Expose the Existing Culture
When one of our customers set out to launch a new product, they discovered that before they could move forward, they had to address the culture among their sales people regarding the marketing department’s use of technology. Marketing was frustrated by the technology they had in place because its form did not follow function. An example of this was the company’s web site. Its content was rarely updated because it took weeks to get any changes made. As a result, marketing personnel had long ago stopped feeling any ownership of the site and instead, had created workarounds to get new marketing materials to sales.
Sales people got their marketing information as email attachments and were on their own to keep it organized and up to date. Those with good contacts in the marketing department got better information than peers without any contacts. This bred isolation and a dangerous independence in which sales people showed prospects marketing materials that were out of date or even that they’d designed themselves. Periodically, marketing came across logos that sales people had designed and other materials that would have never passed their muster.
What have you seen? What's your experience with the technology you deal with? Does it support your ability to get your job done? Do you have trust in your IT department, or are you always waiting, and experiencing bottlenecks when it comes to getting the technology applications that you need?
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