Insights

Marketing Organisation and Capability

What a real structure looks like, how to size it, and the layer that decides whether any of it works

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Marketing strategy gets written about constantly. Marketing organisation almost never does – which is odd, because the structure decides whether the strategy can be executed at all.

A real multi-market structure

A field marketing and sales organisation operating across five countries, and what its shape reveals.

Three things that structure teaches

1. The pyramid inverts in importance

The bottom layer outnumbers everyone above it many times over, and it is the only layer the customer ever meets. Every promise made in every layer above is delivered – or not – by people on the shop floor earning the least and receiving the least training.

Which means the practical question in any marketing organisation is not “is the strategy right”. It is “does the person at the point of contact know what we promised, and can they keep it”.

2. Every market needs its own analyst

Even the smallest markets in that structure carried a dedicated data analyst. That looks like an inefficiency until you consider the alternative.

The moment nobody owns the numbers locally, reporting becomes a story told upward rather than a measurement taken. Local performance gets narrated by the people whose performance it describes, and by the time it reaches the centre it has been smoothed three times.

3. Span of control is a cost decision disguised as an org chart

Each additional layer adds salary, adds delay, and adds one more place where a message can change shape. Each layer removed increases the number of people each manager must actually know. There is no correct answer, only a trade-off that should be made deliberately rather than inherited.

Sizing the team

The simplest version of the question, and why it is not the whole answer.

In its crudest form you keep hiring until the last person added does not produce more than they cost. That is the arithmetic floor, and it is genuinely useful as a discipline.

But it ignores the organising decision underneath, which changes the answer substantially.

• Organise geographically and you need fewer people, but each must cover the entire range and will inevitably know some of it shallowly.
• Organise by product specialism and you get genuine expertise, but you need more people and customers deal with several of them.
• Organise around major accounts and your best customers get someone who understands their business, at the cost of coverage everywhere else.

Most organisations end up with a hybrid, and the hybrid works only if the overlaps are named explicitly rather than left to goodwill.

Compensation, and how it should change over time

Three structures, and a reason to move between them.

• Straight commission. Highly motivating when sales are good, actively demoralising when they are not, and it selects for people who will do anything to close.
• Straight salary. Easiest to administer, simplest to budget, and motivates very little on its own.
• Salary plus commission. The best motivator of the three and the hardest to administer well, because the split and the thresholds have to be right.

The evolution worth copying

One technology business structured commission to change as the product matured, and the reasoning is sound enough to generalise.

1. Year one: direct correlation between revenue and commission. A new product with no track record needs people willing to take a risk on it, and pure revenue correlation is the clearest possible signal.
2. Year two: seventy per cent numerical, thirty per cent qualitative. Once the product is established, pure revenue rewards the wrong behaviours. The qualitative component covers market visibility, share, market visits, timely business reviews with customers and distributors, collections, price increase implementation, and repeat custom.

That thirty per cent is where the difference between a transaction and a business gets paid for.

The field discipline nobody writes about

Route planning is unglamorous and it is where a large share of commercial productivity is won or lost.

• Most field teams operate without a proper route plan, which means coverage is decided by habit rather than by customer potential.
• Time splits badly. A substantial share disappears into office work, email and internal meetings rather than customer-facing activity.
• Traffic, distance and a growing number of product lines compound the problem as the business scales.
• Prospecting has to happen daily rather than in campaigns, or the customer base erodes quietly while everyone is busy.

The objective is easy to state and hard to achieve: more time in the field, less time in the office.

Building capability, not just headcount

The part of organisation design that survives a restructure.

• Insight generation as a standing capability. Trends, purchasing habits, consumption and user behaviour – gathered continuously, not commissioned when a decision is already overdue.
• Alignment tools. Marketing and sales grids, production plans and tracking tools, so that alignment is a document rather than a meeting.
• Performance development review and career path clarity. People leave marketing teams because they cannot see the next role, more often than because of pay.
• Structure focused on industry or channel rather than on internal convenience.
• Deliberate agency relationships. Built on business understanding and measured against agreed indicators, not on personal rapport with whoever manages the account.
• Cost reduction as a mindset rather than an annual exercise imposed from outside.

The question worth asking about your own team

How many layers sit between the person who decides what we promise and the person who delivers it?

If the answer is more than three, the promise is being interpreted at least three times before it reaches a customer. That is not a communication problem to be solved with a better deck. It is a structural fact, and it should inform what you promise in the first place.

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