Does working in siloed teams still work?

Cross-team collaboration has been attributed to a happier, healthier and more productive workforce. However, it’s often not practical or easy for teams to collaborate or work towards the same goal, people are often focused on what they do best, thinking outside the box could be seen as a distraction.

In Gartner’s recent CMO spend survey, CMOs stated that their top inhibitors were the finance team. Given that technology has brought teams like sales and marketing teams closer together by offering hubs that work in collaboration. Is it possible to extend this bridge to include the operations and finance teams?

Getting your departments to work as one and understand the needs of each other could have a positive impact on your business. With everyone on the same page, you could have a team of superheroes!

Why is cross-team collaboration so important?

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons building bridges across teams is so important:

If you succeed as a team you are more likely to succeed as a business. We are all great at working to our strengths but what if we all worked together? The results might be surprising!

Here are a few considerations that might help build some bridges to your finance and operations teams:

How to build bridges across teams 

Break down those walls

These might be physical as well as metaphorical. Often teams work in isolated teams in the office space, but increasing businesses are seeing the benefits of mixing teams up, perhaps working in projects teams rather than traditional departments.

It’s also important to identify the business metrics that really matter across the whole business – the ones that everyone can understand. See if people can agree what that common goal / metric is and get them to all work towards achieving that.

Be a finance hero

If you work in sales and marketing, make it your mission to help your finance out! Here’s an idea how. Finance teams often have really good software systems that tell them what happened yesterday, they don’t have the tools to tell them where the business is going.

Sales and marketing have forward-looking data at their fingertips thanks to CRM’s and marketing software, such as HubSpot and Pipedrive. So why not give them  access to this lovely data; see if it can help with their future planning and in turn, help them do their jobs better.

It’s all relative

Metrics must be relative and understanding how they change and why is key. Often these metrics are hidden or spread across departments and in different systems meaning that operations and finance teams have to work really hard to get that information.

Combining past, present & future data needs collaboration. If as a business, you have a central system, where you can combine information and reach a common conclusion – this will make everyone’s life easier and increase the sense of collaboration.

Sales Velocity is important

Sales velocity is the speed in which your business brings in revenue, calculated by Leads / Deals / Wins.  Having a view of this shows the areas you should to invest your time in. For more information on sales velocity, read our blog article, Understanding your sales velocity. 

Use this data to help build bridges across departments – find out who needs more budget or resource and how can everyone work to make a positive impact? Perhaps sales can help with the cash funnel or marketing can help with the sales funnel. Again, having a complete view of the business means everyone can understand and see where they can make a difference.

How long does it take your business to change direction?

All teams must understand how long it takes your business to change.  That way, they can set realistic targets and and work together to achieve them.   

Of course, there are also things you can do to accelerate the pace of change.  “Agile” is easy to say but hard to achieve across all departments.  There are ways to speed-up the way your business evolves but understanding what takes time today and what your constraints are is a great place to start.

Get closer to the purse strings

If you understand how your finance team and their strategies work, you are more likely to build a better business case for a budget increase.

Why not try work with finance team and come up with that business case together. Understanding the budgeting process can help get inside the heads of the finance team, meaning your business case might be more successful. 

All the points above are looking at how working collaboratively can help make more collective decisions, which in turn and push your business in the right direction. Utilise technology to strengthen these new bridges and keep building more!

To find out how QuarterOne is helping build bridges to your finance team by simply connecting to your existing CRM data and turning it into valuable insight for the whole business.   Contact us for a demo and free trial.