Operational Excellence in Marketing & Sales | PLAY

Coordinated processes and effective collaboration between individual teams and business units are essential pillars of success in marketing and sales. In this context, executives in the right positions and with the right competencies represent another piece of the puzzle to drive a strategy forward. They are the interfaces that exemplify the agility required today in the organization and can exploit potential for improvement in collaboration. The “PLAY” module deals precisely with these topics, which lie on the path to operational excellence in marketing and sales.

THE CORE TASKS OF A COLLABORATION MODEL

“Let’s FACE our customers”: We need to adapt our market approach, our teams’ marketing processes and our services to what customers expect. FACE stands for the very qualities that a company, a marketing department or a sales team most urgently needs to fulfill in the digital world.

“FAST” = fast, with short response times,
“AGILE” = agile, with flexible implementation strength,
“CREATIVE” = creative, with the courage to be unique,
“EFFICIENT” = efficient, with freedom of movement on the resource side.

In terms of collaboration, this is also why their own solutions should address the following core tasks:

• Simplify or enable (digital) coordination
• Create transparency
• Expand innovation space
• Ensure performance

Batten & Company has a wealth of experience in the area of processes and collaboration models, especially in the corporate areas of marketing and sales. We support our clients in issues revolving around future interfaces, processes, agile collaboration and responsibilities within the marketing or sales organization.

SELECTED TOOLS AND PROCEDURE OF THE OPTIMIZATION PHASE

On the common path towards a modern and agile organization, the following tools are often used in project phases:

• Use case-testing
• Best practice comparisons
• Infusion-, way forward- and consolidation-workshops
• Task and activity analyses
• RACI/RASIC
• Process modeling, e.g. using flowcharts

We use these tools not only for internal use during the project but are also happy to provide you with the necessary tools for your everyday business.

Not least through the use of these tools, we succeed in identifying potential for improvement in the cooperation between organizational units. This enables us to work with our customers to clearly define processes and responsibilities and ensure efficient workflows.

How do we proceed in concrete terms?
Once the change objectives have been clearly defined, we start with an inventory of the defined workflows tailored to the situation and determine the relevant interfaces. In this way, we identify potential for improvement in processes and internal collaboration at an early stage. The assessment is also carried out in the context of workshops or personal discussions such as interviews – your team leaders, employees and colleagues are therefore involved from the very beginning. After this initial joint phase, a decision can be made on how to proceed. Especially in questions of collaboration, we like to rely on agile project planning.

Fig. 1: Overview selected collaboration models

Once we have clearly defined the fields of action, we jointly select the best solutions from a comprehensive set of collaboration models and combine them as needed. In the past, we have had very good experiences with a combination of agile stand-up meetings and KPI dashboards. We are happy to work out the implementation and learning of the new methods together with your teams.

Typical results of optimization for operational excellence:

1. Become faster: Optimizing time-to-market
2. Improve collaboration across teams, locations, and business units (break down silos).
3. Increase the innovative power of the marketing and sales organization
4. Greater automation of processes

We look forward to hearing from you to convince you of this approach as well!