There’s a version of the marketing leader role that involves staying firmly in your lane. Running campaigns. Generating leads. Hitting that MQL target. Handing off to sales and wishing them well. Keeping your head down and not getting involved in things that aren’t technically yours to own.

I understand the appeal. It’s safer. It’s cleaner. And frankly, most of us have enough on our plates without volunteering for other people’s problems.

But eventually there’s a reckoning. A deal slips. Lead conversion drops off a cliff. The pipeline looks anaemic. And in the QBR, all eyes turn to you. The answer, believe it or not, isn’t always more leads.

Marketing’s remit is wider than the job description often suggests.

Marketing feels it first

Marketing sits at a vital intersection in most businesses. We touch the customer before almost anyone else. We make promises the rest of the business has to keep. We’re the first point of contact when something goes wrong, and often the last to be told why it happened.

That position means we feel friction early. When onboarding is clunky, we hear about it in churn conversations before the customer success team has filed the ticket. When contracts are difficult, we see deals slow down before procurement has sent the formal complaint. When the website breaks, we notice the conversion drop before IT has raised an incident.

This isn’t a complaint. It’s actually a significant piece of organisational intelligence. Marketing is often functioning as an early warning system for problems that live elsewhere in the business…and most organisations are oblivious to this.

The standard response, and why it’s wrong

Marketing notices the friction. Marketing mentions it. Someone says ‘that’s a legal problem’ or ‘talk to HR’ or ‘IT are aware of it.’ And then nothing changes, because it’s been successfully categorised as not-our-problem and filed accordingly.

Meanwhile the problems continue to mount. Deals slow down. Onboarding drags. Candidates drop out of hiring processes. Customers leave without making a fuss, which is somehow worse than the ones who do. And yet in the QBR, all eyes turn to marketing.

Staying in your lane is a reasonable instinct. But if the lane next to yours is on fire and it’s affecting where you end up, at some point staying in your lane stops being professional and starts being an oversight. If broken processes are slowing revenue, damaging customer experience, or eroding brand perception…those things are your problem, whether you built them or not. You have a duty to roll your sleeves up and come to the table with solutions.

That’s not overstepping. That’s what good marketing leadership looks like.

The opportunity hiding in the friction

Marketing’s cross-functional visibility isn’t just a burden. It’s an opportunity. The CMO who shows up to the leadership team not just with campaign results but with a clear-eyed view of where the business is losing revenue to broken processes should earn a seat at a different table. They stop being the person who runs marketing and start being someone who drives commercial outcomes.

That’s a meaningful shift in how you’re perceived. And it’s available to any marketing leader who’s paying attention and willing to do the slightly uncomfortable work of raising things that aren’t theirs to own.

The framing has to be right, though. This isn’t about pointing fingers. It isn’t about empire-building or making other functions look bad. It’s about identifying where the business is losing and proposing how to fix it. The distinction between those two things is the difference between being seen as a strategic contributor and being seen as a nuisance.

What it looks like in practice

The approach that tends to work has three components.

Name it specifically. Not ‘the onboarding isn’t great’ but ‘we are losing a measurable number of prospects at the contract stage and the pattern points to contract complexity as the primary cause.’ Vague observations get dismissed. Specific ones with commercial consequences attached are much harder to ignore.

Connect it to numbers. Everything has a cost. If legal turnaround time is extending average sales cycle length, that’s a calculable pipeline impact. If HR onboarding takes a month and new hires aren’t productive until month three, that’s a ramp cost you can quantify. Marketing leaders are good at making the commercial case for their own function. Apply the same rigour when flagging problems elsewhere.

Come with a recommendation, not just a complaint. ‘Here is the problem, here is what it’s costing, and here is what I think we should do about it’ is a completely different conversation from ‘this is making our lives difficult.’ The first one positions you as a problem-solver. The second one positions you as someone who needs managing.

The bit that goes both ways

There’s an uncomfortable corollary to all of this. If marketing is going to operate as a forcing function – naming friction, escalating cross-functional problems, demanding that broken processes get treated as business issues, then marketing has to hold itself to exactly the same standard.

We don’t get to point at clunky onboarding and slow contract turnarounds if the brief we hand to sales is vague, if the messaging we produce doesn’t reflect what customers actually care about, or if the leads we generate aren’t properly qualified. Those are marketing’s friction points and other functions feel them too. Own them with the same energy you’d bring to flagging someone else’s.

The forcing function only works if it goes both ways.

The organisations that will win are the ones where marketing leaders have the confidence and the credibility to say: this is what’s slowing us down, this is what it’s costing, and this is what we should do about it. Not as a complaint. As a contribution.

Not Marketing’s fault. Still our problem. And that’s actually the version of this job worth doing.

Godspeed.