What if all teams were really working towards the same goal? Often it feels like everyone is on different paths and not fully aligned to reach the same destination.
For example, the social media team focuses on engagement. The email team aims for high click-through rates. The website team is working to improve site performance. However, none of this contributes to a unified improvement of the company’s overall goals.
This happens when teams are assigned goals relevant to their work, which do not align with the organization’s strategic goals. As a result, opportunities for business growth and customer retention are missed.
Let’s explore how shared goals and incentives can lead to measurable results, with three key reasons why alignment is essential.
Reason 1: Unified vision and team dynamics
Let’s face it: Disconnected goals lead to fragmented marketing efforts. Even if a team can succeed at a specific task, the ultimate goal must go beyond individual measures. Everyone, even if it is not part of their role, contributes to the overall growth of the company.
However, focusing only on a single metric can distract from this broader goal. For example, let’s say the goal is simply to get people to open emails. In this case, you can use tactics that attract attention, but not to the right audience. This can lead to a “successful” campaign that doesn’t help your business grow.
Ensure all teams share a unified vision with common key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, the email team’s goal should be to target the best customers likely to purchase. This may reduce open rates, but will improve the return on investment (ROI) of the campaign.
Achieving this requires shared communication and reporting on metrics. Your email team should always focus on their email metrics only. However, sharing information about the bigger picture helps them align with the rest of the organization.
The added benefit? Happier customers who see real added value in opening your emails and interacting with your brand.
Dig Deeper: 5 secrets to cross-functional collaboration in marketing
Reason 2: Break down data silos
Sometimes teams know it would be helpful to have a holistic view – both of inputs and outcomes – but they don’t have access to the necessary data. Isolated data sources prevent these teams from having a comprehensive understanding. Without a complete picture, they try to do their best with accessible information.
This creates two main problems:
First, teams may rely on outdated or anecdotal evidence, such as “this didn’t work last year.” The dynamic nature of consumers and their preferences make these anecdotes of little use. Second, teams can focus too much on their own part of the process, neglecting how it fits into the overall customer journey. Because they can see and influence these numbers, they view them as too large, potentially to the detriment of getting the right customers.
The solution to this problem is to implement centralized data management for cross-functional access. This moves organizations from a “need to know” basis to a democratized view of data. With a better understanding of how individual elements influence the overall journey, each team can contribute more effectively.
Shared data promotes transparency and improves decision-making on individual tactics as part of the customer journey and broader strategic initiatives. From a technical perspective, this problem can be solved by ensuring that teams have a centralized view of the data meaningful to their work.
Teams must understand the impact of their work on the overall process and be able to share information with other teams.
Dig Deeper: Breaking Data Silos: A Practical Guide to Integrated Marketing Data
Reason 3: Accountability and Streamlined Incentives
Teams that work in isolation often focus too much on their own goals. Everyone can understand the company’s mission, but teams focused on their own goals can veer off course. Being incentivized to make their channel as successful as possible distorts their ability to contribute to the end goal.
A social media team can partner with an influencer who brings a lot of followers, likes, and attention to a campaign. But if this results in few conversions and sales, other stakeholders will see it as a waste of time and resources.
To solve this problem, leaders should create incentive structures that reward collective success. Teams can still celebrate their individual achievements. However, success occurs when each part of the process contributes to the overall goal. A strong element of a campaign that would have otherwise failed does not count as a success. Only when everything works together will the campaign succeed, fostering a stronger team culture.
Aligned incentives promote teamwork and shared responsibility, helping everyone understand how to improve and contribute to future victories.
Dig Deeper: 5 steps to ensure business goals guide your martech strategy
To start
This all sounds great, right? While better alignment can yield amazing results, there are a few things to remember that can make the transition more difficult. Be wary of potential resistance to changing team KPIs and goal structures. After all, people generally don’t like change, but explaining the “why” behind your actions can help put them in context and convince them.
Also be careful not to abandon your existing success metrics to focus only on the big picture. Teams should examine both to continually improve their efforts. Success lies in effectively balancing individual and team contributions within shared incentives.
Regardless of the size of your organization and the resources you have, encourage leaders to start with small pilot programs focused on goal alignment and share the results to gain buy-in for larger initiatives. These quick wins can more easily demonstrate why scaling up can be even more impactful.
Aligning goals and incentives to help teams see the big picture and understand their role is crucial to achieving consistent growth and collaboration.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the writing and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
