Closing the Trust Gap Between Marketing and Tech

Finally Make Strategy Stick.
At first glance, everything looked promising. A privately held SaaS company had great people, strong products, and a loyal customer base. But when I stepped into their leadership team session, something felt off. The marketing team and the tech team were at odds.

It wasn’t just tension. It was mistrust.

They weren’t collaborating. They were moving in parallel silos. And despite their best efforts, nothing strategic ever stuck. Marketing would push initiatives. Engineering would ignore them. Strategic decisions died in the gap. The root cause? A complete lack of trust and shared context.

What Silos Really Cost You

Everyone talks about cross-functional collaboration, but most companies are still flying blind when it comes to what the other team is solving for. Without shared understanding, every initiative feels like interference.

- Marketing sees engineering as blockers.

- Engineering sees marketing as reckless.

- Leadership gets stuck playing referee.

Until there’s a shared definition of what the customer truly values, you’re stuck. Every function optimizes for their own goals instead of a shared outcome.

Here’s How We Fixed It

We didn’t start with roles or org charts. We started with truths:

- What trends are shaping our industry?
- What do our customers really care about?
- Where do we disagree about our customer?
- Where is trust already working (even if imperfectly)?

Then, we created clarity and shared ownership by:

- Mapping customer needs to internal strengths
- Defining what each department actually needed to succeed
- Uncovering the friction points in their execution loop
- Establishing a shared purpose they could all believe in

Once the conversations were grounded in reality—not opinion—the finger-pointing stopped. The teams started to see each other as partners, not roadblocks.

The Outcome. What changed?

- Strategic plans didn’t just look good—they got executed.

- Marketing and tech started collaborating early instead of reworking late.

- Customer satisfaction scores climbed. Internal morale did too.

- They uncovered opportunities together that no single department could’ve seen alone.

Final Thought: Strategy Dies Without Trust

If your teams aren’t collaborating, it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they don’t see the same picture. Bridge the trust gap with shared insight, real conversations, and co-ownership of the outcome—and suddenly, execution gets a whole lot easier.

Want to close your team’s trust gap and get execution moving again? Let’s talk.