Collision Avoidance Tools for Every Business

There’s an old slogan in the business world, “If marketing conceives it, sales sells its, and operations doesn’t deliver on it, we’ve just wasted a lot of time and money.”

Okay, it’s not really an old saying. I just made it up. But it should be. Far too frequently than we’d like to admit, organizations plan and fail, yes fail, in silos. Why do I say more frequently than we’d like to admit? Because each of us is guilty of doing so, but we won’t be raising our hands anytime soon to admit to it.

So, allow me to be the first one to raise my hand and admit that we didn’t include, think about, talk to, or engage my brethren in the operations and delivery worlds while conceiving the most amazing product ever and then training our sales team on how to really sell it. We were in a hurry.

Problem was, when it came to product delivery, the product really didn’t exist – at least it didn’t exist beyond the sales and marketing teams. We hadn’t talked to the field operations teams to understand what it would or could look like in their worlds. And worse yet, we hadn’t talked to finance about how to bill for this “new” product. And, because ours was a really, really complex sale, we also hadn’t quite figured out how to price this new product.

Essentially then, all we did was put a prettier wrapper on what we already had, without really delivering any real value for our customers. And talk about the headaches post launch – mine and everyone else’s!

As my teams have heard me say many times since, if we’re not all going in the same direction and bringing everyone along, we’re headed for collisions at the intersection of sales, marketing, operations, customer service or delivery, and finance. It’s a five-way intersection and it’s really, really challenging to navigate well.

Delivering value for your customers involves even more than working across functions or silos in your organization, it also means really involving your customers, as well. They should be the first stop on your product or service journey because if you only ask, they’ll tell you what they really need or want.

Once you’ve discerned customer needs, either through conversations, feedback mechanisms, watching your churn, looking at conversions (or lack thereof) or myriad other ways, your next stop is your product development or delivery team. What are you missing that customers want? What do you have that they want more of? Where are you missing the boat entirely? How do you make/add/subtract/change to respond to what the market is telling you?

From there, the next stop is operations. If we add this, does it change how we deliver that? Can we do it? What training do our teams need? What language, systems, or other adaptations must we make? And how quickly, by God, can we do it?!

Then, and only then, when the sun, the moon, and the stars have aligned, do you launch that new product (and they can align in fewer than 30 days, I promise). But, seriously, launch it to your internal audience first. They don’t want to read about it through LinkedIn. If that happens, you’ve already lost.

Throughout each stop on that journey, you should have been thinking about strategy, messaging, sales tactics, media buys, etc., etc., so that when you’re ready, you’re really, really ready.

That process may have felt like a waste of time, but believe you me, it was time well spent.