Noah Cisneros

Cross-Functional Leadership

Breaking Silos to Build Momentum

Lessons from Scaling TAB Bank’s Working Capital Product Marketing

When most people think about growth marketing, they picture clever ads, viral campaigns, or fancy analytics dashboards. What they don’t picture is the messy, behind-the-scenes work of getting product, sales, compliance, and marketing to row in the same direction.

That’s where cross-functional leadership comes in; it’s not for the faint of heart.

When I took on marketing for TAB Bank’s Working Capital product, it wasn’t a “broken” offering. The product worked. The clients who had it loved it. But awareness was low, sales cycles were longer than they needed to be, and our marketing efforts were operating in isolation from the teams that actually closed the deals.

The Real Job: Orchestrating, Not Just Marketing

My job wasn’t just “run campaigns.” It was to orchestrate moving parts across teams that had different priorities, different metrics, and, frankly, different languages.

  • Sales spoke in objections, quotas, and relationships.
  • Product spoke in features, roadmaps, and risk profiles.
  • Compliance spoke in regulations, disclosures, and “no, you can’t say that.”
  • Marketing spoke in impressions, CTR, and brand storytelling.

If you want cross-functional success, your first job is to become multilingual.

Building the Playbook

1. Partnering with Sales
 We tore apart the sales call notes and proposals to identify the real pain points our prospects had, and we built our messaging around solving those, not just listing product features.

2. Syncing with Product
 Marketing isn’t just lipstick on a pig. If the product team had updates or differentiators, we made sure those were front and center in campaigns and tested quickly to see what actually moved the needle.

3. Accelerating Compliance
 Anyone in financial services knows compliance can slow things to a crawl. We flipped the script by involving compliance at the brainstorming stage instead of the sign-off stage. This meant fewer re-writes, less frustration, and faster launches.

4. Creative & Digital Alignment
 Every campaign touchpoint — from a LinkedIn ad to a HubSpot workflow — was tied directly to the sales cycle. No fluffy campaigns that “built awareness” but didn’t move deals forward.

Execution That Actually Works

We used a multi-channel approach to increase B2B touchpoints. These included Display, Search, YouTube, LinkedIn, email nurture sequences, and targeted landing pages. But more importantly, we measured in two buckets:

  • Marketing Metrics – CTR, conversion rate, cost per lead.
  • Business Metrics – qualified opportunities created, sales cycle compression, revenue.

One of my favorite wins? A stalled initiative due to compliance pushback on our language. Instead of shelving it, we reframed the messaging with the same hook, but structured the claim in a way that met compliance standards. It went live, generated leads, and reinforced a core leadership principle:

Cross-functional leadership isn’t about avoiding friction. It’s about turning friction into forward motion.

Leadership Lessons from the Trenches

  1. Proactive Communication Beats Damage Control – Don’t wait for alignment; create it.
  2. Translate, Don’t Transmit – Every department speaks its own dialect. Learn it.
  3. Conflict Is a Tool – Yes, I’m direct (exceptionally low in politeness, according to my personality test). That’s not a bug: it’s a feature. Just pair it with enough empathy to keep the room engaged.

From One Win to a System

The success of the Working Capital campaigns wasn’t just about the product. It was about building a repeatable system for cross-functional wins: shared goals, shared language, and shared accountability.

If you’re leading across functions, remember this: stop thinking “my department” and start thinking “shared mission.” The scoreboard doesn’t care which department jersey you’re wearing: it only cares about your team losing or winning.

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