Now is a great time to be reviewing your organisational structure, roles, and capabilities and skills with a view to:
- Avoiding duplication and inefficiency
- Providing clarity, direction and inspiration to the existing workforce
- Keeping the company AND the people within it developing with a view for the longer term.
Here’s some tips on how.
The Sales vs Marketing Conundrum
One of the most common things we hear is ‘Marketing don’t talk to Sales, and Sales don’t talk to Marketing’. This ‘great divide’ causes all sorts of problems.
For example, Sales is primarily concerned with the retail customer, and Marketing with the consumer / end user. So who is looking after the shopper? As we probably don’t need to state, they’re often not the same person (think pet food, children’s products, and ‘buying for others’ in general).
‘Who is looking after the shopper?’ is a great place to start when reviewing your organisational structure. Having a ‘Shopper Marketing’ function that represents the voice of the shopper makes a lot of sense. To be effective, it needs to report in at the same level as Marketing and Sales. So that you have the Retailer (Sales), the Consumer (Marketing) and the Shopper (Shopper Marketing) equally represented in decision-making. Ideally, you would co-locate all these functions so they HAVE to talk to each other, and schedule regular planning and work in progress meetings for all three teams together.
Where would Trade Marketing sit, then? Ideally it would sit under Shopper Marketing, given that Shopper behaviour insight is necessary to determine effective point of purchase solutions. It would also need close relationships with Sales for the Retailer perspective and Marketing for the brand perspective.
More and more leading organizations are restructuring to include a dedicated Shopper Marketing function so that the voice of the Shopper influences planning in the same manner as that of the Consumer and the Retailer. This kind of structure can also assist with reducing confusion and duplication among sales and marketing functions.
‘People accounting’ in the era of lean (but not mean)
The current climate is requiring many companies to review which functions, roles and people are critical, versus those who are not.
To avoid making subjective decisions about this, it is helpful to have an exceedingly clear picture of the performance criteria for each role in the organisation, and how this contributes to the whole.
Ideally, every role has more than KPIs - a clear scorecarding system is required. Scorecards for every role enable objectivity in reviewing current performance as well as development, and provide clarity of communication and expectations. Scorecards also identify clearly where a person is not progressing along their development roadmap, and when they are going faster than the company is and therefore require more support.
Furthermore, the whole organisation needs a scorecard based on its core critical functions, with a clear indication as to where each role fits in. Developing such a scorecard can sometimes identify where duplication and inefficiency are occurring, and where roles can merge or become defunct.
Ultimately, ‘people accounting’ is as important as traditional accounting, because one directly affects the other!
Keeping morale on the up and up
It’s a well used statement that in every downturn there is opportunity for some, and the same thing applies internally to your teams.
Whilst some roles may be considered ‘surplus’, that can ultimately mean fast-track development for others.
For each person / role in whom the company decides to continue investment, a personalized roadmap for development needs to be created. Where the scorecard provides clarity about performance against expectations, the roadmap provides crystal clarity on mutually agreed development goals and how success in achieving them is measured.
A development roadmap can be a highly motivating way to push through tough times with goals in mind, seizing on the opportunities created by restructuring to create a more flexible, versatile, highly skilled team that is offered variety and ongoing development support.
There are many ways to optimize the business in a downturn, but to recap on three key measures:
- Review your Sales and Marketing functions and consider whether the Shopper is adequately represented (because ultimately it’s the Shopper who drives topline growth!)
- Implement a clear scorecarding system for the company as a whole and for each function, to determine what is critical versus not critical, and where inefficiencies exist
- Ensure your people have clear, motivational development roadmaps to encourage a flexible and versatile workforce in an era where spanning across multiple roles and responsibilities may be required.
