactly what you want in a marketing team. But it only emerges in environments where people feel safe to try things and honest enough to report what actually happened.

A well-structured team with clear accountability and honest feedback loops will consistently outperform a more talented team operating in ambiguity. That is not a motivational claim. It is a structural one.

Data, Tools, and the Illusion of Visibility

Modern marketing teams have more data available to them than any previous generation. They also have more ways to misread it, over-index on it, and confuse activity metrics with outcome metrics. A dashboard full of impressions, clicks, and engagement rates tells you that things are happening. It does not tell you whether those things are moving the business forward.

When building a team, the data question needs to be answered early and answered honestly: what metrics actually connect to the commercial outcomes the business cares about, and how confident are we in our ability to measure them? Most teams are more confident in their measurement than the underlying data quality justifies. That false confidence leads to optimisation decisions that are internally consistent but commercially irrelevant.

An integrated data strategy for your marketing organisation is not a technology problem. It is a clarity problem. What decisions do we need to make? What data do we need to make them well? What is the minimum viable measurement infrastructure that gives us honest signal without false precision? Answer those questions before you buy the next tool.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness, and one of the most consistent patterns in the entries that do not win is the conflation of activity with impact. Teams that run a lot of campaigns and measure a lot of things but cannot draw a clean line from their work to a commercial outcome. The winning entries are almost always characterised by clarity: a clear problem, a clear intervention, a clear result. That clarity starts with how the team is built and what it is held accountable for.

If you want to go deeper on the operational side of how marketing teams function, the marketing operations hub covers the processes, systems, and accountability frameworks that sit behind a well-run marketing function. The team structure is only one part of the picture.

When to Restructure and When to Rebuild

At some point, most marketing teams need to change shape. The question is whether they need a restructure, meaning a reallocation of roles and responsibilities within an existing team, or a rebuild, meaning a more fundamental rethink of who is in the team, what they are there to do, and how the function is positioned within the business.

The signals that suggest a restructure is needed: the team is producing good work but it is not landing commercially, accountability is unclear, or the team has grown in one direction without balancing capability elsewhere. These are structural problems that can often be addressed without changing the people.

The signals that suggest a rebuild is needed: the team has lost credibility with the rest of the business, the commercial outcomes have consistently missed over a sustained period, or the culture has drifted to a point where the team is internally focused rather than externally oriented. These are not structural problems. They are foundational ones, and restructuring will not fix them.

I have been brought in to turn around loss-making businesses, and in almost every case, the marketing function was part of the problem, not because the people were incompetent, but because the function had been allowed to drift from commercial accountability. Rebuilding it required clarity about what the business actually needed, honest conversations about the gap between that and what the current team could deliver, and a willingness to make changes that were uncomfortable in the short term but necessary for the long term.

The marketing process and the team structure need to be reviewed together when either one changes significantly. A new strategy without a structural change to support it rarely delivers. A structural change without a clear strategic rationale produces disruption without direction.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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