We either work together, or revenue will suffer, and you'll become obsolete
TO: Head, Sales
FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO
SUBJECT: We either work together, or revenue will suffer and you'll become obsolete
Morning Chief.
Azleen here. As of the end of 2025, the revenue tanked again. The number was slightly lower than in 2024. I’ve repeatedly told the CEO that the sales and marketing teams need to work together since January 2025 in the management meeting, but somehow the suggestion fell on deaf ears for whatever reason. I guess Hema Kangeson is right all along. An outdated organisational mindset is indeed costly.
Here I am, emailing you directly so that we can do something about our teams’ collaboration so that we can see progress this year. I want to settle this before it goes into disaster mode.
Regularly, I’ve been observing your team grinding out day and night prospecting, going out for appointments, attending and participating in events, presentations and so on, trying to convince strangers who don’t know us to give us a minute of their time. They think this is the hustle required to win. In reality, those activities are expensive to sustain. Just look at their travel-related claims versus the ROI. Nothing came back to the company. You and I, we know that those efforts hardly produce results. When things are done in a random manner and not structured, things won't work as planned. And, it's dangerous.
Sorry for being blunt here.
I know you are an avid Manchester United fan. So let’s use the football analogy to drive my point here.
In football, the sales team is like strikers. Marketing is pretty much like midfielders. Right now, you are playing like a striker who doesn't trust your own teammates. You’re running all the way back to the goalkeeper area to win the ball, trying to dribble it through the mud across the entire park, and then, exhausted and out of breath, trying to take a shot at the goal. To win the game, you don’t go solo like that.
Marketing, being the midfielders, the role is to do one thing. We read the game, understand how the opponent plays and control our game tempo, tire out the challenges and potential objections, and feed you with good goal-scoring opportunities so you, as a striker, can focus on delivering only one thing that matters: concluding the deal. A midfielder is called a playmaker for this very reason, FYI. The marketing team knows how to generate leads more than you all do. From the market research, establishing the lead magnet and coming up with a powerful value proposition, to growing conversations, making AI recommend us and winning the game. As a matter of fact, we grasp the 2026 marketing trend better, too.
When you try to do everything on your own, wanting to become a star, you are actually wasting that striker talent. For every hour you spend explaining our value proposition or even the pricing structure to a cold lead, you are wasting time where you could have been closing a hot one.
Please, let’s work together. We give you the opportunity, and you work on the closure. But if you intend to maintain the status quo, you must then know one thing. Midfielders do score goals, too. As a matter of fact, the marketing team can finish the game without you.
Thanks to the power of the Internet and selected tools, they have tremendously matured now. We do have the templates and infrastructure to support the customer’s purchasing journey by nurturing, validating, and closing deals entirely from within this very office. Marketing can, and does, independently conclude sales without a single sales team’s intervention. In short, we know how to combat declining sales should the situation turn south. The not-so-good part about working in silos is one. The success will unfairly make you an unnecessary overhead.
Give it a week to think this through. You can keep running the whole pitch alone until you’re obsolete, or you can stay in the game, wait for the clinical pass from us, the midfielders, and do what you were hired to do.
Azleen.
P.S. Thanks for reading. Fix your marketing here. Bite-sized how-tos, published almost daily. It’s free.
