Marketing campaigns, product launches, internal reorganizations, and the like require cross-team alignment to succeed. The communication and operational efficiency challenge is real, regardless of an organization’s size or office location. Fortunately, emerging AI technology can help ease the pain and keep organizations moving together toward a common goal. And did I mention that your marketing agency can play a role in team synergy?
Learn how to create more harmony with a few AI tools and some help from the outside.
Understanding cross-team alignment
The term cross-team alignment sounds fancy, but it’s essentially “breaking down silos.” It’s ensuring teams across an organization have the same data and information and are communicating and working towards a coordinated outcome. Forrester sums it up nicely:
“In simple terms, cross-functional alignment (also known as cross-functional collaboration or revenue alignment), happens when people from different teams or functions in an organization join forces to work on a common goal or project. But more importantly, alignment means that every individual in every function shares a common understanding of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and for what purpose.”
The benefits of cross-team alignment are many. There’s improved productivity, collaboration, and increased job satisfaction — which leads to employee retention. And, you get better decision-making by management, leadership and employees.
Cross-team alignment in a B2B setting
Now, let’s explore the concept further by considering how cross-team alignment can work in a B2B environment.
The marketing team is immersed in the customer journey, ushering potential customers down the funnel to a sale. They have the best understanding of their prospects’ challenges and needs. Meanwhile, the sales team works directly with prospects and knows what is needed to convert to a sale. Communication between these two teams is necessary to ensure all the needs of a prospect and customer are met. But, let’s not forget about a few other important elements to the overall customer success story — the product and customer support teams.
The product team addresses the current and (often unidentified) future needs of the customer. Meanwhile, the support team works directly with the customer. They hear everything from praise to complaints and spend their days troubleshooting issues and providing educational opportunities.
Ensuring everyone communicates, collaborates and works towards the same goals leads to higher success in everything from your marketing campaigns to overall customer retention. And as technology continues to advance, cross-team communication can be more efficiently streamlined.
Content Matterz CEO and Founder, Cara McDonald and Professional Speaker and Customer Expert, Bryan Rutberg recently hosted a webinar on how to turn your leads from prospect to evangelist. Check it out.
Utilizing AI for internal synergy
Whether you want to introduce or increase cross-functional alignment at your organization, there are AI tools that can help streamline collaboration efficiently.
A few things that AI can do include:
- Open the channels of communication. As business spans across the globe, language can create barriers. Now, AI tools, such as Interprefy, provide real-time translations for meetings, events and even 1:1s. AI allows everyone to participate in discussions and fully understand goals and missions.
- Provide personalized content to employees. Training materials, product updates and company announcements are all important pieces of internal communication. However, it’s not always as simple as sending out [yet] another email. Tools like Simppler provide a single source of truth for employees, allowing them to easily access tailored company content and support.
- Analyze and summarize employee sentiment. How employees feel is important to their productivity, satisfaction and overall retention. Organizations often utilize surveys to solicit feedback, but sifting through the results and determining the next best action can take time. Fortunately, using a tool like Lattice turns a few days of work into a few minutes, and offers recommendations for action.
One important note that should not be overlooked:
Even with all the tools in the world, the only way cross-functional alignment can be successful is to have a team memeber appointed as the owner. As stated by the Product Marketing Alliance:
“The only way collaboration and information will ever happen between different departments is if someone takes charge of making it happen. Since marketing, product, and sales enablement are all key parts of what product marketers do, that someone is usually the product marketing team.”
The role of a marketing agency in cross-functional alignment
When partnering with a marketing agency, look beyond just the materials, content and collateral you need. An agency can interview members of other teams (and even customers) to solicit feedback and insights on areas of improvement. They can review, summarize and make recommendations based on these conversations. A marketing agency can also aid in the creation of internal education materials, as they often know just as much (if not more) about your products and services.
For example, the marketing agency can create and even distribute internal newsletters. At Content Matterz, we are platform agnostic, meaning we are comfortable navigating our client’s internal and external automation and go-to-market systems. This allows us to help with both marketing and internal communication projects and campaigns for our clients.
Cross-functional alignment success stories
Not sure what this all means for your company? Here are two success stories to get you thinking about how you can apply or increase cross-functional alignment to your organization.
- CME Group, a financial services company that provides electronic trading globally on its CME Globex platform, aligned its product, sales and marketing teams to launch a new financial product. The teams were given a three-fold mission: drive demand and awareness; grow trading volume within the first year of launch; and no scope creeping into existing products. By starting and staying aligned, this new product brought in 75,000 new traders within the first year.
- Spotify, the popular audio streaming platform, is well known in the agile scene for its squad model. Essentially, employees are organized in groups that range across departments and experience. They work collaboratively and focus on a specified product feature. The workflow and hierarchy get deeper at Spotify, but the overall result is faster-to-market products that meet customer needs.
Ready to take your organization to the next level? At Content Matterz, we are more than just external marketing content gurus. Our expertise includes internal communications, sales enablement materials and trainings. Reach out today to learn more.