This matters because most organisations are better at managing functions than managing the relationships between them. A Sales Director can be held accountable for sales performance, while a Product leader can be held accountable for the roadmap and Marketing can be measured against demand, positioning or campaign outcomes. Those accountabilities may all be perfectly reasonable individually, yet they do not automatically create a coherent commercial system. The customer experiences the combined result, including every misunderstanding, delay and contradiction created along the way.
I first became particularly conscious of this while working on global enterprise accounts at ACSL. Customers had signed international agreements with IBM, and from the centre the commercial model looked relatively straightforward because the contract defined the terms, standards and expectations. Actual delivery, however, depended on local reseller partners across different countries, each dealing with local configurations, availability, logistics and customer requirements. The customer had bought one global promise, but fulfilling that promise required a distributed network to behave as though it were one coordinated organisation.
The interesting part was that execution could deteriorate without any individual party being obviously incompetent. A central agreement might be clear, a local partner might know its own market, and the people coordinating the account might all be working hard, while a misunderstanding at one handoff still created a customer problem. Configuration details could be interpreted differently, responsibilities could become unclear, or an issue could sit between two parties because neither regarded it as fully theirs. From the customer's perspective, those distinctions were largely irrelevant because they had bought from one organisation and expected one outcome.
That experience changed the way I began looking at execution problems. When something went wrong, I became less interested in asking only which team had failed and more interested in tracing how the decision, information or responsibility had travelled through the system. In many cases, the source of the problem was not where the symptom eventually became visible. A failure that appeared in Sales might have started in positioning, a problem blamed on Marketing might have originated in unclear commercial priorities, while an operational delay might have begun with an ambiguity that entered the process several steps earlier.
The same pattern becomes more visible as organisations grow because every additional layer creates more interpretation. More products require stronger coordination between Product, Marketing and Sales, while more countries require central decisions to survive local adaptation without losing their meaning. Acquisitions introduce new systems, teams and propositions that need to coexist with what was already there. None of those developments is inherently problematic, but each one increases the number of interfaces where two reasonable interpretations can begin to diverge.
Samsung provided a very different example of the same underlying issue. The business had been given an ambitious objective to double B2B sales, but the local commercial setup was still extremely lean and the connection between Product, Marketing and Sales was underdeveloped. One of the first requests from the senior salesperson was remarkably practical: he needed a proper local product catalogue that could be used naturally with customers. Building that catalogue together, and then joining customer visits to understand how the products were actually being discussed, began creating a feedback loop between functions that had previously been working with different levels of proximity to the market.
The significance of that example is not the catalogue itself. The request exposed a weakness in the connection between teams, because Sales was missing something basic that Product and Marketing could reasonably have assumed already existed in usable form. Once the functions began working from the same customer conversations, each could contribute differently while remaining anchored in the same commercial reality. The improvement came from strengthening the relationship between the functions rather than asking one of them to compensate through additional activity.
Large organisations create an additional complication because central decisions often have to travel through several layers before they reach the customer. At DS Smith, a group-level strategic and brand transformation needed to work across product areas, countries, languages and sales teams, which meant that successful approval at the centre was only the beginning. Sales enablement technology could distribute material efficiently, but it could not guarantee that the material remained useful once somebody needed it in a live customer conversation. Rebuilding approximately 95 sales stories with stakeholders across the business therefore became less about producing content and more about making the strategic story usable across the interfaces through which it travelled.
These examples also explain why execution problems are often misdiagnosed as performance problems. When a revenue target is missed, Sales is the most visible place to look because the shortfall appears in the sales numbers. When campaign results disappoint, Marketing becomes the obvious focus, while a delayed product launch naturally directs attention towards Product or Operations. Those reactions are understandable, but they can lead management to increase pressure on the part of the system where the problem surfaced without examining whether another part of the system created the conditions for failure.
That can produce a familiar pattern in which every function becomes busier while the commercial outcome barely improves. Sales increases activity around a proposition that remains difficult to explain, Marketing produces more material that does not fit the reality of customer conversations, and Product accelerates delivery without resolving uncertainty about what the market values most. Each team can report additional effort, and management can see more movement, while the underlying disconnect remains untouched. The organisation becomes more active without becoming more coherent.
The difficulty for leadership is that interfaces rarely belong as neatly to one executive as functions do. It is usually clear who owns Sales, Product or Marketing, but responsibility for the quality of the handoff between them can be much harder to locate. The same ambiguity appears between central and local teams, between acquisition and integration teams, or between commercial promises and operational delivery. When ownership of those connections remains implicit, organisations often become dependent on a small number of experienced individuals who know how to bridge the gaps informally.
That dependence can work surprisingly well for a while, which is one reason the underlying weakness remains hidden. Strong people compensate for poor handoffs by making additional calls, translating information themselves, chasing decisions or resolving disagreements through personal relationships. Their effort keeps the organisation moving, but it can also disguise the fact that the system depends on people repeatedly repairing connections that were never properly designed. Once those individuals leave, responsibilities change or complexity increases, the hidden weakness becomes much more visible.
Improving execution therefore requires more than making individual functions stronger. Leadership needs to understand where the critical commercial interfaces sit, what information has to move through them and which decisions require shared ownership rather than sequential handoffs. Product, Marketing and Sales do not need identical perspectives, because their different expertise is part of what makes the organisation effective. They do, however, need enough shared commercial logic that those perspectives contribute to the same direction rather than creating competing interpretations of what the business is trying to achieve.
In practice, that usually means becoming much clearer about a relatively small number of questions. The organisation needs a shared understanding of which customers matter most, what problems it is trying to solve for them, why the offer should win, which commercial priorities take precedence and how conflicting priorities will be resolved. It also needs clarity about what happens when a decision moves from one function to another, because decisions that are repeatedly reopened at every handoff are not really decisions at all. The greater the complexity of the organisation, the more important those apparently basic agreements become.
Over time, I have become much less interested in whether individual departments appear aligned during a meeting and much more interested in what happens when work actually crosses the boundaries between them. That is where strategy is interpreted, customer information is translated, priorities are tested and ownership becomes real. Strong functions remain essential, but they are not enough to create strong execution when the connections between them are weak.
Many organisations invest heavily in improving the individual parts of their commercial system while giving much less attention to the way those parts interact. When execution remains difficult despite capable people and substantial activity, the most useful question may therefore be different from the one management first asks. Instead of looking immediately for the function that needs fixing, it is often worth examining what happens in the space between them.
