Hit your goals…connect the dots.

In my last post I talked about the importance of connecting the dots of your strategy plan from your vision to your tactics, understanding the impact on your business of setting out to achieve your goals and the need to align the different areas of your business in order to do just that.

I used the example of entering a new market sector and converting new prospects and highlighted some of the areas involved in doing this such as sales, marketing, engineering and HR.

These are functional parts of a company and aligning goals, objectives and tactics to them is not straight forward simply because they are separate vertical sections.

To connect these dots, rather than try and align by functional departments or groups, align the goal, and work involved in achieving it, by horizontal processes.

Using the above example you may split the goal into the process of entering a new market and the process of converting a prospect. Break the processes down into logical steps and you will see how they involve a number of vertical functions.

The process, for a technology company, of entering a new market will involve market research (marketing), client profiling (sales), possibly new product features (engineering), new targeted marketing strategy, messages and collateral (marketing), possibly sales training (HR/marketing/engineering), PR (marketing), new account management (sales), relationship building (sales/directors), new contracts, pricing, services-level agreements, customers (administration), technical support (engineering) and of course a budget (finance).

That’s one process and around six separate functional sections of the company.

So you see, connecting the dots from a goal to the tactics and the tasks involved, is easier to do when broken down into steps within a process. The various functions or departments involved can then plan their role and align with each other to achieve an efficient execution of this process.

Define all the processes in your business and align the roles of the relevant functions to each. Assign someone to be in charge of the processes so that they can work with each function involved to ensure the processes are aligned and run as smoothly as possible to achieve the company goals.