This is the second in a two part series about “silos” within organizations and how to eliminate them for the greater good. I love this quote from Karyn Greenstreet, President, The Success Alliance: “ It’s not just about how sales and marketing treats the customer, it’s about how customer service, tech support and even the cleaning staff talk about the business to the outside world.”
Everyone is in sales and marketing whether they recognize it or not. Everyone needs to row the boat in same direction or else….the boat will go in circles. Here are 3 more strategies for breaking down those internal barriers.
Reward collaboration. Rewarding silos encourages inward thinking. Building collaborative performance objectives into a project or employee review process encourages innovation and cross pollination. Different
people are joining the conversation. “When a worker is only rewarded based on his work or his team’s work, he has no motivation to care about the other team’s success,” says Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., faculty member for the Institutes for Management Studies. “And make sure you have interim goals and final goals; don’t make your people sweat about knowing how they’re doing.”
Focus on the Customer. Companies don’t necessarily organize themselves around a customer need; they organize themselves around a function or product. “If you really do focus on the customer, you start sharing marketplace information, sharing customer feedback, you bring in a panel of end users to report their experience so everyone understands the enterprise as a whole, meeting or exceeding customer expectations,” Goman says. In addition, it’s critical that everyone must know about the concept of integrated marketing. “The reputation of the business depends on consistent branding across all teams,” Greenstreet says. “It’s not just about how sales and marketing treat the customer, it’s about how customer service, tech support and even the cleaning staff talk about the business to the outside world. Building a brand is more than a fancy logo or a viral video … it’s about building a reputation in any place where the public can see you … and even where they can’t.”
Get personal. Collaborative relationships thrive in an environment of personal trust, which means you need to get to know people as individuals, and organizations need to allow for social time. “One CEO at
a conference told me, ‘All the important conversations are taking place around the wine and cheese table,’” Goman says.
If you’d like to see the entire article, that issue of Connect Magazine is online here