The Internal Alignment Playbook

Built from a conversation with Kelly Ranieri, Associate Vice President of Marketing at Northland, and Sara Graham, Founder and CEO of Six Dots Consulting. Watch the full session.

Doing great marketing is only half the job. Getting your organization to understand it, fund it, and actually adopt it is the other half.

Almost none of that second half lives in a job description. Nobody writes “spend a quarter of your week explaining the strategy to people who don’t report to you” into a job posting, and yet that work is often what separates a marketing team that ships from one that doesn’t.

This playbook is the framework for doing it deliberately: claiming the time for internal education, mapping the people who can stall your work, and turning resistance into a better plan. It came out of a conversation between two multifamily marketing leaders who have both had to figure it out the hard way, one inside a nationwide portfolio and one advising operators from the outside.

Read it through once, then work the sections that apply to you right now.

Why This Decides Whether Your Work Ships

Marketing can move mountains, and most marketers already believe that. The problem is that belief isn’t distributed evenly across your organization. The people who approve your budget, the regionals who have to endorse your strategy, and the on-site teams who have to live with it every day all need a different version of the same explanation.

“I have learned that doing great marketing work is only part of the job. Making sure the rest of the organization understands the strategy and the why behind it and the value it brings is just as important.”

– Kelly Ranieri, AVP of Marketing, Northland

When that alignment is missing, the pattern is predictable. Leadership questions the spend. Regionals slow-walk the rollout. Site teams quietly go back to what they were doing before. None of that is a failure of the marketing work itself. It’s a failure to market the marketing.

One mantra runs underneath all three: context, relevance, consistency. Give people enough context to understand the why. Make it relevant to what they specifically care about. Then say it again, because saying it once is not the same as being understood.

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Claim the Time for Internal Education

The first question is how much of your week this should take. There isn’t a universal answer, and anyone who gives you one is selling something.

When we asked a room of multifamily marketing leaders how much of their time currently goes to educating up and across the company, the answers ranged from 10% to 60%, with several saying that in busy stretches it hits 75% or higher. Asked what the number should be, most wanted it lower. The honest read is that it varies enormously depending on two things: how flat or matrixed your organization is, and who you report to.

That second one matters more than people expect. Plenty of senior marketers have not reported to another marketer in decades. When your direct supervisor is a COO, a president, or a CEO, they may not know much about what you’re working on, and the education load lands on you by default. That isn’t a problem to resent. It’s usually an opening for real conversations about resource allocation and priorities that you would not otherwise get.

“I myself have not reported to another marketer in more than 20 years.”

– Sara Graham, Founder and CEO, Six Dots Consulting

So set a target that matches your company and your seniority, protect it on the calendar, and revisit it when your reporting line changes.

It’s Advocacy, Not Reporting

The most common mistake is treating internal education as status reporting. It isn’t. It’s closer to internal PR: visibility, advocacy, and alignment.

That framing makes some people uncomfortable, because it can feel like tooting your own horn. Reposition it. You are not promoting yourself. You are advocating for resources, and you are building enough shared understanding that other people can advocate for you when you’re not in the room.

“When you’re doing this PR work, it can feel a little like you are tooting your own horn. But I actually think of that in a different way, where you are actually advocating for resources and you are creating knowledge about the work that you and your team are doing.”

– Sara Graham, Founder and CEO, Six Dots Consulting

That’s when it starts compounding. Someone from another department says marketing mentioned they’re working on this, and it’s going to make the on-site team’s job easier. Someone in finance says this is going to change how we plan the budget. Someone in operations says yes, we actually do need this platform, because it lets us cut something that nobody adopted anyway.

You cannot manufacture those moments in a meeting. They happen because you did the education work months earlier.

Translate One Strategy Into Three Messages

The strategy doesn’t change by audience. How you communicate it absolutely should. Each group is asking a different question, and your job is to answer the one they’re actually asking.

• The C-suite and senior leadership want the business case. Keep it at that level: what’s the challenge or opportunity, what is marketing recommending, what’s the investment, and what impact do we expect. They don’t need the tactical detail, and giving it to them makes the case harder to follow, not easier.
• Regional and department leaders want it closer to the portfolio. What are we seeing at their specific communities, why is this strategy the right response to that, and where do you need their support to make it work. This is where endorsement gets won or lost.
• On-site teams want it practical. What’s changing, why, what do we need you to do differently, and above all, how does this help you or your property. If you can’t answer that last one, you are not ready to roll out.

The Warning Signs You’ve Under-Communicated

There are reliable signals that your message hasn’t landed. Learn to read them early, because each one tells you something specific.

• Leadership repeatedly questioning ROI usually means the business case never landed, not that they doubt marketing. Go back to investment and expected impact.
• Debate about what a number even means is a definitions problem. Align on the metric before you argue about the result.
• Pushback from regionals usually means relevance was missing. They haven’t been shown what this does at their communities.
• A steady stream of questions from site teams is the practical version of the same gap. It also happens to be the cheapest feedback you will ever get.

“I think of questions and pushback as information. They tell you where you may have an education gap, and that’s really valuable for you to be aware of.”

Kelly Ranieri, AVP of Marketing, Northland

None of these are attacks. Questions don’t mean something is wrong. They mean you have an opening to provide context, and they tell you exactly where the education gap is. The teams that treat this as intelligence get ahead of the next rollout. The teams that treat it as friction stay reactive.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Kelly Ranieri’s team at Northland rolled out a new reporting dashboard with a long-standing vendor partner. It’s a significant change from what site teams were used to. Almost immediately, frustration comes back about the interface and how to navigate it.

The instinct is to read that as a product problem. It was a communication problem. Announcing the platform once was not enough. The fix was more education, not more features: additional training sessions with the vendor, ongoing updates as enhancements shipped, and standing opportunities for people to ask questions and give feedback.

And the communication looked different for each group. Site teams got the practical version: how do you use this, where do you go for help. Regionals got the change summary and how it supports their teams. Leadership got the investment conversation: is this platform delivering the value we expected.

One rollout, three messages, sustained over months rather than announced once.

Get Education Out of Your Inbox

If everything you’ve ever explained lives in old emails, your institutional knowledge leaves when people leave. New hires inherit nothing. People who missed the email in March are still operating on pre-March information in September.
Build a central place instead: an internal hub, a shared knowledge base, whatever your organization will actually use. One source people can return to, rather than a search through aging threads and outdated training decks. This is unglamorous and it compounds faster than almost anything else on this list.

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Map the People Who Control Change

Marketing is one of the most cross-collaborative functions in any company, and especially in multifamily. Depending on your organization, the list of people who can stall your work includes the C-suite, owners, asset managers, property managers, operations, IT, HR, and if you do development and lease-ups, effectively the entire development company.

That’s a long list, and treating everyone on it the same way is why initiatives stall. Sort them instead.

The Three Buckets: Approval, Influence, Adoption

• Approval. The people who ultimately decide whether you can move forward. Depending on the size of the ask, that might be your SVP, another VP who owns part of the portfolio, or the CEO. They care about the business case: cost, risk, expected impact, why now, and how you’ll measure success. They need to believe the case is sound.
• Influence. Often regional leaders, or a department like asset management that you work with constantly. They may not sign anything, but if they don’t believe in what you’re doing, it will not gain traction. They care about what this does for their portfolio and their people.
• Adoption. Community managers and site teams. The people who have to live with whatever you implement, every day. They care what’s changing, why, what you need from them, and how it helps them.

Sort every stakeholder into one of the three, then plan a different conversation for each.

Approval Is Not Adoption

This is the single most expensive lesson on this page.

You can get full executive approval for a new platform and still watch it fail, because you never brought along the people who actually had to use it. The pitch that wins a budget conversation is about cost, efficiency, and better decisions. That is not the pitch that makes a leasing team change their daily workflow. Different bucket, different questions, different conversation.

“Approval and adoption are two completely different things. I can get approval for a new marketing platform or a strategy and I can still have it fail, because I didn’t bring along the people who actually needed to adopt it.”

-Kelly Ranieri, AVP of Marketing, Northland

If you only prepare one version of the argument, you will win the version you rehearsed and lose the one you didn’t.

Run a Listening Tour

The most reliable way to build this map is also the simplest, and you can do it on day one or day one thousand and one.

Pick the people you and your team intersect with most, plus anyone with real influence even if you rarely work with them directly. Set up short conversations. In person if you can, video if your team is distributed. Aim for somewhere between five and a dozen, and get them done inside 60 days so the feedback is comparable rather than scattered across a year.

Ask what’s working. Ask what isn’t. Ask where things get blocked. And ask the magic wand question: if you could have marketing do anything, what would it be? You are not a genie and you should say so, but the answer tells you what they actually care about, which is the whole point.

If you work on the operator side, include on-site teams. You will learn more than you expect.

Ask your own team too. Where are we getting pushback? What’s going well? Where are the questions coming from?

Then collate everything and look for patterns. They will show up on their own. What you end up with is a documented list of friction points, opportunities, and allies, and that becomes the foundation for any strategic initiative you want to stand up or refine. Some of what surfaces will be things you had no idea existed.

“The listening tour to me is something that has been just a gold mine of information. If you work on the operator side, I strongly encourage you to include some on-site teams in this. You will learn more than you ever dreamed possible.”

– Sara Graham, Founder and CEO, Six Dots Consulting

One more thing this gives you: the value proposition of every department you work with, in their own words. That’s worth the calendar time by itself.

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Turn Resistance Into a Better Plan

When someone pushes back, the instinct is to ask how do I get them on board. Better question: why are they pushing back, and what does that tell me?

Resistance is feedback. It tells you what’s unclear, what feels risky, and where the real concerns live. Sometimes it tells you that you’re wrong, which is uncomfortable and also extremely useful before you’ve rolled something out to a hundred properties.

What “I Don’t Want to Do This” Usually Means

Four things hide behind that sentence, and they need different responses.

• They don’t understand why well enough yet. That’s a context gap, and it’s on you.
• They tried something similar before and it failed. You want to hear that story in detail. It probably contains the reason your version will be received the way it is.
• There’s an operational challenge marketing isn’t aware of. This is the valuable one. Something about the workflow, the staffing, or the timing makes your plan harder than you know.
• They’re right, and your strategy needs to change. It happens. Catching it here is cheaper than catching it later.

Don’t Go Into Selling Mode

The reflex when you hit resistance is to sell harder. That’s the move that costs you the information.

Instead of asking a site team or a regional to buy into a platform, lay out the problem you’re trying to solve, the outcome you’re trying to create, and how you’re recommending you get there. Then stop talking and ask what they think.

“I don’t typically go in to a site team or my regionals and say, I need you to buy into this platform. I try to say instead, here’s the problem we’re trying to solve, here’s the outcome we’re trying to create, and this is how we’re recommending we get there. And then I stop and I listen and I ask for their perspective.”

-Kelly Ranieri, AVP of Marketing, Northland

Most of the time you learn something. At minimum, the relationship gets stronger, and the relationship is what makes the next thing easier.

What Handling Pushback Looks Like

Northland’s marketing team changed the conversion prompts on their property websites. Solid reasoning, well communicated. Pushback from the regionals anyway, and their concern is specific: this will hurt lease velocity.

The move that worked was not sending more rationale. It was asking more questions to understand why they were worried, then addressing that concern directly, and closing with a reminder that everyone is aimed at the same outcome. We would never do something we thought would hurt lease velocity. We’re on the same team here.

The reply came back: thanks for explaining, this makes sense now, looking forward to seeing it roll out. The first email had been a flat no with no explanation.

The difference was five minutes of asking why instead of five minutes of re-arguing.

When You Truly Can’t Move Someone

Sometimes the blocker is entrenched, and often there’s history you don’t know about. A pilot that went badly six or twelve months ago leaves a mark.

Start by finding out why, and go in collaboratively rather than defensively. Then use the three buckets. Knowing whether this person is an approver, an influencer, or an adopter tells you which questions to ask and which concerns are actually theirs to have.

And resist the urge to push through. You cannot be a bull in a china shop and get things done sustainably. It may feel like the only way forward is to put your head down and run, but that approach does you and your team a disservice. Taking what feels like a step back is frequently the only way to move forward.

“You cannot be a bull in a china shop and get things done. That is the antithesis of productivity. Even though it might feel like the only way forward is to put your head down and run, it is not sustainable.”

Sara Graham, Founder and CEO, Six Dots Consulting

The exception worth naming: occasionally a concern is serious enough that the right answer is to adjust the plan or pause it. Being able to tell that apart from ordinary friction is a senior skill.

Shape Every Message With Think, Feel, Do

This one comes out of formal change management practice, and it survives contact with reality better than most frameworks.

Before any communication goes out the door, whether it’s an email, a Teams message, or a training session, answer three questions:

• What do you want them to think? The understanding you’re trying to create.
• What do you want them to feel? Confident, prepared, included, rather than blindsided.
• What do you want them to do? The specific action, stated plainly.

If you can’t answer all three, the message isn’t ready. When you can, people get a clear view of what’s happening, why, when, and what’s being asked of them, and they feel like part of the process rather than recipients of a decision.

Pair it with a second discipline: anticipate the pushback before you send. Based on who’s receiving this, what will they ask? Address it in the original message. That single habit moves you from reactive to proactive more than any tool will.

There Is No Such Thing as Over-Communicating

You will feel like you have said the same thing until you’re blue in the face, and someone will still tell you they had no idea it was happening.

“There is no such thing as over-communicating. You may feel like you’re saying the same thing until you are literally blue in the face. I promise you, you could say it again and someone would say, I had no idea this was happening.”

Sara Graham, Founder and CEO, Six Dots Consulting

That isn’t a failure. Everyone is busy, and nobody is paying as much attention to your initiative as you are, because you’re the one driving it. There is always more room to communicate, and always more room to distill the message down to the part that actually matters to the person reading it.

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How to Pilot Something Big

“Just pilot it” is easy advice until the thing you’re piloting requires a lift from five departments. Websites and CRMs are the two hardest changes in multifamily, and neither pilots cleanly by default.

It’s still possible, and the trick is choosing the right entry point rather than asking an established team to change how they work.

Natural entry points are the ones where no workflow exists yet, or where change is already happening: a new acquisition, a lease-up, a change in management, or a third-party client who requests a provider you don’t currently use. Any of those lets you frame the pilot as adapting to a situation rather than disrupting a working team. If it goes well, you phase others over on a timeline instead of moving a hundred properties at once.

Before you announce anything, go have the conversations. In person, casually if that’s the culture. Plant the seed with each department and get a real sense of what the lift means for them, because your estimate and theirs will differ.

Then, when you make the recommendation, lay it all out: what this takes from IT, what it takes from each other department, and the timeline you’re proposing. An email that says we’re piloting a new website triggers defensiveness and a list of competing priorities. A communication that shows you already understand each group’s workload gives you the strongest possible starting position. You may still get resistance. You’ll get less of it.

One specific check: find out what IT’s actual bandwidth is. If it isn’t there, the honest answer may be to push pause, and knowing that early is worth more than a start date.

If Your Marketing Isn’t Landing Right Now

If it currently feels like nothing you do registers and you’re being ignored, the instinct is to market harder. That’s the wrong first move.

Figure out where the disconnect actually is. Usually it’s one of two things. Either leadership isn’t seeing the business value, which is a communication problem you can fix. Or you’re solving problems the organization doesn’t consider priorities, even though they feel urgent to you. Those need very different responses, and guessing wrong costs you months.

“”The title of this is marketing your marketing. I certainly wouldn’t start by marketing harder. I would figure out why it isn’t landing.”

Kelly Ranieri, AVP of Marketing, Northland

Then pick one or two opportunities where marketing’s work connects unmistakably to a business problem the company already cares about, and build credibility there. You are not going to change your organization’s perception of marketing overnight. It takes time. But two clear wins tied to something leadership is already worried about will do more than ten well-executed projects nobody asked for.

It also helps to just ask. Say plainly that you feel like things aren’t landing and you’d value the feedback. There is nothing wrong with asking for feedback whether you’ve been in the role a week or a decade, and it fits the same alliance-building work as everything else here.

Or as Sara Graham put it, marketing does not operate in a silo. If the problems you’re solving aren’t meaningful to the business, that’s the disconnect, and no amount of better execution closes it.

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Your First 30 Days

Pick a starting point and protect it. This is deliberately small, because the failure mode here is an ambitious plan that dies in week two.

Set your protected time. A recurring block each week for listening and relationship-building, treated like any other commitment. If it isn’t on the calendar it won’t happen.

Decide what you’re doubling down on, and what you’re deprioritizing. The second half is the hard part, and skipping it is why the first half fails.

Then one concrete move a week:

1. Week one. Schedule three listening tour conversations, including at least one person outside your usual orbit.
2. Week two. Hold them. Write down what you heard the same day, while it’s fresh.
3. Week three. Map your stakeholders into approval, influence, and adoption. Note which relationships are thin.
4. Week four. Take one communication you already need to send and rebuild it with Think, Feel, Do before it goes out.

That means carving out the time and forcing the time for marketing your marketing. It truly is an underpin to your success.

Kelly Ranieri

“If you aren’t telling your story, then someone else will.”

Sara Graham

Finish by naming the one shift you’re committing to. Not five. One, specific enough that you’d notice in ninety days whether you actually did it.

Get the Worksheets

Every section above has a matching worksheet: your weekly target and where the time lives, the three-audience translation, the gatekeeper map, your listening tour plan, the Think, Feel, Do builder, and the 30-day plan.

Print it, or work through it with your team in your next marketing meeting. It’s more useful filled in together than alone.

Prefer to watch the full conversation? The Marketing Your Marketing session is available on demand. 

The Hardest Internal Sell Is Usually the Platform

Internal alignment gets tested hardest when you’re proposing something the whole organization has to live with. A portfolio-wide website change is usually the biggest one on the list.

We do this with multifamily operators every week, including pilots that let you prove the case on a handful of properties before you ask anyone to approve the whole portfolio.

Join us for session two, where we go deeper in to the business case of translating marketing efforts to profit:
Marketing Your Marketing: Bridging ROI to NOI
live Wednesday, August 26 at 1:00 PM ET.

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