Get sales and marketing on the same page.

All too often, sales and marketing people have different objectives. If they do, they can spend more time bickering than creating bottom line results. Or worse, they just go their separate ways.

If you want to find out if your sales and marketing people are working together, send them a simple questionnaire. Make sure a copy goes to every sales rep, manager and executive. Send it to every person in the marketing department and the people at your ad agency, design studio or public relations firm.

Ask them this…

Can the king lead the revolution?

According to C.K. Prahalad, the University of Michigan management professor who coauthored the book “Competing For The Future,” this concept is based on the incorrect assumption that top managers can develop strategy and force everyone else to implement it.

In effective organizations, he says, real change is enabled by the people lower down in the organization who are closer to new technologies, to customers and competitors.

In an interview with strategy+business (3Q 96 p84), Dr. Prahalad said, “If you think about strategy as a revolution, as discovery, as innovation, as changing industry norms and industry patterns, then you must acknowledge that no monarchy has ever fomented its own revolution. In other words, senior management does not have a great propensity for change.”

So, how can you get the best ideas from people throughout your organization? Try this…