Who Owns Your Audience? The Missing Role Every Organization Needs
When customer relationships get fragmented across departments, everyone owns a piece—and no one owns the outcome
Only after publishing my work earlier today on Substack did I realize I had narrowly focused it so much that it felt like if you didn't work in a newsroom, it didn't apply to you. But the truth is, every "customer-first" organization fragments audience relationships the same way.
Ask just about any CEO "who owns your customer relationships?" and you'll watch them struggle to give a clear answer.
That's likely because whether you're a SaaS startup, retail brand, or nonprofit, you've probably split audience work across:
Marketing (acquisition and awareness)
Product (user experience and features)
Customer Success/Support (retention and satisfaction)
Sales (conversion and revenue)
Operations (delivery and fulfillment)
Marketing builds brands and drives acquisition campaigns, while Customer Success deals with the churn those campaigns create. But nobody connects the feedback loop between what was promised and what was delivered.
The Universal Coordination Problem
This fragmentation happens regardless of size or structure, whether you're a Fortune 500 company or a local synagogue where roles are combined.
If you're the executive director of a synagogue, you might wear the Customer Success/Support, Sales, and Operations hats, a volunteer may handle marketing, and the clergy may own the product experience. When everyone owns audience, no one owns it.
Optimization happens in silos. The executive director may see the connection between a happy congregant and a donor, but what is the marketing volunteer doing to amplify that story? How does the rabbi's programming connect to what actually builds lasting community?
This applies to any industry. Think about where you work—do any of these examples sound familiar?
SaaS: Product builds features users don't want because they don't talk to the customer success team hearing actual pain points.
E-commerce: Marketing drives traffic to products that customer service knows have quality issues.
B2B: Sales promises capabilities that product can't deliver because nobody connects the feedback loop.
Local Business: An artist sells custom lawn signs online without coordinating with fulfillment, leading to canceled orders and frustrated customers.
The Real Cost of Fragmentation
This isn't just theoretical—it has measurable business costs. When departments optimize in silos, you get missed opportunities, waste, and customer frustration.
At Philly.com, when we launched our industry-groundbreaking daily deals product, lack of coordination between marketing and tech teams resulted in a promotion our system couldn't handle. Customer frustration ensued—all easily preventable with better communication.
The pattern repeats everywhere: marketing creates expectations that operations can't meet, product builds solutions that sales can't sell, customer success identifies problems that never reach the teams who could fix them.
The Solution Isn't Always Hiring
While it may sound like I'm advocating that every organization needs a Chief Audience Officer, I don't think that's realistic for most companies.
The solution isn't necessarily a new hire—it's about creating systems for departments to share customer intelligence. At its core, it's about mission alignment: being clear about what success looks like for the whole customer relationship, not just individual department metrics.
Instead of marketing optimizing for leads, customer success for retention rates, and sales for deal size—everyone optimizes for customer lifetime value, satisfaction, or whatever your north star metric is.
Simple Systems That Work
You don't need complex organizational restructuring. Start with:
Monthly cross-department customer feedback sessions where each team shares what they're hearing and learning.
Shared dashboards showing how department actions affect each other—not just individual team metrics.
One coordination point person (doesn't have to be senior) whose job includes connecting dots between teams and translating customer insights across departments.
Customer journey mapping that all departments contribute to and reference when making decisions.
Start Small, Think Big
Pick one customer pain point that spans departments and assign someone to solve it end-to-end.
For example, if customers complain about confusing billing, have one person work with sales (what they're promising), product (how it's implemented), and support (what customers actually experience) to fix the disconnect. Use that as proof of concept for better coordination.
For our synagogue executive director, this might mean monthly check-ins with the marketing volunteer to share what's resonating with congregants, or creating a simple shared document tracking which programs build community versus just filling seats.
The goal isn't perfect coordination—it's conscious coordination. Someone needs to be thinking about how all the pieces of your customer relationship fit together.
Because when audience is everyone's job, it becomes no one's job. And that's when customer-first organizations accidentally become customer-confused.
What's one customer complaint at your organization that multiple departments touch? That's your coordination opportunity waiting to happen. Tell me what you find—I'd love to hear how different organizations are tackling this challenge.