The 4 Pillars of Marketing Team Success: Building the Foundation for Scale

This might be a hot take, but over the years, I’ve come to realize that a marketing team’s success doesn’t necessarily hinge on having the most creative campaigns or the most cutting-edge tech stack. Instead, it often boils down to something more fundamental: the strength of your team’s foundations. It’s like in basketball, if your team doesn’t know how to dribble, pass, shoot, and play defense, all the fancy plays in the world aren’t going to get you wins.

I recently heard this quote and I think it makes a lot of sense for start up marketers: “Soldiers win battles, logistics wins wars.”

If you’ve worked in the world of tech, specifically in a start up, you know that there is a crazy amount of work to be done. A thousand details and never enough hours in a day. In fact, here’s how your day 1 might differ from other industries…

So how do we become the most effective marketers possible?

We have to figure out how to get the work done. And the best way I’ve found to do that is to get some solid processes in place.

I know these pillars may seem overly straightforward, but through a decade of guiding five distinct marketing teams during their scale-up phases, I've refined a set of basic operational practices. These practices transformed each team from a group of struggling, inefficient marketers grappling with productivity challenges into streamlined, highly efficient marketing powerhouses.

In the world of tech start ups, where change is constant and expectations are high, scaling a marketing team can often feel like trying to build a plane mid-flight.

The work can’t stop while you get your house in order. So I learned the art of change management—often working in the margins to clean things up and show - not tell - how the work of getting these pillars in place can be incredibly worthwhile.

Be warned from the outset that the realization of the value of this work is often a slow dawning vs an instant Aha! If you’ve ever managed change, you know how slow it can be “turning the ship”. But know that as you build it…

Success breeds adoption.

For example, as the website team buys into creating a work request process and suddenly for the first time gets a handle on their team’s workload, they will start evangelizing the benefits of the project management software.

When the Field Marketing and Campaigns teams can see all of the emails that need to be sent for the month in the global email calendar and can easily slot in their requests, they’ll start buying into the calendaring system.

When the CMO gets word from the new head of Demand Gen that it was the best onboarding experience they’ve ever had. They’ll tell the CMO how easy it was to find everything they needed, educate themselves, and hit the ground running. And you might hear something like, “Lisa, you've really created a ‘force multiplier’ across marketing with this kind of friction-free onboarding. I love it!!!” (Yes, he really did include 3 exclamation points!)

So what are the 4 pillars for marketing team scale up success?

As I’ve said, these pillars might not be the sexiest part of your strategy, but I promise they create the order that makes room for creativity to flourish.

Here’s a closer look at each one and why they are essential to your marketing team’s success.

Pillar 1: Project Management Software

Let’s start with the backbone of any organized team: project management software. It’s no secret that marketing involves a multitude of moving parts—from campaign planning and execution to content creation and analytics. Without a robust project management system, keeping everything on track becomes nearly impossible.

In my experience, implementing a project management tool is transformative.

At one organization, we set up collaborative calendars and workflows that allowed the entire marketing team to have a clear view of all ongoing initiatives. Suddenly, everyone knew exactly what they needed to do, when it needed to be done, and how it aligned with larger team goals.

This newfound clarity not only improved individual productivity but also enhanced our ability to prioritize projects effectively. In fact, we started receiving compliments from other departments about how polished and organized our briefings had become—a direct result of having our 💩 together.

After evaluating all of the top project management software options, my personal preference is Asana for one main reason - multi-homing.

What is multi-homing?

Multi-homing enables a single task to be part of multiple projects simultaneously, ensuring that any updates—whether a change in assignee, due date, description, or other details—are automatically synchronized across all projects that the task lives in.

This is invaluable when each team needs to interact with different tasks in different ways. I’ll probably do a separate post about this at some point, but for now I’ll give the example of how a campaign manager needs to see an email in the context of her campaign, the copywriter needs to see drafting the email in the context of all writing projects, and marketing ops needs to see the email in the context of all of the emails planned for the month. All of these different views are possible with multi-homing. And instead of duplicating the same task across multiple projects, multi-homing allows for once-and-done updating across all projects.

Pillar 2: Knowledge Base/Wiki

Next up is the knowledge base or wiki—a central repository for documenting everything from tribal knowledge to standard operating procedures. In a growing team, knowledge can easily become siloed or lost when people move on. A well-maintained knowledge base prevents this by ensuring that critical information is accessible to everyone, all the time.

At one of the organizations where I implemented this pillar, our internal wiki became a game-changer not only for the marketing team, but also for the sales team.

They frequently praised how well-organized and easy to navigate the knowledge base was—allowing them to find campaign resources and event information which not only built their confidence in marketing, but it gave them access to resources that made them feel supported and gave us a unified sales + marketing front.

Depending on what systems your company already has, you can create these sites in Confluence, Google Sites, Notion, Microsoft SharePoint or anything similar.

Pillar 3: Document System

The third pillar is a well-structured document system, such as Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint, where all team resources are stored in an organized, easy-to-find manner. When organized well, it’s a simple yet powerful tool for ensuring that everyone on the team can quickly access the materials they need to do their jobs.

At one organization, the document system we set up became the cornerstone of our daily operations. I can’t count how many times new team members remarked on how easy it was to find what they needed.

It eliminated the frustration of digging through endless folders, or asking me! (hence why I made this - ahem, snarky - diagram) or waiting on a colleague to send over a file.

Instead, our team was fully equipped with everything from marketing collateral, brand elements, meeting decks, strategic plans, positioning, target audience and account information, boilerplates, you name it. The result? Faster execution, fewer bottlenecks, less frustration and wasted time, and a more empowered team.

From a practical standpoint, this can be a very tedious pillar to tackle because you’re often having to clean up a disorganized, forgotten mess. It requires coordinating with the team and communicating well to ensure nothing important gets lost, links don’t get broken, permissions are set up correctly so folks don’t lose access, etc.

I recommend gathering the key players needed to make decisions about the contents of your folders and setting up a workshop block to work through the sorting and clean up process live.

I also recommend training your team to work out of live documents that live in shared folders. Don’t keep any documents on local machines. And just say ‘no’ to versions and attachments.

If I ever received a document, a spreadsheet, or a PowerPoint that was sent as an attachment, I would either file it (at first) and share the live link, or eventually once the team was trained, I would request they put the doc where it belonged in the shared folder, and share the link.

I had more than one team mate have a laptop lost or stolen… along with all of their unsaved/unshared work (and files and photos). Talk about tragic… and sadly avoidable if they’d been in the habit of working in the cloud.

Pillar 4: Onboarding and Training

Last but certainly not least is onboarding and training. Scaling a team means constantly bringing in new talent, and without a strong onboarding process, you risk leaving new hires feeling lost or overwhelmed. Onboarding is your first opportunity to set the tone, communicate expectations, and ensure that everyone is aligned from day one.

I’ve seen firsthand the difference that a thoughtful onboarding process can make. It accelerates ramp-up times and creates a friction-free onboarding experiences. New team members don’t just learn the ropes—they get plugged into a well-oiled machine that sets them up for success. They know how to find things, who to talk to, and how to get work done right from the start.

First, I create an onboarding project template (in Asana or your project management software of choice). In the template, I include a standard list of tasks for the new hire’s manager, for the new hire, and for other members of the team. It’s the responsibility of the manager to duplicate the template for their new hire and fill in owners and due dates.

The tasks within the project include things like—for the manager: schedule welcome calls, add the person to team Slack channels, invite person to standing team meetings, etc. For the new hire, set up your email signature (provide the page in the wiki that shows them how to do that), schedule calls with other team members (based on manager’s guidance), familiarize yourself with the wiki, take the basic Asana training and other software training courses, etc.

The project can include not only tasks that the new hire needs to complete, but also content and documents they should review to get up to speed on the company, marketing programs, org chart, info on other teams, wiki articles, etc.

The other piece of this pillar is the information we build within the wiki. I work with the team to document processes and training. This can live as written processes or my favorite is to use software like Loom, Zoom, or the screen recorder on your device to walk through a how to within marketing software, how to update the website, etc. And then host these videos on the team wiki so that anyone on the team can replicate the work in the case that someone leaves or is no longer in their role.

Why These Pillars Matter

These four pillars—project management software, knowledge base/wiki, document system, and onboarding/training—are the foundation upon which scalable, successful marketing teams are built. They might not be as glamorous as a viral campaign or a cutting-edge AI tool, but their impact is undeniable.

In fact, according to a recent survey by CoSchedule, organized marketers saw a staggering 674% increase in success, and those using project management software were 426% more likely to report success. Yet, less than 40% of marketers use these tools effectively.

The takeaway? As I mentioned at the start of this post, it’s not always the most unique or brilliant strategy that wins the day. Sometimes, it’s the team that’s got their logistics locked down that comes out on top.

The Path Forward

I’m excited to share that I’m pivoting my offering here at Cloudberry Marketing. Going forward, I’m focusing on helping marketing teams establish these foundational pillars.

My consulting practice is built around the principles that have proven successful in my last five roles. If we’ve truly entered the “Do More With Less” era, this is one of the best avenues to explore for gaining efficiency, effectiveness, and scale.

Please feel free to visit my Services page to see the full scope of the strategic and tactical capabilities I can help add to your team. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. And if you think I’ve missed any foundational pillars, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Let’s continue the conversation—because building a strong foundation is the first step toward scaling your marketing team to new heights.