The Customer Never Sees Your Org Chart.

The customer never sees your org chart.

Years ago, I learned something that seems ridiculously obvious.

Customers don't know who owns what inside your company.

And more importantly, they don't care.

They don't know that marketing owns the website.

Operations owns the experience.

Sales owns the relationship.

IT owns the technology.

And somebody three floors up apparently owns the button that doesn't work.

They just know they chose you.

Yet inside organizations, we spend an amazing amount of time defining where one person's responsibility ends and someone else's begins.

“That’s an operations issue.”

“Marketing doesn't control that.”

“You'll need to talk to sales.”

Maybe.

But to the person on the other side of the counter, screen or phone, there's no handoff.

There's just one experience.

And one brand.

I've always believed some of the best marketing work happens when marketing stops worrying about where its responsibility ends.

And starts paying attention to where the customer's experience begins.

Because customers never see your org chart.

They only experience the spaces between it.