You wouldn't use Slack as your CRM. So why is your marketing team doing dev work?
You wouldn't use Slack as your CRM. So why is your marketing team doing dev work?
Slack is an excellent tool. It keeps teams connected, moves conversations out of email, and integrates with almost everything you already use. But you would never open Slack and expect it to manage your sales pipeline. Not because Slack is bad, it's brilliant at what it does. But because it was never built for that job.
The same logic applies to your marketing team. And yet, in growth-stage companies across the UK and Europe, marketing teams are routinely being handed work that was never their job: updating the CMS, troubleshooting broken integrations, building landing pages from scratch, managing plugin conflicts, and attempting website changes that, when they go wrong, create problems engineering then has to quietly fix.
This is not a competence problem. It is a role alignment problem.
The situation that created this
Fast-moving companies run lean. There are never enough people. Engineering is focused on the product roadmap, rightfully so. And when marketing needs something on the website, someone makes a reasonable call: the marketing team is closest to it, they have access to the CMS, and they're smart people. Surely they can figure it out.
Often they can. And that's partly the problem.
Because "figuring it out" becomes the expectation. The workaround becomes the workflow. And gradually, your Head of Marketing, the person you hired to own strategy, drive pipeline, and position your product in a competitive market , is spending a meaningful portion of their week inside WordPress, chasing a developer for a form fix, or trying to understand why a HubSpot sync stopped working after someone renamed a field.
What it costs the marketing team
If you're on the marketing side reading this, you already know the number. The hours lost to tasks that sit nowhere near a campaign brief. The Friday afternoon spent troubleshooting a landing page that should have been a 30-minute job. The strategic work that keeps getting pushed because the operational fires keep arriving first.
Marketing Week's 2025 Career and Salary Survey , which surveyed over 3,500 marketers, found that 58% felt overwhelmed in the past year, 56% felt undervalued, and just over half reported emotional exhaustion. These are not the numbers of a team that is thriving. They are the numbers of a team that has been asked to do too many jobs at once.
And the senior people are not immune. The same research found that 54% of CMOs, directors and VPs felt overwhelmed, the people who are supposed to be setting direction, not putting out fires.
Research consistently shows that splitting attention across unrelated tasks reduces productivity by nearly 40% . For a marketing team already managing an average of ten channels, up from seven just a few years ago, adding technical work to that mix does not stretch the team. It degrades them.
What it costs the business
The impact does not stay inside the marketing department.
When your Head of Marketing is context-switching between campaign strategy and CMS troubleshooting, you are not getting full output from either. The strategy is slower and shallower than it should be. The technical work is slower and riskier than it would be in the right hands. You are paying a senior marketing salary for work that is being split across two entirely different categories of problem.
IDC's 2025 research on the execution gap in marketing found that most teams lack the operational infrastructure to execute their strategy, defined processes, repeatable workflows, and the right people in the right roles. The ambition exists. The capacity to execute it does not.
That gap is not closed by asking marketing to work harder. It is closed by giving them the right support structure.
"Just use AI" is not the fix either
When the dev bottleneck becomes visible, the next reasonable call is: let AI handle it. Hand the website task to an AI tool, let it generate the code or make the change, and move on.
Sometimes that works. More often, it creates a different problem.
AI is genuinely capable. The issue is not what it can do, it is what it does not know about your specific setup when it does it.
A marketing team member prompting their way through a form change does not necessarily know that field names need to match exactly what the CRM is listening for. They may not know that the lead form requires multiple IDs to support legacy systems running underneath. They do not know that the section they just asked AI to restructure was the one engineering spent two weeks optimising. AI fills in those gaps confidently, produces something that looks correct, and moves on.
The error surfaces later. Usually as a ticket. The form is live, the campaign is running, and three days in someone notices that submissions are not triggering the Customer.io email sequence. Engineering gets a report. They trace it back. The fix takes an hour but the diagnosis takes three, and now both engineering and marketing have spent time on a problem that a developer with context would have caught before the change went live.
In the meantime, the marketing team has also spent real AI budget iterating through prompts on a problem they did not fully understand to begin with. Not because they are careless, but because they were handed a technical task without the technical context needed to prompt their way through it correctly.
The result is three costs stacked on top of each other: AI credits spent, marketing hours lost, and an engineering ticket that should never have existed. The bottleneck did not go away. It made a round trip and came back more expensive.
The person using AI to make website changes is not solving the bottleneck. They are the symptom of how bad it has already become.
The right tool for the right job
Slack does not try to be a CRM. HubSpot does not try to be a project management tool. Each of these tools is valuable because it does one thing exceptionally well.
Your marketing team should work the same way. Not because they are not capable, but because capability spread too thin is capability wasted.
The website changes, the platform updates, the integration fixes, the new section builds, these are not marketing work. They are development work that sits between marketing and engineering. And when there is no one in that gap, the work falls to whoever is closest. Usually marketing. Usually at the cost of the work they were actually hired to do.
A monthly development retainer built for marketing teams is not a luxury. It is the operational fix that lets your marketing team do what you hired them to do, while giving your engineering team back the focus they need to do the same.
If your marketing team is spending hours a week on work that should never have reached their desk, that is what the Not So Traditional retainer is built to solve.
Want the data on what this bottleneck is costing in hours and budget? Read: Your marketing team is losing 328 hours a year before a single campaign goes live →
Sources: Marketing Week 2025 Career & Salary Survey · IDC: Facing the Execution Gap 2025 · Marketing Week: Emotional Exhaustion Survey