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Marketing and IT: Best Friends Forever

Marketing leaders need a strong relationship with the IT leader whose team builds the capabilities their growth strategy depends on. A five-step playbook for investing in that relationship and the compounding difference it makes.

In 2019, I was consulting for a marketing executive at a major telecom. He had an ambitious goal to use customer data and the most recent marketing technologies to personalize marketing based on customer attributes and service availability. A great idea that would benefit the customer and the business.

The problem was that the data and the marketing technology capabilities that needed to be built were owned by two different teams outside of Marketing. He was dependent on their development priorities and bandwidth to get anything done. I asked him a question I always ask in this situation: "Who is the technology leader your agenda is most dependent on, and when was the last time you spoke to them in person?"

He knew who the person was, but couldn't remember the last time they spoke in person.

So I went and found that leader myself. It turned out he sat on the same floor of the same building. Not in another city or another campus. The same floor. They had been trading emails. They had been relying on their team leaders talking amongst themselves. But they had not had a face to face conversation in a very long time.

When I sat down with the technology leader separately, it was clear he didn't understand how strategic the marketing agenda was. He didn't understand the customer experience implications or the urgency. It wasn't because he was disengaged, didn't care, or didn't have the capacity to understand. It was because no one from Marketing had walked across the building and told him.

Disconnected leaders lead to disconnected teams and slow progress.

Don't blame org structure

Most Marketing-IT alignment problems get explained as organizational design realities. The data team rolls up to the CIO. The martech development team sits inside Engineering. Marketing doesn't directly manage the people or the budget that builds its capabilities. All of that is true, but it's not the root problem.

The real problem is that senior marketing leaders tend to use the org chart as a reason not to invest in the relationship. "I don't manage them, so I can't do anything about it." It's understandable for people lower in the organizational hierarchy to be constrained by the org chart. Senior leaders who want to make a difference need to break through this perceived constraint. The org chart is real, but it doesn't have to be a limiter to progress.

There is a cultural piece to this as well. Technical leaders, in my experience, tend to be more introverted. They are less likely to walk across the building, ask for help, or invite a peer to lunch. Marketing leaders are generally more extroverted and more comfortable being vulnerable about what they need.

Which means you shouldn't wait for IT to come to you. Marketing needs to take the first step in building a strong relationship with IT.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship

A few years later, I led a multi-year sales and marketing transformation at a large retailer. Every piece of the agenda depended on the IT team's ability to move quickly on hiring a new team, developing and buying new data and technologies, integrating those systems and driving adoption across the organization. I knew that the transformation would fail, or at least be slowed down, without a strong Marketing and IT partnership. I made building and nurturing the relationship with IT part of my job.

I met with the CIO on a regular cadence. We had informal lunches with each other and with our leads. I sat on interview loops for key roles on his team. He and his key leads reviewed every C-suite presentation and proposal I made before it was delivered, so they were never blindsided and always had some ownership in what I was proposing.

I pushed my team to do the same with their counterparts in IT. We even held joint happy hours to encourage people to know who was on the other side of those emails and virtual conference calls. Once the teams really started to know and trust each other, they started solving more friction points on their own. When something did escalate to me, I could walk down the hall and have a real conversation with my counterpart about the actual issue. In tougher spots, we'd negotiate in good faith: "Prioritize what I need this week, and I will deprioritize something else to give your team bandwidth."

We were still two teams, two hierarchies, two budgets. But we did everything we could to work as one team with common goals. It wasn't perfect and we had disagreements. But the trust we had built made even the hard conversations easier.

The Five-One Playbook

If you think your relationship with IT could be stronger, here are five steps you can take this week to form a stronger bond with the team you probably depend on most.

1. Audit your calendar. Make sure you have regular touch points with your Data and Marketing Technology leaders, at least every two weeks. Schedule at least one informal meeting a month, like coffee or lunch. Big meetings that you both attend do not count here. Strong relationships and trust are not built in 20-person meetings.
2. Share each other's agendas and priorities for the next six months. What are the key opportunities and challenges? Where do your goals overlap? Where do you have a priority that needs their support but is not currently on their list? You may have done this formally in annual planning, but have you checked in recently? You may find that you share the same challenge, like needing more resources or funding, or convincing the CEO of a particular approach. These are areas where working together will move both of your agendas forward.
3. Cascade the importance of relationship building to your team. Ask your leaders to set up meetings with their counterparts in IT and assess the state of those relationships. Brainstorm one thing to improve them this week and put it in motion. Trust at the leadership level is necessary, but trust at the operating level is where friction in the work gets reduced and progress accelerates.
4. Run a joint working session on one urgent or recurring challenge. Identify root causes, not grievances. Co-sponsor it with your IT counterpart. Both of you set the tone that this is a growth-mindset conversation. If the relationship is too strained to do this productively right now, spend this week preparing for it instead. And recognize the signal this is sending you. If the relationship isn't strong enough for this, then something bigger needs to be addressed, and you need to prioritize repairing it.
5. Express gratitude publicly. Find one thing the IT team did recently that mattered to your team, and send an email to the people who did the work, copying their senior leadership. Marketers often feel under-appreciated in their organizations. The Data and Technology teams I've worked with have felt it more. A small token of appreciation from a senior leader goes a long way. Make this a weekly habit and encourage your teams to do the same.

This isn't optional for transformational work

If the marketing initiative you are leading is a real transformation, the relationship with your IT counterpart is not a nice-to-have. It is the critical dependency. I cannot think of a single large cross-functional transformation that has made meaningful progress without the leaders across functions being in sync at multiple levels.

If you can name the IT leader your team depends on most, but you cannot remember the last time you sat down with them in person, don't wait another week before reaching out and building one of the most productive relationships you'll ever have.