- Integration and the Marketing Round
- Breaking Down the Silos
- CEO Communication
- Creating the Marketing Round
- The Dashboard
- Bringing It All Together
- Exercises
Creating the Marketing Round
After you’ve created your launch group with someone from every discipline, hold an inaugural, in-person meeting. In-person is vital, especially if you’re accustomed to working remotely or from satellite offices. This will build trust more quickly than a video conference or a conference call.
At the first meeting, agree to (at a minimum) biweekly meetings (these can be done with video or conference calls) and get them on everyone’s calendars. The mandate must come from the corner office that these are not to be missed except in cases of customer emergency, medical emergency, or long-scheduled vacations.
Encourage group members to communicate with one another outside of meetings—Chatter, Yammer, Skype, Google Hangouts, or even the old stand-by GChat are useful options. Or create a forum, a Google+ or Facebook group, a discussion group, or an internal blog where you interact daily.
Picture a round organizational chart for each discipline, with marketing in the middle, as shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Marketing is in the middle of all the communication disciplines in an organizational chart.
Communication is the key to all of this. It’s imperative you all know what the others are doing, at all times, to make this work:
- Have a new product or service being launched? The first place you should go is the marketing round, to discuss the opportunities and how you can launch it together, instead of in your silos.
- Need to increase sales? Go to the marketing round.
- Want to get customer feedback? Go to the marketing round.
- Need to communicate internal changes? Go to the marketing round.
This is the job of everyone, not just sales or marketing, not the leadership team. Not public relations or corporate communication.
Everyone.
Work together to create the plan. Be rid of the silos.