Why the First Step to Solving It Is Stopping the Reflex to Route It
When a business problem hits the table, most leadership teams instinctively do the same thing — they route it to the department that seems like the closest fit. It’s efficient, and it feels decisive. But it also means the problem is viewed through a single lens, and the connections between functions that could solve it are never explored.
Cash flow is down? That’s Finance. Can’t find good people? HR. Processes are breaking as we scale? Operations.
The problem gets a label, the label gets a lane, and the conversation moves on. Everyone feels productive. But the BIG problem, the real, interconnected, strategic one, is still sitting in the middle of the table, untouched.
That’s exactly why we created What’s Your BIG Problem?™ (WYBP).
WYBP™ is a strategic card game featuring 48 business issues across six categories: Revenue, Growth, Brand, Competition, Performance, and Alignment; designed for leadership team facilitation.
“My Challenges Look Different”
Recently, an operations-focused advisor explored the WYBP™ deck and had a reaction that was honest:
“I’m an operations guy, and my challenges look different from what marketing can address.”
Building a leadership team. Creating playbooks. Training employees. Improving productivity. Increasing cash flow. These are real, urgent, and tangible. But they’re also symptoms — the day-to-day manifestations of larger strategic issues.
WYBP™ was built from our vantage point as fractional CMOs, and 48 cards can’t capture every challenge across every function. That said, the facilitation game was designed to work at a different altitude. “Building a leadership team” can cut across all six WYBP categories, while “increasing cash flow” is a revenue and performance issue. “Creating SOPs” is about performance at scale.
The distinction matters because when you name the symptom, you assign it to a department. When you name the strategic problem, you open the conversation to everyone who can help solve it.
Each of the challenges above can be addressed, at least in part, through strategic marketing. WYBP™ shows leaders what business problems look like through a strategic marketing lens, because that’s the perspective most leadership teams never get.
They may have outstanding marketing implementors, but fewer have a Chief Marketing Officer leading strategic thinking.
Where Strategic Marketing Meets the Rest of the Business
Let’s look at five challenges that get routed to a single department every day and why the solution almost always benefits from a wider lens.
1. Building a Leadership Team
The default owner: HR / Recruiting
Attracting top-tier talent requires internal communications and messaging that clarify the company’s vision, values, and direction, and external recruitment marketing that brings those to life. Your careers page, Google reviews, and Glassdoor presence aren’t HR deliverables. They’re brand assets. The right leaders don’t just want a job. They want to align with where a company is headed, not just where it’s been. If your employer brand doesn’t tell that story, you’re losing the candidates you need most — before they ever apply.
2. Creating SOPs and Playbooks
The default owner: Operations
We’ve developed many SOPs. Not just between sales and marketing, but across client experience workflows that touch every department. When your customer journey spans five teams, and no one owns the handoff, that’s not just an operations gap. That’s a strategic gap. Process discipline is how you keep things from falling through the cracks as you scale, and building the playbook to fix it is squarely within a CMO’s wheelhouse.
3. Training Employees
The default owner: HR / L&D
Training videos, LMS modules, onboarding playbooks; we’ve been involved in all of it. Consistency around process, access, and brand standards is what turns employees into brand ambassadors. If your team can’t articulate your value proposition the same way twice, that’s not a training problem. That’s a messaging problem with training implications.
4. Improving Productivity
The default owner: Operations / IT
In our role as fractional CMOs, we evaluate marketing and sales teams—their people, processes, and tools for project management, DAM, data, and more. Most of the time, the issue isn’t the tools. It’s people's behaviors and a lack of focus and strategy. Adding accountability and measurables creates productivity. Many of our clients use EOS and the “GWC” framework, and our process dovetails nicely because strategic marketing leadership is about aligning effort with outcomes, not just checking boxes.
5. Increasing Cash Flow
The default owner: Finance / Sales Cash flow isn’t just a finance metric; it’s a strategic outcome. We evaluate product and service lines to identify winners and losers. We build predictable pipelines by strategically positioning the winners relative to the competition. We design lead-nurturing and revenue-focused initiatives that reduce friction, shorten sales cycles, and improve win/close rates. When you stop spending money on what doesn’t drive revenue and double down on what does, cash flow follows.
The Problem with “Marketing Problems”
Too often, people think of “marketing” as only able to solve “marketing problems” — website functionality, SEO, and social media. The tactical stuff.
It’s a common perception, and it’s costing companies real money.
Strategic marketing touches revenue, growth, performance, brand, competition, and alignment. Those aren’t marketing categories. They’re business categories. And they’re the six pillars of WYBP™ for a reason.
One of our goals in creating this tool was to build education and awareness—not to convince people they have a marketing problem, but to open the conversation by first identifying the problem. When you lead with the issue rather than the department, you begin to see that disciplines that seemed siloed are actually deeply connected. And that shift in perspective is often the first real step toward solving the BIG problem a leadership team has been circling for months or even years.
Start with the Problem, Not the Org Chart
The leaders who will get the most out of WYBP™ aren’t the ones who see their department’s problems in the deck. They’re the ones who see their company’s problems and recognize that the solution was never going to come from one lane.
Whether you’re a CEO focused on revenue growth and EBITDA, a COO trying to systematize operations across expanding markets, or a CHRO rethinking how you attract top talent, the answer starts with a better question.
What’s your BIG problem?
Ready to find out?
WYBP™ is built for leadership teams, facilitators, and business advisors, regardless of which side of the org chart you sit on. Use it in a strategic planning session, a boardroom, or a one-on-one with your team to start the conversation that matters most.