A while ago I had a client tell me to not bother any of the other departments in their company. Leave the copywriters alone, don't bug the tech team because they have to program, etc... But the reality is that in order to be really effective with SEO, you have to make the whole company aware of what needs to be done. Everyone from Customer Service and Call Center Reps to the head of PR needs to have a basic understanding of SEO. Here's why.
Customer Service
If your Customer Service team is rude to customers, doesn't provide answers and puts people on hold, you may find these customers hurting your SERPs. Angry people are usually the ones who complain the most. When they go out and bash you online, leave negative reviews on Hotpot, Yelp and other sites, it could have a negative effect on how well you rank. Especially with local search. It could also cause sites to show up when customer's type in your company name with negative reviews costing you money and sales. Your Customer Service is your direct connection to your customers and keeping them happy. Happy customers may tweet about you and like you on Facebook which Google and Bing have said may influence your SERPs. If you catch Customer Service not providing friendly service, you may want to escalate it to their Managers and show the Managers how poor customer service can cost the company online sales as well as repeat customers.
Public Relations
Your PR department or agency has outreach to news wires, Bloggers, media outlets and other sites that can give you great backlinks. Not only can these help to give you keyword rich links from high authority sites, but it is also a great way to get other sites to find out about you and start linking to you. What many PR people don't get is that even if no one ever clicks on the link, it still adds value because if it is a good one it can help you rank in the SERPs and drive revenue. SEO for PR isn't always about instant eyeballs and traffic and it is important to teach them about that. Get involved with all Press Releases and give them ideas of which terms to link off of and which pages to link to. It will make your life a little bit easier.
Sales
Your sales team has outreach into key Clients. If those Clients are happy with you, your sales team can talk to them about linking to your site. Since they are using your services, they may have a section of their site or their entire site may be content relevant to your site and the backlink can be extremely valuable. If your sales team has a good relationship with their Clients, educate them on asking for a backlink from their site to yours and see if they can get them for you.
IT
If your webmaster or IT department doesn't get why certain tags have to be named a certain way or why dynamic tags and titles can be bad, then you need to talk to them. Talk about split testing, click through rates, attracting eyes and how certain keywords cause people to react differently and shop differently depending on the landing page. Try to give real life examples and pull up SERPs to show why someone may click on certain SERPs and skip over others. You'll also want to go into naming conventions for images and other on site aspects. You may also want to give them examples on how Google ranks images and when they show up in the SERPs with natural listings. Those images and videos can drive a lot of sales. IT plays a key part in SEO so educate them on why you need certain things a certain way. Some of it may be theory, but it is your job to educate them.
Copywriters
If you aren't the one who writes the web copy, or you have someone in Marketing that does both the onsite and collateral materials, it is important to talk to them about keyword repetition and minimum word counts. If you cannot talk to them about how to combine specific phrases and show them the search volumes for those phrases, then you are not doing your site justice. It is important to show them keyword tools and have them help with keyword research before they write anything that goes live on the site. You'll also want to talk to them about having pages compete with each other for specific terms and how to work around it.
If you don't educate your company and each department on SEO, then your company probably will not be as successful as it could be. Talking to everyone and teaching them about SEO and how to do their part is part of your job as an in house or SEO consultant. Not only will it make your life easier, but it will help your company and Clients rank a lot better.