Many companies fail to align themselves to their own corporate-wide objectives. Their business processes aren’t aligned.
Huh?
Let’s put it another way. Are the processes, tools and technologies are used throughout your company helping you to reach your business objectives? Are your company departments – sales, marketing, service, support, administration – all working with a common business goal in mind?
In short, are they all signing from the same hymn sheet?
If they’re not – as is the case with most organisations – then a large percentage of your team’s time, effort and money are going towards helping your competitors. Thus the importance of what we can generally term Business Process Alignment.
Missing The Point In Your Brand Communications
Organizations spend hours – and dollars – brainstorming Mission Statements, Vision Statements, and brand promises. They spitball ideas to help distill their brand to its most raw and fundamental. They spend fortunes crafting campaigns to spread the word to their audiences.
But in the midst of all this self-congratulatory posturing and idea-chasing, they’ve forgotten their most important audience: the employees.
The result – if you’re lucky – is a bunch of well-meaning individuals doing the best they can. What’s more likely is that you’ve got a bunch of disorganized, frustrated, and demotivated people who feel left out of the process – and the endgame. Never forget that your employees are the individuals at the coalface. They’re the ones dealing with prospects, existing customers, partners, suppliers. For most of the people that interact with your company, your employees are the only human contact they’ll have with your brand. As a result these are the people who can help make – or break – your brand in a heartbeat.
With so much riding on the importance of your employees in this, why haven’t you bothered to include them?
The Importance Of Employee Buy-In To Marketing Initiatives
Employees want to be directed. To be inspired, and feel part of a larger goal, cause, and purpose. Instead you think their prime motivation is based on objectives like salary, or how many vacation days they take. Studies continue to show the main reason employees leave their current place of work isn’t the salary, working hours, or benefits package. The main reason people leave their jobs is because of their bosses.
Too many companies think that communication and branding starts with prospects and customers. The truth is that your value statement starts with the first customer awareness touchpoint. That may be a reTweet, share, or Like from your organization’s social media account. But it could just as well be the perceived tone of voice in the text of your website, the way your receptionist speaks with the delivery driver, or how your accounts person writes an email.
Business process alignment means everyone in the organization pulling in the same direction. By “everyone” I really mean everyone – from the CEO to the janitor, and everyone in between. If just one person isn’t on board, your audience will smell a fake and the business brand promise will be seen as inauthentic. And once you’ve lost it, it’s the devil’s own job to get it back.
Business Process Alignment: Customers AND Employees Singing From The Same Hymn Sheet
Without focusing your company around its ‘reason for being’ – its core objectives – you are allowing your competition to deliver to your customers better and faster than you can.I’m not talking about your sales department, or your sales process, or your reseller channel, or your marketing collateral. I’m not referring to how your accounts department handles cashflow, or how your receptionist answers the telephone.
I’m talking about all of them. And more.