In order to pave the way for effective business performance, it is essential to develop a clear and precise strategic action plan. For this to be adequate, it must be well implemented and executed, otherwise the entire development of society is upset. To avoid this, leaders must ensure that each team performs the right actions and that there is real cohesion in their work – this is called strategic alignment. In his latest practical guide, HubSpot, the scalable CRM platform for sales, marketing and customer service teams, helps you assess the alignment of your different teams.
4 evaluations to improve the way your business operates
HubSpot’s guide is divided into four main sections. In each part, several self-assessment questions are asked, related to the level of knowledge, productivity and efficiency of each branch of its company.
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First, it is imperative to analyze your marketing strategy. Successfully transforming prospects into customers requires the attention of marketing teams, but also those of sales, customer service and operations. In this sense, alignment with its other departments is essential to accelerate and improve the purchasing journey and optimize its conversion rate. To succeed in improving your action plan, it is therefore important to assess the alignment within its different branches.
Does my team spend at least two hours per week meeting with members outside the department? Does my team have a process to provide the sales team with the marketing content they need? These are two of the ten questions that will help you improve your organization.
Then you have to look at the commercial part of your activity. As sales play a major role in the expansion of a business, it is important to have effective collaboration between its employees to improve them. Whether it’s qualifying leads from marketing or tailoring demos based on feedback from your customer service team, it’s essential to understand your audience and know how to address them.
However, sales teams lack time on a daily basis, and ultimately only spend a third of their day actually chatting with prospects according to a 2021 HubSpot study. In this sense, improving the customer experience will be based on active involvement going beyond the sales department. After answering the ten questions of the guide, you will find out if the alignment of your sales team with other departments is optimal and advice on how to improve it.
While the latter strives to attract new prospects, it is the responsibility of customer service to retain and, above all, to build customer loyalty. Indeed, it is imperative to ensure the satisfaction of existing customers, especially when we know that it costs between 5 and 25 times more to acquire a new customer (Harvard Business Review, 2014). For this reason, a truly customer-oriented approach is a fundamental value in the development of any organization.
To improve it, HubSpot’s guide will suggest several strategies. For example, it may be a good idea to organize frequent meetings between the marketing, sales and customer service departments to discuss customer support.
Finally, to ensure proper internal functioning, operational alignment should not be neglected. A typical enterprise uses an average of 137 different SaaS applications, while large enterprises use an average of 288, reveals a 2020 Blissfully study. Keeping data synchronized, accurate and accessible by all its departments is then a critical job, in which operational teams have a role to play.
These coordinate systems alignment, data connection, and process efficiency across the enterprise. However, they are often involved too late in a company’s action plan, limiting the use of their potential. For this reason, the audit in this guide should be used to measure and improve the performance of operational teams.
After each assessment you will find out if a department is out of alignment, if its alignment is poor, or if it is optimal. This score will help you target priority branches. In each case, you will know the steps to take and the path to follow to improve the development of your business. To find out about all the measures that can be implemented, don’t forget to download the HubSpot guide !