Great discussion today from four different clients about how they are handling relationships between marketing, sales, and service. Seems everyone has their challenges and their strengths.  Alignment is the word of the day, getting everyone to represent the brand consistently to the customer while providing different things and with different objectives / measurements.

One really interesting idea was a company that is doing job shadowing across groups, having marketing folks go on sales calls, sales people ride along on service calls, service people work on a marketing campaign. The comment that stuck with me is “it felt ‘heavy’ when we started, but the results are so positive we are saving time and improving customer satisfaction dramatically on the back end, so it is totally worth it.”

If you are in Denver in February, please consider joining us at our Boardroom Talk series. We’ll be talking about Digital Engagement, together with my colleague Merritt Rutledge from Western Union.  It promises to be an interesting and informative morning!

Click HERE to register!

for corporate conferences.  This month I’m attending two client offsites, and our own internal company meeting, which is held in Atlanta every January.  These events are often perceived as expensive, time consuming, and perhaps even disposable.  However, I’ve found that the people who come ready to participate and drive value out of it are successful in doing so, and they walk away with connections they could not have gotten in any other forum. No matter how technologically adept we become, there is something valuable about putting a critical mass of humanity into a confined space for a few days that just can’t be replicated.