Silo Syndrome
Five symptoms that tell you your revenue teams are working next to each other instead of with each other.
Human truth
Silos feel like normal company life. Each team is busy hitting its own number, so nobody calls it a problem until a customer falls through the space between them.
The parts
Information hoarding
What one team knows stays with that team. Nobody else gets the context they'd need to help.
Lack of cross-functional collaboration
Teams work next to each other, not with each other. Work gets passed over the wall instead of built together.
Misaligned language
Each department uses the same words to mean different things, so agreement in a meeting doesn't survive the walk back to the desk.
Competition between GTM functions
Sales, marketing and CS compete with each other for credit and resources instead of with the market.
Team-based identity
People identify with their team before the company or the customer, and the customer's problem becomes somebody else's department.
When to reach for it
Teams argue over whose number is right. Information lives in one team's tool and nowhere else. Customer problems get bounced from department to department. Everyone is working hard and the customer still feels the seams.
The essay
I
grew up in the punk scene. Somewhere along the way I started bringing what I learned in the mosh pit, about building communities that shake things up, into the work pit.
What I wanted to shake up was silos.
I didn't name Silo Syndrome. Phil Ensor did, at Goodyear, back in the 1980s. But when I started Kill Yr Silos, probably the first RevOps podcast, the term fit everything I kept seeing in revenue teams. So I started listing the symptoms.
People hoard information. Teams don't work across functions. Every department speaks its own language. Sales, marketing and CS compete with each other instead of with the market. And people identify with their team before the company or the customer.
None of these look like a crisis on any given day. They look like a normal company. That's what makes them dangerous. Each one is small enough to live with, and together they decide how the customer is treated.
Underneath all five is the same missing thing. When we see Silo Syndrome happening, there isn't a common, customer-based goal. Every team is optimizing for its own number, and the customer walks straight through the gaps between them.
That's why the fix was never another meeting. At Go Nimbly the answer was revenue operations: pull the siloed operations teams together into one function around the customer. We'd map the customer's journey with a client, find the places where the silos showed up as gaps in the buying experience, and work on the people, process and data behind each one.
#SiloNoMore started as a hashtag. It caught on in the RevOps community, and for years it was the closest thing I had to a slogan.
Years later I'd describe the problem differently. A silo is the wall between two teams. What I care about now is what happens at the wall: two teams leave the same meeting sure they agree, each fills in the blanks on its own, and then they run into each other. I call that a collision, and it's where this arc goes next. ■
Where it came from
The term "Silo Syndrome" is Phil Ensor's, from his work at Goodyear in the 1980s (credited in a Go Nimbly / Chargify write-up). The five symptoms, the #SiloNoMore hashtag and the Kill Yr Silos podcast are Jason's. Go Nimbly built a "Silo No More" workshop on the same idea, mapping the customer journey to find where people, process and data silos become gaps.