Marketing With Purpose Kit: Breaking Down Silos Across Teams

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:16)
Welcome back to the Marketing With Purpose segment of The Bliss Business Podcast where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Tullio and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategy that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. So let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Rebecca Throop. She's the Director of Marketing at Merchants Fleet. Rebecca is a seasoned marketing leader with more than 25 years of experience driving strategy, growth, and brand impact across startups, national organizations, and non-profits.
Today, she leads an eight-person marketing team at Merchants Fleet, where she focuses on aligning marketing with revenue growth, strengthening demand generation, and building scalable data-driven operations. Known for her servant leadership style, Rebecca brings a deeply human perspective to organizational alignment, and behind her professional work, she's a TED Talk speaker, non-profit board member, and advocate for individuals and families affected by addiction. Using storytelling to reduce stigma, foster understanding, and inspire compassion. Very excited to have you with us. We're going to explore breaking down silos across teams, my favorite topic, Rebecca. I'm excited to dive right into this and see how alignment, communication, and shared goals can help organization achieve stronger results together, which is also really good for the people involved.
So, Rebecca, before we dive in, I'd love to hear why was breaking down silos across teams, the topic you chose to explore with us today, and what makes it so important right now?

**Rebecca Throop** (2:07)
Well, I appreciate that question, and Tullio, and I appreciate you having me here. Thank you.
This was an easy topic for me to pick when we first started talking. For my entire career, in my opinion, the center of all business and the center of all success in business is the person, it's humans. That's just not because I'm in marketing, I started in strategic planning. It really gets down to who are we working for and who are we working with? To do that, it's all connection. It's connection, it's communication, and it's assessing the balance between the needs of different people at different times. So this topic is something that I've lived and breathed for 25 years now.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:55)
Very nice.
So let's dive right in, because sometimes we might have some approaches and strategies and a methodology that we're really tied into, and it can be very people-centric, very people-focused. But let's face it, the heads of marketing often get pulled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. It's a big balance and a dance that we do every day, right?

**Rebecca Throop** (3:20)
Exactly.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:21)
So how do you ensure your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals? And where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen?

**Rebecca Throop** (3:30)
So like I mentioned that I started in strategic planning. So my mindset has always been the marketing department might be here in the organization and the strategic plan is up here at the board level, but it all should flow up and should flow down. So I have been, I think, gifted with the sense that a lot of the businesses I've worked with have also had that belief system. And as a marketing leader, and even when I was not quite the leader level, we were involved heavily in building the strategic plan.
And so there's sort of this, what are we doing at a corporate level? Then what are we doing at a functional business plan level? And then bringing it down into departmental plans. And that's how I build our plan. And then that gets reassessed every quarter. So we're at the beginning of Q3. I just did this with my team this quarter. Here's what we set in 26 And as it relates to the commercial plan that ties up to the strategic plan, let's look at what we're doing. The friction comes with the fact that we are throwing stuff every day that isn't in plan, right? That's how business works. So we support our commercial teams and we support corporate from a marketing perspective. And so it's really assessing, I think almost on a daily basis at times, what's the bandwidth? What's the workload? What's the end goal? What do we have to move to accommodate this and which is a higher priority? And for me, it's keeping very close communication with my boss, who's the Chief Growth Officer. And if there's any question in my mind, he and I have a conversation.