Value to Change
In Chapter Two, I covered how difficult it is to quantify the gaps in insights and collaboration across functional areas. I wish I could wave a magic wand. Or had a magic model into which you could plug several variables and watch it spit out a sparkling number that would inspire your exec team to see the light, and sign on to an actual transformation project that included robust insight-sharing between functional areas.
Yes, I’m a nerd but you’ve alreadyguessed that by now.
Let’s Get Personal
While I can’t hope to quantitatively inspire your exec team today, I can hope to inspire you. So let’s have a think about your team, your environment, your costs, and your opportunities.
What if Product had near real time access to Sales, Success, and Marketing insights?
Might they be able to course-correct roadmaps, both short and long-term, to more quickly delight customers or reduce support costs?
What if Marketing had near real time access to Product, Sales, and Success insights?
I bet Marketing would love to be able to pivot on key messages or topics, and improve conversions by being more relevant to the market.
What if Sales had near real time access to Product, Marketing, and Success insights?
Salespeople could improve the quality of their questioning strategy by gently pressing on the most current pain points.
What if Success had near real time access to Product, Marketing, and Sales insights?
Could Success pre-empt Support issues by getting ahead of hurdles?
How could each of those teams make better decisions daily on what to stop, start, or continue? Turn up or turn down? Prioritize, and most importantly, deprioritize?
As long as we’re going crazy here, let’s take this a step further. What if, in addition to sharing current insights, your teams ** wait for it** actually coordinated some structured mining for collaborative goals?
Let’s say Product has a Utilization challenge, yet it’s not clear if it’s an issue with functionality, interest, or something else altogether. Wouldn’t it be cool if Product could go to the other teams and ask them to proactively mine for a small set of data points relative to each functional area? And if that was actually a thing teams were set up to do, naturally, in the course of doing business?
Marketing may set up relevant google alerts, or test specific content with customers and the market overall. Sales and Success could buddy up and ask the same small set of questions to prospects and customers during a set period of time, then compare and contrast the data.
Our general model focuses on answers because it’s the highest value engagement behavior that can be easily measured and valued.
Imagine how much more robust a picture Product would then have with which to problem solve the Utilization challenge. Compared with only the tools and data they have at their disposal today!
What if Sales has a hunch and wants to try a new angle with a segment of their market. Wouldn’t it be great if they could ask their colleagues in the other functional areas to do a small, joint project where each team mined for the same data points?
Let’s take this up a notch. What if a Leadership Team had ongoing, cross-functional, structured mining projects, and used the same to actually steer the business? What would be the value to the company? Think about the competitive advantage. Is this going on today? If it is, at your company, bravo. You’re in the minority.
Unfortunately for most organizations, no one is anywhere near that level of insights collaboration.
Here’s how Community Management Evangelist, Rachel Happe (more on Rachel at the end of this chapter in Read, Watch, Follow) sees the value:
“The ’Networked Value of Community’ is relevant here, which is essentially the value of trusted and relevant transparency. The idea is that a community will help save time and duplication by aggregating a conversation in one place vs. emailing/connecting with multiple people individually in a fragmented way. But the real value (to an organization and the human) is for the next person who doesn’t have to ask the question at all because they can access, see, and discover the answer if it already exists.
Our general model focuses on answers because it’s the highest value engagement behavior that can be easily measured and valued. We then look at workflows and where that behavior shows up and how. And then show how a community would optimize the initial interaction - and then make that value available to others. In our research the average ratio of answers provided and accessed answers is about 1:41. That is the value lift/multiple.”
What insights data *do* we have today? And how reliable is the underlying data?
We’ve got some data from our CRM. Yet,
When sales leaders around the world are pleading daily or weekly, “Hi teams, can you please be sure Salesforce is updated?” are we really dealing with great data for analysis?
How often is your team pulling reports out of your CRM, manipulating the data in a massive spreadsheet with input from a horde of folks across the company - something breaks, someone fixes it, someone else then tries to combine it with the archaic finance reports - and *that’s* what you’re using to make the big decisions?
We likely have some decent Power BI projects going on, but those are like the point solutions of data analysis in a company.
We have a silo of Marketing data. We likely know the content and keywords that are/aren’t performing.
We likely have some product data.
We probably don’t have much Success data beyond NPS and churn.
And we have data from Sales on how opps are/aren’t moving through the funnel. But hardly any insights are being gathered that are helpful to the business beyond projecting against sales targets.
As far as insights go, we have rather a mishmash of insights at hand today. A hodgepodge. A jumble.
And how do we determine the value of implementing these changes? I sometimes despair at this as I have many brilliant colleagues whose main gig is inspiring organizations to wholesale embrace digital transformation, when all I want is this one small improvement. Sometimes, organizational transformation just seems so far away.
In Chapter 2, we looked at ways we can assess the costs of the cobbling from the perspective of productivity debt. It’s more challenging to quantify the upside of change, but here’s some good news.
Very few organizations are getting this right today. And therein lies the opportunity for you and your organization. The ones that can get this right stand to take material competitive advantage in the market.
If prior to this chapter you didn't already know Engaged Org's Rachel Happe, global leader and visionary for all things Community Management, you must rectify that. Find her first on twitter and then LinkedIn. Then go get her Becoming Hybrid: A Team Collaboration Handbook.
I’d also advise getting your head around the power of Community Management. The very essence of (properly structured) Community Management is bringing a diverse set of humans together for a common cause. And the ROI is undeniable.
Rachel and the brilliant network of community managers everywhere know the world’s best kept secret:
“Community approaches are critical in transforming how organizations work, manage, and lead. Strong community business and governance models harness the enormous untapped capacity in ecosystems by replacing hierarchical bottlenecks with shared purpose and trust. Instead of constraining productivity, organizations employing communities enable distributed leadership and promote self-directed management in both their employees and customers.”
Communities, by their very nature, are teams of cross-functional humans. Rachel, together with her community of community managers, has great data on how valuable this cross-functional approach is for organizations and businesses:
