Why Removing Silos Is One of the Most Underrated Growth Levers in Scaleups
- Laura Derbyshire
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Removing Silos in Scaleup Growth
Most scaleups I have had the opportunity to work with have a common symptom: a lack of shared insight.
Sales teams hear objections every day, marketing teams build campaigns based on assumptions, product teams roadmap in isolation and leadership teams sit above it all, wondering why growth feels harder than it should.
And it’s one of the biggest blockers to clarity, strategy and sustainable growth.
Sales Teams Are Sitting on the Most Valuable Growth Data You Have
If you want to know why customers buy (or don’t), then you just need to talk to the sales team.
Sales teams hear:
The real objections
The language customers actually use
Why deals stall or accelerate
Which features resonate and which don’t
What competitors are winning on
Yet in many scaleups, this insight never travels. It stays in CRM notes, Slack messages, or worse - in people’s heads.
Marketing plans get built without it, product decisions happen without context and leadership strategy drifts further from reality.
That’s how silos quietly kill momentum in your business.
The Research Is Clear (Even If Execution Isn’t)
Harvard Business Review has consistently shown that cross-functional collaboration improves decision-making quality and innovation outcomes - yet it remains one of the hardest things for growing organisations to maintain.
McKinsey & Company has repeatedly found that companies with strong alignment across sales, marketing, and leadership significantly outperform peers in revenue growth and profitability.
Why Silos Increase as You Scale
Early-stage businesses talk constantly. Everyone sits close to the action. But as companies grow:
Teams specialise
Reporting lines harden
Meetings become functional, not connective
“Efficiency” replaces conversation
Ironically, the moment insight becomes most valuable is when it’s hardest to move and what tends to follow is:
Marketing optimises channels, not narratives
Sales sells what exists, not what could exist
Product ships features, not solutions
Leadership reacts instead of shaping direction
Growth slows, not because people aren’t capable, but because insight isn’t shared within the different teams across the business.
Insight Is the Raw Material for Strategy, Not a Byproduct
Some of the strongest products, services and campaigns don’t start with ideas., they start with patterns:
Repeated sales objections
Common customer workarounds
Feature requests that signal unmet needs
Friction points that don’t show up in analytics
When these insights are surfaced and discussed collectively, they become:
New product lines
Clearer positioning
Sharper campaign ideas
More confident sales narratives
This is where clarity actually comes from; not decks, not frameworks, but joined-up thinking across the business.
It's a Leadership Responsibility, Not a Process Issue
Removing silos in scaleup growth doesn’t happen accidentally, it has to be designed and led.
In my experience, leaders who unlock growth do a few things consistently, they;
Create regular spaces where sales, marketing and product share insight
Reward contribution of learning, not just delivery
Listen for patterns, not anecdotes
Turn insight into strategic decisions
It's about having better meetings and it’s about leadership signalling that insight matters as much as execution.
At OSER, clarity is something we help with and a good chunk of our work with scaleups involves:
Unlocking insight that already exists inside the business
Reconnecting leadership teams with frontline reality
Turning sales conversations into strategic advantage
Helping teams see the dots they’re too close to join
This is why our work often starts with conversation, not campaigns. Because when insight flows, strategy sharpens, and when strategy sharpens, growth follows.
Actionable Questions for Leadership Teams
If you want to pressure-test whether silos are slowing you down, ask:
Where do sales insights actually go today?
Who hears customer objections regularly and who never does?
Which decisions are made without frontline input?
What would change if marketing, sales and product planned together?
Growth doesn’t stall because teams stop working hard. It stalls because communication breaks down, insight gets trapped, and leaders lose visibility of what’s really happening on the ground.
Removing silos isn’t a cultural nice-to-have, it’s a strategic growth move.
Where Flow Thinking Comes In
This is exactly where OSER Flow Thinking and our leadership workshops come into play.
Flow Thinking creates the space for insight to move across the business - connecting sales conversations, customer reality, brand ambition and commercial strategy in one place. It’s how leadership teams step out of reactive, siloed decision-making and into clearer, joined-up thinking.
In our workshops, we don’t start with solutions. We surface patterns, we connect dots, we turn lived insight from across the organisation into strategic clarity teams can actually act on - it's something I've done successfully with Citywire and Bayley & Sage.
For many scaleups, this is the moment when growth starts to feel lighter again, not because people are working harder, but because they’re finally aligned.
If growth feels slower or more complicated than it should, it’s often a signal that insight is trapped inside silos.
If you want to explore how Flow Thinking and leadership workshops can help your team reconnect insight, strategy and execution, you can learn more about how we work at OSER here or get in touch for a conversation.
