Marketing Capability Building: How to Develop Commercial Skills Across Your Team

Marketing capability building is no longer a luxury—it’s a critical investment for teams expected to prove value, influence commercial outcomes, and drive sustained business growth.

In today’s complex marketing landscape, the role of the marketer has undergone significant evolution. It’s not enough to simply deliver campaigns—teams must now operate with commercial clarity, work cross-functionally, and embed effectiveness into everything they do.

Yet many marketing teams are still structured—and skilled—around execution, not impact.

Why Marketing Teams Need to Evolve – Fast

According to LinkedIn’s Future of Skills: 2023 report, strategic marketing, performance measurement, and commercial acumen are among the most in-demand capabilities globally, and among the most underdeveloped.

That’s where marketing capability building comes in. Organisations must equip their teams with the right skills to think commercially, work cross-functionally, and embed marketing effectiveness into every role.

From Creative to Commercial – The Key Skill Gaps to Close

Many marketing teams excel at creativity and content, but commercial marketing skills are often underdeveloped. To drive long-term value, teams need to evolve across four key areas:

🔍 Strategic thinking – Aligning daily activity to business and customer outcomes
💡 Commercial acumen – Understanding how marketing contributes to revenue and margin
📊 Measurement literacy – Using meaningful metrics to track and improve performance
🤝 Cross-functional fluency – Collaborating across sales, product, finance and insight

The IPA’s Talent and Effectiveness Strategy highlights a major capability gap: many marketers lack confidence in making commercial decisions or communicating their impact.

Bridging this gap is essential to building effective marketing teams ready for the future.

To drive real change, marketing capability building must be woven into the fabric of the organisation—its culture, processes, and leadership approach.

Some proven strategies include:

📘 Creating a shared language of effectiveness – Align on what “good” looks like in terms of contribution to value
📈 Integrating effectiveness into individual goals – Use objectives that align marketing actions with commercial impact
👥 Peer learning and knowledge-sharing – Regular team learning sessions, cross-functional showcases and community-based learning
🎯 Formal programmes – Internal academies or tailored capability-building programmes, covering strategy, measurement, and planning

✅ Case study – The AA
We worked with the AA to unify the Brand and Acquisition teams through a single measurement framework. By aligning demand generation and conversion metrics, we enabled clearer planning, ownership, and  a more tangible impact.

In WARC’s 2023 article “Why marketing capabilities matter more than ever”, 69% of marketing leaders said capability building is critical to improving performance, yet only 20% felt they were doing it well.

Making It Stick – Embedding a Learning Culture

Capability building isn’t a one-off workshop—it’s a shift in how teams think and work. We’ve previously discussed how to build a Culture that enables marketing effectiveness and how to shift from judgment to helpfulness. To make it sustainable:

👓 Leadership role-modelling – Leaders must talk about outcomes, not just outputs
🏆 Celebrate commercial wins – Recognise behaviours and work that contribute to business value
🧪 Encourage experimentation – Create a psychologically safe environment to test, learn, and improve
📅 Build it into existing rhythms – For example, integrate effectiveness check-ins into planning or team reviews

💡 Pro tip: Connect skill-building efforts to your planning calendar – e.g. upskilling around measurement ahead of campaign reviews or annual planning.

What Can You Do Today?

Audit your team’s current capability.
– Use an effectiveness skills framework to identify strengths and gaps across roles

Start with one team or function.
– Focus on a high-impact area like planning or insight, and use it as a proof of concept

Engage a transformation partner.
– Whether it’s designing a learning roadmap or embedding better planning processes, support can accelerate results

Want to explore how to embed effectiveness into your team?
Join the conversation in The Ignition Room, or get in touch a Marketing Effectiveness Capability Audit.