When you spend enough time inside growing businesses, one thing becomes clear fairly quickly. Marketing rarely operates in isolation.
In many teams, marketing sits alongside commercial, product and revenue functions, sometimes as a separate discipline, sometimes embedded directly within them. The structure varies, but the relationship is consistent. Marketing helps shape demand, commercial teams convert and retain it, and both rely on shared insight, data and direction.
That understanding comes from industry experience. It’s what we see day to day when supporting businesses and people through hiring decisions.
Marketing and commercial aren’t polar opposites
In practice, marketing and commercial teams are solving different parts of the same problem. How to grow a business in a sustainable, repeatable way.
Marketing brings clarity around audience, positioning, messaging and channels. Commercial teams bring focus on pipeline, relationships and revenue. In well-structured teams, these functions work closely together, sharing goals and learning from each other.
Sometimes that collaboration is informal. In other cases, roles are deliberately designed to sit across both areas, particularly in start-ups and scale-ups where teams are lean and responsibilities are broader.
Where we see the crossover most clearly
Through our work, we often see overlap in areas such as:
Growth roles that combine marketing insight with commercial awareness
Ecommerce teams where performance, trading and customer experience intersect
Revenue and operations roles that support both marketing and sales performance
Marketing roles embedded within sales-led or product-led teams
These aren’t trends for the sake of it. They reflect how businesses actually operate as they grow.
Why this matters for hiring
Understanding how marketing and commercial teams work together helps businesses hire more effectively. Clearer role definition, better alignment across teams and more realistic expectations all contribute to stronger outcomes and better retention.
For candidates, it means understanding the environment you’re joining. Some roles sit within traditional marketing teams. Others work more closely with commercial or revenue functions. Knowing that context upfront makes a big difference to long-term fit and job satisfaction.
Our approach
At Kin Collective, marketing recruitment remains at the core of what we do. It’s where our roots are and where much of our experience sits. But that experience has also shown us how closely marketing connects with commercial, growth, ecommerce, revenue and technology teams in practice.
That’s why we recruit across marketing and commercial roles. Not because the lines are blurred for the sake of it, but because understanding how these functions work together allows us to support businesses and people more thoughtfully.
The goal isn’t to label teams differently. It’s to help them work better together.
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Image: N7, Adobe Stock (ID: 869114300)