SPANNING BOUNDARIES
Warning!
Your companies market research data has just been
hacked! How did this happen? Some sales guy just "spanned
his boundaries!" thus the State of a Free Capitalistic System and
that is a GOOD thing!Spanning Boundaries is a Sales Training
Drivers World Class Sales Competency. It falls under the category
of "business insight" and involves the active
collaboration of cross functional teams or work groups. The
purpose is to collecting critical information on organizational
challenges. Sales training and the need for knowledge management
will be invaluable to this process as it relates to team
building, prospect data collection, cultural behavior analysis
and market trends.
Knowledge Management is focused on
leveraging different knowledge bases that can provide Sales
Trainers up to date resources faster and more efficiently than
one leader, group or organization can do by itself. In other
words, two or more resources working together towards a common
goal is better than one. Wikipedia describes it this way -
"Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of
strategies and practices used in an organization to identify,
create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences."The incoming information is
shared, stored and analyzed by knowledge management so that
sales leaders and upper level management can address the
business climate and organizational development concerns
quickly. Boundary spanning teams and workgroups will
continue to collect and bring in the information for problem
solving and finding new ways to capitalize on learning and
development opportunities.
The organizational challenges being examined externally by a cross
functional sales and marketing teams could include: business
intelligence, global competition, changing marketing demographics,
cultural development or technological advances by a competitor.
Internal boundary spanning by the team could look at challenges and
root weaknesses in executive leadership behavior, succession
planning, and an in depth look at interpersonal communication
breakdown between senior leaders, departmental directors, and
managers.
Sales Directors and Sales Trainers will look to give Senior Leaders
information on how to solve sales revenue and sustainability
problems collectively. This will require the deliberate initiation
of highly trained boundary spanning teams.What may be most
difficult for Senior Leaders, Talent Management and Marketing /
Sales Analysts, is that the re-organizing the traditional vertical
organizational charts showing how employees directly report to one
another will be changed for open source communication.
This is no easy task. It pushes the critical need for knowledge
management expertise front and center to measure the success of
changing people processes. It will need to ensure the alignment and
commitment to a collaborative business strategy. However, it has
been found that teams engaged in boundary spanning are more likely
to achieve team goals. Just be careful of how you collect and
distributeculturally diversity information. Gathering this data
and dispersing it into the wrong hands could pose serious
organizational concerns. Everyone wants real time business
intelligence that is critical to stay competitive.