How do you balance the business for success? Surely it is just setting up measures for each team and letting them work towards scoring as high as possible, right?
Many businesses that I have seen set up their teams to fight one another. Not intentionally, I’ll admit. It’s just that there seems little overall plan to bring the teams together.
Sales are often driven for top line numbers. Bring in revenue and it’ll all be great! Make the promises to customers to drive the orders up!
Here’s the catch. Those promises made, usually aren’t expected to be kept by the Sales team. Operations are the ones expected to keep those promises and they are typically measured by unit cost reduction. How cheaply can you still make the product or service in a way that makes the customer happy.
Anyone see the problem yet?
Unless you have an effective way to bring these teams together there is an ongoing tension between promise makers and promise keepers. I have seen this result in physical violence when the blame games start.
So what, then, is the option? There is a concept called Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) that makes a world of difference to your business and your customers and suppliers. This process brings an alignment to the promises made and how (and even whether) they can be kept. Bringing this “balance to the force” can take a significant almost Darth Vader figure to drive things to begin with but provided the process can be made clear and it also can be seen by everyone to drive real performance this has been a tried and true method to overcome the battle of the business heavy hitters.
Like many ideas like this, the implementation takes experience and is not something that you would enter into without support. Having been involved in these processes across many industries and countries I can honestly say that business culture, and whether the executive strongly support the idea, will make or break the approach. I once saw a CEO walk a well respected senior manager out the door for repeatedly sending junior staff to the meetings. Commitment means exactly that if you want it to work.
The upside, is that SOP provides a way of knowing, not just guessing, whether promises have a chance of being met. It makes shared measures based on optimal delivery possible so that everyone has a stake in the success of all of the teams, not just one business unit.
You can continue the battle if you like. There is a well established alternative that might just stop the war altogether.
