The importance of collaboration between Marketing and other departments
Kim Lawton
Founder at Enthuse Marketing Group | Innovative Brand Strategy | Team Development | Management Solutions That Deliver Measurable Results
Cross-department collaboration occurs when multiple departments in your business align to work together toward a shared goal. Cross-department collaboration can increase innovation, improve brand consistency, and enhance your understanding of your customers — all of which can greatly improve your marketing operations. If you want to enhance your marketing and other business operations, read on to learn how to facilitate cross-department collaboration.
Cross-department collaboration occurs when teams from multiple departments within your business work together to achieve a common goal. Cross-department collaboration is a great way to prevent miscommunication within your organization as well as harmful silos.
Your business’s marketing operations could likely benefit from cross-department collaboration. Your marketing operations is the function of overseeing your marketing programs, planning campaigns, and measuring your efforts progress.
A lack of collaboration can have a serious negative impact on your business. If you want to bring your teams together and optimize your marketing operations — and your business as a whole — this blog will tell you everything you need to know.
Understanding Marketing Operations in Modern Business
To understand why increased collaboration is so important and how it could improve your business as a whole, it’s important to understand what marketing operations are and how large of a role it plays in your general business.
Marketing operations is essentially an umbrella term that describes the people, processes, and technology that help run a business’s marketing strategy. Marketing operations include people like SEO specialists, marketing analysts, and content creators, processes like data management, research and project planning, and tech like social media, CRM tools, and content management systems.
Marketing operations are key to driving business objectives. Your business’s marketing operations team will oversee the planning, budgeting, execution, and analysis of your marketing strategies, all while aiming to increase efficiency and drive the desired results. Generally, a good marketing strategy can make or break a business.
Marketing operations have always been important to businesses, but they’re continuing to evolve as the world becomes more digitized and modern business continues to grow and change. Some digital advancements that have contributed to the evolving nature of marketing operations include:
The Drawbacks of Operating in Silos
Departmental or organizational silos are teams, departments, or groups of people that are segmented or isolated from other parts of the business. This can be intentional or unintentional and is often a result of poor information flow. Silos can also occur as a result of different departments in the business having unique tools and processes to do their jobs.
For example, your shipping department will have a different workflow than your marketing department, and this alone can be reason enough to create a departmental silo.
There are several drawbacks to operating in silos, and they can also have an impact on your business’s efficiency, communication, and overall success. Some drawbacks of departmental silos to be mindful of include:
#1. Limited Communication
Poor communication can cause departmental silos, and once your teams are siloed, that communication doesn’t get any better. With siloed departments, people in each department will have limited interactions with each other. This can have a major impact on business operations as a whole. If your teams aren’t communicating properly, your business will likely be less efficient, and it can put a damper on your potential for success.
#2. Resistance to Change
With departmental silos, the people in each department likely enjoy the way they work, including the processes and routines they’ve become comfortable with over time. This can make them resistant to change if you propose policies that may disrupt the environments they’ve come to know. This could hinder your efficiency if the new policies you’re proposing have the potential to improve business operations and your employees struggle to get on board.
#3. Collaboration-Avoidant
It’s normal for people in each department to be most comfortable with those who work in the same area. While this can be good for collaboration within each department, silos can make it so people become collaboration-avoidant when it comes to working with other departments. This may just be because they aren’t familiar with another department’s workflow, but it’s still an obstacle in the way of cross-department collaboration.
#4. Reduced Customer Satisfaction
Unfortunately, it’s possible that departmental silos can impact how satisfied your customers are. When departments are siloed, there can be knowledge gaps about the customer journey across departments. This can result in a disjointed customer experience that can impact your company’s reputation, and churn rates, and even turn your customers away to competitors.
#5. Data Silos
Departmental silos can also lead to data silos because each department likely has its separate application to store data, meaning each department may be working with a different, incomplete data set.
Why Collaboration Matters
An efficient business should run like a well-oiled machine, and to do that, you need to foster collaboration between all departments. This is where cross-department collaboration comes in.
Cross-department collaboration is important for several reasons and can have several benefits, including:
#1. Holistic Strategy Development
Holistic strategy development connects all the departments within your organization to help them work together as a team to achieve an overarching goal. When you take a holistic approach to your business, everyone understands how their work benefits the company and how each person’s job is important to the business as a whole.
A holistic strategy can allow you to pool insights from various departments, encouraging fresh perspectives that can help your employees brainstorm new initiatives to help improve your operations while fostering collaboration and communication between departments. For example, if you need new ideas for a marketing campaign, you may be able to collaborate with your data team to pull actionable insights for a new social media campaign.
Taking a holistic approach can also allow you to craft strategies that resonate across the organization. This means that any business decisions or general operations will consider all departments and impact everyone, preventing silos.
#2. Improved Resource Allocation
In business, resource allocation is the strategic process of assigning available resources to tasks or projects to support business objectives. Resource allocation is important because, when done effectively, it ensures work is evenly divided among departments, which prevents burnout.
Cross-department collaboration can help improve resource allocation throughout your organization. When all departments are working together, and there aren’t any departmental silos, you can effectively allocate the right resources to the right person or department. This improves your overall efficiency by preventing any overlap or duplication and ensuring you’re using your budget and manpower most effectively.
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#3. Enhanced Customer Understanding
When your organization practices cross-department collaboration, it can lead to an enhanced customer understanding, which can greatly improve the customer experience your company offers.
When all the departments in your organization are working together, and you don’t have any departmental silos, you can gain a 360-degree view of your customers from various touchpoints. This allows you to fully personalize the customer journey, as you’ll have a deeper understanding of who your customers are and what they want and need. With a better understanding of who your customers are, you’ll be better equipped to reach them through your marketing efforts.
#4. Strengthened Brand Consistency
Cross-department collaboration is key to strengthening your brand consistency. When all departments within your organization are working together and communicating effectively, you’ll be able to establish workflows that unite departments rather than siloed workflows that don’t connect.
This means you can ensure a unified brand message across all channels and departments. This helps create a consistent brand image your audience will grow to recognize and rely on, which can be extremely valuable to your digital marketing team.
#5. Fostering Innovation and Growth
Teamwork and collaboration are a must if you want to foster innovation and growth. When the departments in your organization are siloed, it prevents people in different departments from sharing ideas and opinions, which can stifle innovation and creative thinking.
With cross-department collaboration, you can combine diverse viewpoints and expertise from various departments to help generate fresh ideas. This also allows you to change the workplace culture and promote continuous learning and innovation, inspiring your employees to continue striving for growth.
Practical Steps to Encourage Collaboration
Any business or organization that wants to start taking the necessary steps to encourage cross-department collaboration. The process will likely vary from business to business, but generally, some practical steps you can take to get the ball rolling on cross-department collaboration include:
#1. Cross-Departmental Meetings
If you want to facilitate cross-department collaboration, you need to establish regular communication between departments to ensure everyone is on the same page. Without regular, open communication between departments, you’ll likely struggle to get anything done within your organization.
There are several platforms and tools your organization can use to aid in interdepartmental interactions, such as instant messaging tools, video conferencing apps, corporate calendars, and other useful collaboration tools.
#2. Unified Training Programs
When getting your departments on the same page, not only is communication important, but it’s also a good idea to conduct some kind of unified training across departments. You should take time to educate teams about the wider business and each department’s role.
Doing this ensures that each department understands each other and how their work fits into the business. With this in mind, it will be easier for various departments to work together to reach the primary business goals.
#3. Shared KPIs and Goals
It’s also important to define your goals and objectives in detail. Keep in mind that these objectives you set should encourage departments to work together and communicate their findings with each other to reach a common goal.
With clear goals and KPIs defined, you should also have measures in place that celebrate shared successes between departments and build camaraderie. This can help to foster the relationships between departments and continue driving growth across the board.
#4. Feedback and Continuous Improvement
Feedback is another important part of the cross-department collaboration process. You can establish a system that allows departments to give each other feedback, which can help you identify what is and isn’t working, where there may be room for improvement, and how to identify new, potential opportunities.
With these feedback systems in place, you can identify ways to adjust the collaboration processes between departments and continue improving upon it and innovating your organization’s workflows.
Challenges to Effective Collaboration and Overcoming Them
Cross-department collaboration is a valuable business move. It can greatly improve the way your business runs, and the way you engage with customers and can also help drive long-term growth.
That said, you may encounter challenges when trying to achieve effective cross-department collaboration, especially if your departments are extremely siloed. Common obstacles include communication barriers, territorialism among departments, misaligned goals and priorities across departments, and a lack of available leadership to support and manage cross-department collaboration.
The good thing is that all of these problems have solutions that can help you overcome these obstacles and achieve true collaboration within your organization.
For example, if you’re facing communication barriers and territorialism between departments, you should work to create opportunities for employees to socialize with each other outside of standard office hours. Cross-department collaboration and relationship building, in general, is more successful when it happens organically. Providing opportunities for socialization allows your employees to find whom they connect with naturally and form genuine connections that can help improve their work when they get back in the office.
If your departments have misaligned or conflicting goals and priorities, you can try holding frequent meetings to share feedback, discuss where each department may be misaligned, and find common ground to reinforce your organization’s shared goals. This is another tactic to address communication issues within departments and get everyone on the same page. You can even use some kind of internal organization tool to keep your goals clearly outlined in one spot so no one gets confused or loses sight of what they should be working toward.
If you’re facing obstacles because you don’t have the leadership to support and manage collaboration, it’s important to address that quickly because you likely won’t achieve successful cross-department collaboration without department heads leading by example. These department heads should take a top-down approach, lay out the guidelines for cross-department collaboration, and help build bridges between their department and others.
Conclusion
Cross-department collaboration occurs when teams from multiple departments within your organization work together to achieve a common goal. Cross-department collaboration is a great way to prevent miscommunication and harmful silos within your organization.
A lack of collaboration can have a serious negative impact on your business. Cross-department collaboration can greatly improve several aspects of your business, especially your marketing operations. When all departments in your organization are connected, you’ll have a better understanding of your customers, a more consistent brand image, and generally be more successful at reaching and churning customers to drive profits.
Without cross-department collaboration, your business may never reach its full potential. It doesn’t serve your organization or your overall goals to have several departments running in different directions. If your organization isn’t already a unified front working toward a shared goal, it’s high time to start fostering collaboration.
Meetings & Retreat Facilitator; Team Creativity Specialist; Better Meetings Coach
1yGreat article, Kim! And don't forget to include frequent, if not annual, cross-departmental offsites/retreats as a practical step to improve collaboration. 😉