Digital Summit MN 2025 - Breaking Down Departmental Silos

During this period of technological change and with AI fundamentally shifting how we work, it’s imperative that marketing leaders drive smarter decision-making through team collaboration and breaking down departmental silos.

In this session, you’ll explore the essential leadership strategies needed today to build a high-performing digital marketing team, foster a collaborative culture, and align cross-functional teams to drive maximum impact. We’ll go through proven frameworks to position your team’s work for greater visibility, encourage other teams to champion your successes, and effectively communicate wins to leadership.

After this session, you’ll be able to:
- Implement a cross-team collaboration strategy that encourages other departments to amplify and advocate for your marketing wins.
- Use a storytelling framework to effectively communicate your team’s impact and results to leadership, securing greater buy-in and resources.
- Create a team culture playbook that fosters accountability, motivation, and high performance in your digital marketing team.

Transcript

1. Break Down Departmental Silos to Unlock More Effective, Results-Driven Decision Making Zach Chahalis @ZachChahalis /ZacharyChahalis
2. Zach Chahalis Vice President of SEO for Over 14 Years in SEO working with brands like: Socials: @ZachChahalis (X) and /ZacharyChahalis (LI)
3. Why I’m Qualified to Talk About Marketing Leadership I currently manage 12 SEOs and Content Strategists/Writers. I also matrix-manage a team of 40 developers and several product managers. I’ve been a successful people manager for two S&P 500 companies and two major marketing agencies.
4. The Corporate World As We Know It Is Changing
5. The AI Era Has Changed The Game
6. And Departmental Silos Only Create Further Problems Paid and SEO competing against one another Marketing / Sales / Product Targeting Different Goals Engineering and Product Misalignment
7. We Need To Break Down These Silos To Succeed
8. First, We Need To Develop A High- Performing Team Culture
9. This Starts With Your Leadership
10. "Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge." Simon Sinek
11. So How Do We Take Care Of Our Team?
12. Start By Developing A Team Culture And Performance Playbook
13. “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” Andrew Carnegie
14. Define Your Team’s Operating Principles
15. Reduce Team Conflict with Clarity
16. Encourage Psychological Safety To Enable Communication And Dissent
17. Reinforce Your Team’s Culture With Set Rituals
18. Set 1:1s With All Team Members
19. Celebrate Experimentation, Testing, and Iteration
20. Now That We’ve Defined Our Direct Team Culture
21. Let’s Start Identifying and Breaking Down Departmental Silos
22. Common Signs of Corporate Silos
23. Departmental Silos Can Result In Large Corporate Problems
24. So How Do We Fix This?
25. Goal and KPI Alignment Is Key
26. We Cannot Be Successful If We Don’t Work Towards A Common Goal "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." Henry Ford
27. Establish Shared Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
28. Define and Align On Your North Star Metrics
29. Establish Cross- Functional Ownership
30. Now That Goals Are Aligned, Let’s Build a Cross-Team Collaboration Strategy
31. Start With A Collaboration Charter Including The Following:
32. Define Your Shared Goals And Desired Outcomes
33. Define Who Owns What
34. Establish Operating Principles
35. Establish How You'll Operate Day-to-Day:
36. Escalation and Conflict Resolution
37. Establish Your Shared Roadmap
38. Set Both Short- and Long-Term Roadmaps
39. Iterate On That Roadmap Each Quarter By Selecting Your Key Headliners and Features
40. Set Your Sprint Schedule by Quarter
41. Ensure Your Team Sees The Value Of Their Work
42. Practice Impact-Driven Storytelling
43. Regularly Share The Impact With The Team
44. Learn From Your Losses
45. Impact Story Example
46. Looking Back – Cost of Living Opportunity The SEO team identified an opportunity in early 2024 to incorporate cost of living data into our network to expand how we support the customer from an education standpoint … and also grow organic traffic. We did see competitors targeting this, but we felt we could provide an enhanced experience.
47. Looking Back – Cost of Living Team Action SEO 1 sourced and secured COLI data. SEO 2 and SEO 3 worked extensively to develop this idea into a functional headliner. Design 1 transformed the idea into a user-friendly, appealing interface. Team Data worked closely and extensively to ingest this COLI data in and create the endpoints needed to support this work. (Shout out to Data 1!) Team Dev 1 transformed the dream into a reality first creating metro area COL pages and then launching our Cost-of- Living calculator. Team Dev 2 with the assist helping to support some of the front-end efforts to support an aggressive timeline The QA team (Shout out to QA 1 and QA2) made sure that these features went out into production flawlessly.
48. Looking Back – Cost of Living Result - Metro Pages Launched on 1/8 A total of XXX pages launched supporting major metros and top cities in the US.
49. Looking Back – Cost of Living Result - Cost of Living Calculator Launched on 1/22 Check it out - https://www.apartments.com/cost- of-living/
50. Looking Back – Cost of Living Business Outcome These pages immediately began to generate traffic and have capture over xxK clicks since launching – and continue to climb. This is also an asset our Digital PR team is actively promoting. Note: Rent Trends pages had a similar start and generated xxxK clicks in 2024 after launching in late 2023 … and extensive backlinks.
51. Looking Back – Cost of Living Business Outcome The pages are moving up page one surpassing direct and indirect competitors We’re also getting displayed in AI overviews, featured snippets and People Also Ask results.
52. Looking Forward – Cost of Living These pages will continue to get supported both with fresh data dynamically and supporting pages.
53. Make Your Wins Impossible to Ignore
54. Internally Market Your Wins and Team Success
55. Encourage Cross- Departmental Amplification
56. You Can Do This By:
57. Communicate In Ways Leadership Understands
58. Top Takeaways Silo-Breaking Is a Leadership Responsibility High-functioning digital organizations need cultural and operational alignment, not just technical fixes. Define a Clear Team Culture With Operating Principles Clarity, rituals, and psychological safety empower teams to perform and collaborate across boundaries. Shared Goals and KPIs Are the Foundation of Collaboration Aligning on OKRs and North Star metrics reduces friction and builds mutual accountability. Cross-Team Collaboration Requires Structure Use collaboration charters, roadmaps, sprint schedules, and conflict resolution frameworks to keep everyone aligned. Tell Stories That Leadership Understands Translate SEO/product/marketing work into business impact using simple storytelling frameworks. Make Wins Visible and Shareable Internally market your success stories in ways that allow other departments to amplify them. Build Trust Through Transparency and Feedback Loops Celebrate contributions across departments, share performance metrics, and stay open to compromise.
59. Get The Slides – Twitter/X: ZachChahalis LinkedIn: /zacharychahalis