Process Boundaries:  Part One. This is the first of a four part series on the topic “Revitalizing the role and relevance of Sales with Chatter”.  

The long dark tunnel
One of the biggest hurdles in process thinking is the concept of boundaries and hand-offs between different sales teams, groups or functions.  Organizational functions, such as Product Development, Sales, or Customer Service, have – so the process theorists say – learned how to operate relatively productively within the boundaries of their own functions.  We see this at many of our clients.  They have more or less evolved a workable way to organize themselves.

Can a High-Tech company with no boundaries stay on the tracks?
Most of our clients would go on record stating they have efficient product development teams, a responsive customer service unit, or a smoothly operating sales branch.  However, at the boundary with other functions, things don’t run as well.  For example, at one of my high-tech clients, marketing is at war with sales, operations can’t execute product development team’s design concepts, or billing is continually making life miserable for customer service.  It’s not that these individual functions don’t have talented business people or a decent technology platform; the problem is that each function has built itself into a silo that may be very internally productive but is monumentally incapable of working smoothly with the other silos that make up the enterprise.  You can say the same for sales teams as well.  

Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?
A recent Bluewolf prospect had an inside sales, regional branch sales, and national accounts team all calling on the same customer.  Throw a new e-business tool into the mix, and you have the perfect recipe for a sales collaboration and customer experience disaster.

Traditional approaches will often state the obvious, but are costly and hard to execute
The answers many consultants will provide is to break down the silo walls, dissolve the boundaries, redesign the hand-offs, and move rapidly to a process-driven organization based on cross-functional teams.  Granted, this makes good business sense.  At least in theory.  But what we see in the marketplace is that many companies have learned (at an exorbitant cost), that this is a very hard concept to execute.  

The Light:  Collaboration between the lines drives the greatest value  
However, the challenges of executing a cross-functional or collaborative process approach shouldn’t detract from the fundamental logic of the idea.  The business problem, and therefore the productivity and innovation opportunities, lie between functions, not within them.  There’s gold to be mined at the boundaries between functions, selling teams, and groups.  Finally, there’s a new, disruptive and innovative tool in the Salesforce stack to dramatically improve sales and operational effectiveness.  It’s called Chatter.

Join me next week as we discuss how to use Agile Business Transformation approaches and Chatter to reinvigorate sales productivity and effectiveness. Join the Conversation: Engage Bluewolf on Facebook, Bluewolf on LinkedIn and Bluewolf on Twitter. Learn how Sales Cloud consulting and Service Cloud implementation improve sales effectiveness and service effectiveness.