When businesses aren’t hitting their sales goals, there are a variety of strategies they can employ to get back on their feet. Sometimes the solution is a simple campaign, but more often there are a combination of barriers keeping them from creating lasting connections with potential customers. A disconnect between their branding, marketing, and sales teams is almost always an issue.
Branding, marketing, and sales form a crucial foundation for business success. Branding defines a company's core identity and values, marketing leverages this identity to attract potential customers, and sales closes the loop by converting interested prospects into revenue. When these critical functions are out of sync with each other, the business suffers.
To overcome these challenges, many businesses are restructuring to adopt a cross-functional team structure called a pod.
Traditional team dynamics
Branding, marketing, and sales traditionally operate as separate entities. Branding sets the stage by establishing a strong business identity and value proposition.
Marketing builds on this foundation, creating awareness and generating leads with targeted campaigns. Sales, the final player, personalises the brand's narrative for prospects and clinches deals. Despite the shared goal of propelling business growth, a lack of synchronisation can diminish the effectiveness of these efforts.
The challenges of siloed teams
When branding, marketing, and sales functions are compartmentalised, they inadvertently create obstacles that can disrupt a seamless customer experience in the following ways:
- Differing goals: independent objectives and metrics lead departments in conflicting directions, away from a unified company vision.
- Lack of ownership: without one team owning the customer journey, critical touchpoints can be neglected, resulting in a disjointed experience.
- Limited collaboration: a lack of interdepartmental collaboration can cause inconsistent messaging, eroding brand integrity and weakening marketing campaigns.
This results in wasted marketing dollars, misaligned messaging, and a prolonged (or failed) sales cycle that impedes rather than enhances growth.
Harmonising business functions with the pod model
Pod structures are common in the tech sector, where adaptive and iterative approaches are fundamental.
Pods can reduce month- or even year-long projects to days and weeks, with drastic improvements in team collaboration and communication and reduced rework, leading to a healthier, more aligned team and substantial cost savings.
Creating a pod structure involves forming small, versatile, cross-functional teams with a dedicated and shared objective. Embracing this methodical approach can refine strategy development and value delivery, helping to:
- Enhance agility: the flexibility of pods allows swift adaptation to market dynamics and feedback.
- Create coherent strategies: the customer journey benefits from a fluid and consistent brand-to-sales experience.
- Build laser-focused objectives: with a concentrated focus, pods help avoid scattered efforts and conflicting objectives.
Understanding the mechanics of the pod model
The role and scope of a pod varies depending on the scale of the project. The bigger the effort, the more resources are added to the pod.
The best structure usually involves four primary resources: a brand strategist, a marketing manager, a sales consultant, and a project manager. This integrated team usually operates from the beginning of a campaign to its completion.
As an example, here’s how pod members’ responsibilities might be allocated:
- Ideation: led by the brand strategist, the team joins forces to craft a strategic campaign shaped by the brand’s guidelines.
- Execution: the marketing manager takes charge of producing and distributing content, ensuring the brand message remains consistent.
- Conversion: the sales consultant tailors the brand story for individual clients, enhancing the potential for successful conversions.
- Management: the project manager keeps everything on track by acting as the bridge among all three resources.
This model encourages a constant exchange of information, where insights gained from sales enrich the overarching brand and marketing strategies, fine-tuning the entire process.
Key takeaways pod-based team structures
Though common, the gaps between branding, marketing, and sales teams are manageable. A pod-based approach promotes strong communication, alignment, commitment, and camaraderie whilst ensuring resources are directed toward a unified objective.
If you’re looking for a way to break down silos and drive growth, restructuring teams into pods centred on shared goals might just be the strategy you need. Remember, the goal is to work together – not alongside each other – to optimise performance and deliver higher-quality work.