Two marketers sit in the same company. One builds the campaign architecture, fixes the attribution model, and quietly ships work that actually moves pipeline. The other spends half their week in cross-functional meetings, asking sales for input on messaging, looping in product on positioning decisions, and presenting results (including results they didn’t personally drive) in weekly leadership syncs.
Guess who gets promoted.
The silo trap
The instinct to let the work speak for itself isn’t just wrong. It’s structurally disadvantaged. The person operating in a silo might produce better work, but they’ve made themselves illegible to the organization. Nobody outside their immediate team knows what they do, how they think, or what problems they’ve solved. When a promotion conversation happens, their name doesn’t surface. Not because the work isn’t good, but because it never traveled beyond the people who already see it.
The person who gets promoted often isn’t running a cynical visibility campaign. They’re doing something more mundane and more effective: they’re making their work legible across the organization. Asking a sales director for input on a landing page isn’t just politics. It means the sales director now understands what the marketing team is building, why it matters, and who built it.
Legibility isn’t loudness
There’s a version of the “get loud” advice that’s genuinely useful and a version that’s insufferable. The insufferable version treats visibility as performance — personal branding theater, LinkedIn engagement farming, manufactured hot takes designed to generate reactions. That version optimizes for attention, not trust.
The useful version is quieter and harder to fake. It’s the practice of making your thinking visible to the people who benefit from understanding it. Inside a company, that means bringing other teams into your process early, not just presenting finished results. It means explaining the reasoning behind a decision, not just the decision. It means being in rooms where adjacent problems are being discussed, even when your calendar says you don’t need to be there.
The difference matters. Loudness without substance burns trust fast. But substance without legibility is a career stall disguised as integrity.
What actually changes when you stop working in isolation
The uncomfortable part of this realization isn’t that visibility matters. Most people already know that, even if they resent it. The uncomfortable part is that working cross-functionally usually produces better marketing.
The marketer who talks to sales regularly doesn’t just gain political capital. They gain signal. They hear which objections keep coming up, which personas are actually buying, which features close deals and which ones prospects ignore. That information shapes better campaigns, better positioning, better content. The silo wasn’t just a visibility problem. It was an information problem.
Which means the person who got promoted by being “louder” may have also been making better-informed decisions — not because they were smarter, but because they’d built the connective tissue that surfaces useful information. The work-speaks-for-itself crowd often underestimates how much of “good work” depends on inputs that only arrive through relationships.
The real skill gap
None of this is about becoming someone who self-promotes for sport. It’s about recognizing that communication across an organization is an actual skill. One that compounds. Every conversation with a peer in another department is a deposit into a network that pays out in context, credibility, and eventually, career progression.
The marketers who stall aren’t usually lacking in technical ability. They’re lacking in organizational fluency; the habit of making their work, their thinking, and their judgment visible to the people who make decisions about their future.
That’s not a personality trait. It’s a practice. And it’s one that most technically strong marketers underinvest in until it’s already cost them.