How Inclusively Built a Marketing Org That Ships Forbes Coverage in 30 Days
Every startup org chart looks the same. CEO at the top. VP of Sales on one side, VP of Marketing on the other. Clean lines, clear responsibilities, perfect separation of concerns. And in early-stage companies, this structure guarantees one thing: your messaging will be slow, generic, and disconnected from what actually resonates with customers.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Charlotte Dales, CEO and Co-Founder of Inclusively—a workplace personalization platform that’s raised $20 million—described an organizational choice that breaks every conventional rule. Her VP of Marketing doesn’t report to a CMO. She reports to the head of customer delivery.
The result? New messaging tested with customers, refined based on real feedback, and picked up by Forbes—all within 30 days. Here’s why this “wrong” structure actually works better than the textbook approach.
The Traditional Structure and Why It Fails
Most early-stage companies organize marketing as an independent function. The logic makes sense on paper: marketing needs autonomy to build brand, create content, and generate demand without being pulled into day-to-day customer firefighting.
But this separation creates a fundamental problem: marketing becomes isolated from the voice of the customer. The VP of Marketing learns about customer pain points through sales calls recordings, survey data, and quarterly business reviews—all filtered, delayed, and stripped of context.
Meanwhile, the customer success team is hearing unfiltered feedback every day. They know what messaging resonates because they hear customers repeat it back. They know what features actually matter because they see what drives adoption. They know what problems are urgent because they’re the ones getting panicked Slack messages.
In the traditional structure, this intelligence takes weeks or months to flow from customer success to marketing. By the time marketing updates messaging, the market has moved.
Charlotte built something different at Inclusively.
The Unconventional Structure
“Our team now we have one VP of marketing, and then she reports into like our service and delivery person who manages both like marketing, but also all the content that goes out to our existing clients and the employees that we are attracting to come on to our platform,” Charlotte explains.
Read that carefully. Marketing doesn’t report to a CMO or directly to Charlotte. Marketing reports to the person responsible for customer delivery and success. This person oversees both external marketing and internal client-facing content.
Why would you deliberately break the traditional structure? Charlotte’s reasoning is tactical: “I think tying marketing in the early stages, this is not a forever thing, but I think tying marketing in the early stages to part of the organization that’s actually delivering value for clients has been really helpful because those messages get so synced up.”
The key phrase: “this is not a forever thing.” Charlotte isn’t arguing this structure works for Series C companies with 200 employees. She’s arguing it works for early-stage companies that need to move fast and stay close to customers.
The Feedback Loop That Changes Everything
The organizational structure creates a feedback loop that’s nearly instantaneous. “Anything we learn from a customer perspective is like going into marketing within the same day.”
Within the same day. Not next sprint. Not next quarter. The same day.
This speed matters because early-stage marketing isn’t about executing a master plan—it’s about rapid iteration based on market feedback. Every customer conversation reveals how they talk about their problems, what language resonates, what objections come up repeatedly.
In the traditional structure, this intelligence gets documented in notes, discussed in weekly meetings, prioritized against other initiatives, and eventually makes it into a marketing brief. Weeks later, new messaging gets created. By then, the market context has changed.
In Charlotte’s structure, the person hearing customer feedback is the same person directing marketing efforts. The translation layer disappears. The latency drops to hours instead of weeks.
The Forbes Story: From Insight to Coverage in 30 Days
The proof came when Inclusively developed new messaging around macro workforce trends. “I mean, I remember we kind of came up with some of this new messaging around, you know, tying the macro trends to what we’re doing and really seeing like, oh my gosh, that’s like really helping people to understand what we do, the problems we solve.”
This messaging wasn’t created in isolation. It came from customer conversations where the team noticed what helped prospects understand the value proposition. They tied Inclusively’s product to bigger trends—Gen Z workforce challenges, the shift from DEI to retention, the talent crisis.
Here’s where the structure mattered: “And you know, within a month that whole story was covered by Forbes and I was like, guys, we got to take a moment here. That was really fast. Like we came up with this, we brainstormed, we tested on a few clients and it was in Forbes within, you know, four weeks.”
Four weeks from initial concept to Forbes coverage. Because the person managing marketing was also managing client delivery, they could:
- Identify the message resonating in customer conversations
- Test variations in ongoing client interactions
- Refine based on immediate feedback
- Package for media outreach
- Ship to journalists while the insight was fresh
In a traditional structure, step 2 alone takes weeks. You’d need to coordinate with customer success, schedule test conversations, collect feedback, analyze results. By the time you’re ready to pitch journalists, the insight feels stale.
When This Structure Makes Sense (And When It Doesn’t)
Charlotte is explicit that this isn’t a permanent structure. “I think tying marketing in the early stages, this is not a forever thing.”
So when does it make sense?
This structure works when:
- You’re pre-Series B with limited headcount
- Your messaging is still evolving (you haven’t nailed positioning)
- You’re selling complex enterprise products requiring education
- Customer feedback directly improves your pitch
- Speed matters more than scale
This structure breaks when:
- You need high-volume demand gen campaigns
- Marketing becomes primarily about execution rather than iteration
- You have enough customers that individual feedback is less informative
- Your messaging is stable and the job is optimization, not discovery
Charlotte hints at this distinction: “I think if you’re doing non enterprise sales and it’s more volumes play, smaller ticket sizes and faster sales cycles, some of the traditional techniques work a lot more.”
For high-velocity, product-led growth companies, the traditional separation makes more sense. You need marketing to run campaigns at scale, not iterate on messaging with every customer.
But for enterprise, where each deal is high-touch and messaging needs to resonate with multiple stakeholders? The tight coupling between marketing and customer delivery creates a competitive advantage.
The Second-Order Benefits Nobody Talks About
Beyond faster feedback loops, this structure creates unexpected benefits:
Unified voice across touchpoints. When the same team manages both marketing content and customer-facing content, prospects experience consistency from first touch through onboarding. There’s no disconnect between the promise marketing makes and the experience delivery provides.
Better content for multiple audiences. Charlotte notes the team manages “all the content that goes out to our existing clients and the employees that we are attracting to come on to our platform.” This means marketing isn’t just thinking about leads—they’re thinking about the entire journey, including how to activate employees who use the platform.
Faster identification of product gaps. When marketing sits in customer delivery meetings, they hear about feature requests, competitive threats, and use cases the product doesn’t support. This intelligence can flow directly into product roadmap conversations.
How to Implement This Structure
For founders considering this approach, Charlotte’s structure requires specific conditions:
The right leader. You need someone who can think strategically about marketing while staying operationally involved in delivery. This is rare. Most people are either strategic marketers or operational customer success leaders, not both.
Clear scope boundaries. Charlotte specifies the leader “manages both like marketing, but also all the content that goes out to our existing clients.” Define exactly what falls under this role to avoid scope creep.
Explicit time allocation. The leader needs dedicated time for each function. If customer delivery emergencies always win, marketing becomes an afterthought.
Defined transition plan. Charlotte explicitly calls this a temporary structure. Have a clear sense of what metrics or milestones trigger reorganization.
The Underlying Principle
Strip away the org chart details and you’re left with a principle: in early-stage enterprise companies, proximity to customers matters more than functional specialization.
The traditional structure optimizes for clear responsibilities and scalable execution. Charlotte’s structure optimizes for speed of learning and quality of market intelligence.
Most founders default to the traditional structure because it’s familiar, not because it’s better. They hire a VP of Marketing, give them a budget and goals, and expect magic. Then they wonder why messaging takes months to improve and never quite captures what resonates with customers.
Charlotte’s approach forces the opposite: marketing can’t escape customer feedback because it’s organizationally embedded in the team that talks to customers every day.
The question isn’t whether this structure is “right”—it’s whether speed of learning or scale of execution matters more for your company right now. For most early-stage B2B companies, the answer is obvious. But few have the courage to structure their teams accordingly.
Charlotte did. And shipped Forbes coverage in 30 days while competitors were still scheduling their quarterly messaging review.
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