Silos Hinder Effective Marketing

**Silos Hinder Effective Marketing** One of the problems that marketers and sales professionals often experience? It's difficult to collaborate with the communications department. This can and should be improved. **Formation of Silos** The larger an organization becomes, the more barriers are built around departments. As a result, meetings have to be scheduled between sales, marketing, and communication colleagues. Whereas these colleagues used to simply sit together in the department. In other words: they lose sight—and thus heart—of each other. The fact that departments communicate less frequently or less organically limits their effectiveness. A concrete example: sales teams talk to (potential) customers every day. Marketing and communication can greatly benefit from the insights of sales. However, these departments only receive such insights during designated meetings. Also, data exchange can proceed much smoother if the barriers between these departments are removed, and silo formation comes to an end. **Frustration with Communication Departments** Betteke van Ruler argues in Adformatie that communication departments often lack alignment with the business, make few data-driven decisions, and lack commercial instinct. "Much is based on intuition and gut feeling." Furthermore, everyone knows the communication departments that are adept at preventing their colleagues from communicating with the media. Fearing scandals, organizations become wary of any form of publicity. And so, a communication department manages to ensure that a company does not build a reputation in the media. A real shame. **Collaboration between Marketing and Communication** Van Ruler suggests that marketing and communication professionals can learn a lot from each other and could strengthen one another more. She suggests that there is a significant risk if these departments do not work together—or worse still: if they try to one-up each other. She sees the merging of more and more marketing and communication departments as a positive development. However, this does not mean that marketers and sales departments have no shortcomings. They are too focused on conversion and lack focus on the relational aspect, the long-term vision needed to build and maintain a reputation. At least, that's what Van Ruler states. **In Conclusion** I believe that *empowering* marketers and sales departments to get started with external communication themselves is the solution. This can be done by gaining relevant knowledge about how PR and external communication work. Getting to know 'the outside view.' Learning to focus on the long-term relationship with the press, rather than a quick win. Communication doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, the PR profession is a craft that can be learned—and there is no reason to believe that marketers or sales professionals would be unsuited for it. That's why Presscloud was founded: to resolve this frustration. So PR is no longer exclusively reserved for PR agencies, but organizations can work on their external communication in a smart and efficient way.