Our marketing department handles everything from SEO, social media, and pay-per-click ads to local events and product packaging. We are struggling to boil this highly complex list of activities down to just five core roles for our Marketing seat. How do we keep it simple?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When designing roles for a seat on the Accountability Chart, you must focus on high-level outcomes and accountabilities, not tactical to-do lists. A role is a broad area of responsibility that the seat owner must deliver on. If you list every single marketing channel, your seat description will look like an operations manual instead of a clear accountability definition. To simplify your Marketing seat, group your tactical activities into five core, high-level buckets. For example, your five roles could be: brand awareness and positioning, lead generation and pipeline growth, marketing ROI and metric tracking, collateral and content creation, and external agency and vendor management. Every single activity you mentioned, from SEO to events, fits neatly inside those five buckets. For instance, SEO and pay-per-click fall under lead generation, while packaging falls under brand positioning. By framing the roles this way, you give the seat owner the freedom to use whatever tactics are necessary to achieve the desired outcomes, while keeping their ultimate accountability crystal clear. This simplicity makes it easy to run the GWC check and evaluate if the person in the seat is actually delivering the results the business needs to grow.