In my consulting work, I constantly talk about alignment as the key driver to produce revenue.
Here’s why:
Generating revenue is tough and with so many moving parts, if your organization has achieved some sort of alignment, you are wasting resources that can be better deployed in achieving your goals.
To simplify this into plain English:
If your sales and marketing teams aren’t working together, how can you expect them to succeed?
Same goes for strategy with operations and all of them together.
The fact is that creating alignment is often painful and difficult because many organizations do a bad job of differentiating between short and long term goals and setting priorities.
Ultimately, the most important thing is that you need to have some kind of overriding ideal that drives your decision making and the strategy of your company.
In working with organizations around the world, here are 3 simple ways that you can draw your different business sections together to create alignment that drives revenue:
1. Focus on outcomes:
This might seem obvious, but in too many instances, I see organizations and managers that are managing based on activities.
It is essential that you as a leader in your organization stop the madness that is managing by activity and focus on the outcomes you hope to achieve.
If you want revenue, set revenue targets for your sales and marketing teams that are consistent and have them focus on the best methods of achieving them. Or, if you have a long term focus, what does that look like?
2. Include multiple Points of View:
In too many cases, strategy becomes a document or set of goals that are set at a high level by executives and the CEO that have absolutely no connection to how the company really works.
This leads very quickly to poor performance and a lack of results.
Instead, to ensure that your strategy and vision and the actions you are organized around are effective, it is important that you bring in multiple points of view.
You need to know not just what the executive committee thinks, but you also need to know what your customers see, and what your front line employees see and feel.
3. Test and adjust:
In any organization, one of the big challenges can be adapting to a changing market.
Here is the deal, change is persistent and inevitable.
So what you have to do is you have to embrace change and test and adjust as you move forward.
Strategy, marketing, operations, sales, etc. are not fixed things on a horizon. They are moving targets that you have to focus on and adjust for, consistently.
Vision is one thing, but strategy is entirely different.