Why do we put in place sales force automation systems? It’s not really to help individual sales people — it’s to help sales managers and executives get a global view of the pipeline and and ensure that vital customer information isn’t lost when the sales people move on to other roles.
During a company takeover, why is there always a central resource center to store goals and plans? Because it’s vital to share information effectively among different cross-functional teams.
So why doesn’t all this apply to normal organizational strategy?!
If it’s important to centralize sales information, why not strategy information? If it’s important to centralize initiatives and goals during an acquisition, why not the rest of the time?
Why do we tolerate strategy, initiatives, and goals to be scattered around the organization, in dozens of incompatible formats?
If organizations are struggling to execute corporate strategy, wouldn’t it help to have all the company initiatives, at every level, for every team, stored in one place, so that you could actually see what was happening? Wouldn’t that help communications? Ensure alignment between different teams? Reduce overlaps between teams? Help spot gaps?
Just as installing SFA doesn’t mean that you tell a sales person how to run their deal, centralizing initiatives and plans doesn’t necessarily mean telling any group how to run their strategy. But just as with sales, making the whole thing transparent helps reinforce the right behaviors and detect dysfunctional strategy — and makes it easier to spot and correct issues before they become huge problems.
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One response to “The Central Importance of Strategy?”
You may want to have a look at my research on “The CRM Dilemma.” It looks at the issue of the failure to get sales reps to use CRM at all. This research is informally presented on my blog and has been receiving alot of attention in the past week.