Let's play a game. Your marketing team launches a campaign that drives a bunch of leads. Your sales team says, "These leads are garbage." Meanwhile, customer success is onboarding someone who thought they bought something entirely different. Sound familiar?
Welcome to life inside a business operating in silos.
You might think this is a communication issue. Or a tooling problem. But the real cost of team misalignment isn't just dropped balls or missed Slack messages-it's lost revenue.
And that's exactly what Growth Operations is designed to fix.
The Silo Showdown: Where SMBs Lose Money Without Realizing It
In small and medium-sized businesses, the lines between roles often blur. That's great for agility-until it's not. Without clear systems and shared goals, each team starts optimizing for their own metrics.
- Marketing chases MQLs because that's what they're measured on.
- Sales chases deals without knowing how those leads were nurtured.
- Customer success picks up the pieces and tries to manage expectations.
The result? Finger-pointing. Friction. Frustration.
But worse: a choppy customer experience that tanks retention, kills referrals, and erodes your reputation.
The Hidden Revenue Leak
When your teams aren't aligned, your funnel looks full-but it's full of holes.
- Leads fall through the cracks because sales doesn't follow up fast enough.
- Prospects bounce when they get inconsistent messaging from ads to demos.
- Customers churn when onboarding doesn't match the promise.
Growth Ops exposes these leaks and fixes them at the root.
Example: A Growth Ops audit reveals that sales never sees 40% of the leads marketing generates. Turns out, the CRM wasn't tagging them properly. Fixing that one workflow boosted SQLs by 30%.
The Growth Ops Mindset: Alignment > Attribution
Growth Ops isn't about giving one team more power-it's about giving everyone shared responsibility for revenue.
Instead of debating whether a lead "belongs" to marketing or sales, Growth Ops asks:
"Where in the journey did we lose momentum? What broke down? How do we fix it together?"
This shift in mindset changes everything:
- From isolated dashboards to shared revenue metrics
- From team goals to cross-functional OKRs
- From handoffs to handshakes
It's not about more work. It's about working better-together.
Unified KPIs: What Gets Measured Gets Shared
One of the biggest drivers of misalignment is conflicting success metrics.
- Marketing celebrates campaign engagement.
- Sales celebrates revenue.
- CS celebrates NPS.
Growth Ops helps unify these KPIs around the only metric that matters: customer impact. That means building dashboards that show how each part of the business contributes to revenue.
Example Key Metrics to Align On
- Lead-to-customer conversion rate
- Time-to-first-value
- Customer retention rate
- Revenue per customer
Once these numbers become team-wide priorities, everyone starts rowing in the same direction.
Beatties Case Study: What Happens When Silos Disappear
Before Growth Ops:
At Beatties, sales and marketing operated independently-marketing ran campaigns based on gut feel, while sales focused on existing customers. Leads lacked follow-up, messaging was inconsistent, and the team couldn't clearly connect effort to revenue.
After Growth Ops:
With a Growth Plan in place, Beatties built unified customer segments, aligned marketing and sales around the same goals, and implemented automation to ensure consistent handoffs. Marketing efforts shifted from reactive to strategic, and sales had better visibility into pipeline quality.
Result:
- Clearer messaging and stronger positioning
- Improved lead qualification and conversion
- Better collaboration across sales, marketing, and leadership
No new hires. No bloated tech stack. Just strategic alignment and operational clarity.
Are You Siloed? A Quick Gut Check for SMBs
Are You Siloed? A Quick Gut Check for SMBs
Ask yourself:
- Do your teams define success the same way?
- Can you map your customer journey, start to finish, without confusion?
- When problems arise, do teams collaborate or blame?
If you answered "no" to any of the above-you're leaving money on the table.
Final Thoughts: Growth Isn't a Department
Growth isn't just marketing's job. Or sales'. Or customer success'. It's everyone's.
Growth Ops ensures your business functions like one team with one playbook. When you align strategy, tools, and teams around revenue, you stop leaving growth to chance.
So if your teams are feeling misaligned, your pipeline is stalling, or your customers aren't sticking around-it's not a sign you need more people.
It's a sign you need better alignment.
Want to see where your silos are costing you growth? Let's chat.
41 King William Street, Suite 300
Hamilton, ON L8R 1A2
905.529.6005
hello@humancode.ca
About Us
Human_Code is a fractional Growth Ops team helping EOS businesses and growth-focused SMBs build smarter, more scalable revenue engines. Our services include full-funnel strategy, demand generation, CRM and technology implementation, sales enablement, and customer success alignment. We've proudly operated in Hamilton, Ontario for more than 25 years.