In our previous blog post we discussed how a poor workflow system, or lack thereof, harms your front-line team and bottom-line revenue. But what about your management teams? The local managers who keep salespeople, media planners and buyers happy. Or the managers at regional or corporate levels who make organizational decisions.
As leaders, we face the challenge of making decisions without enough information. But why do so if it’s avoidable?
Let’s look at challenges caused by management without measurement.
The Domino Effect
From a leader’s or executive’s point of view, difficulty starts with lack of information for managers, buyers, sellers and planners to execute upon. You want your teams to seamlessly and flawlessly deliver on campaigns. And they should have information at their fingertips for consistent, transparent communication. Without this, your teams are sure to fail. Despite hours spent in disparate workflow platforms, and dollars poured into coordinators, you won’t learn of issues until too late.
Ultimately, as a leader you’ll be in no better position than your marketing managers, buyers, sellers and planners. If your workflow doesn’t make everyone aware of campaign responsibilities, deadlines and deliverables, mistakes will be made and deadlines will be missed.
That falls on you.
And if your workflow platform doesn’t keep you informed, early and often, a growing number of walls will fall on you.
The Questions
If your workflow is opaque:
- How do you know how busy each of your teams and people are?
- Do you need more staff? Less?
- At what functions? How do you know?
This can lead to incorrect selling, buying, or placing, which impacts campaign delivery. This, in turn, harms your ability to execute for clients or stakeholders by preventing a comprehensive view of results. Then your team makes mistakes which eat into profitability, and erode client and stakeholder confidence.
If your workflow is disorganized:
- How can you keep close track of monthly or quarterly billing?
- How will you measure margins and project profitability?
- Which products are most profitable or productive? What about your markets, partners, clients or teams?
What manager or leader doesn’t require clear, day-to-day visibility into each of these?
As a manager, these individual issues can combine to kill careers, if not companies.
An inefficient, opaque or overly-manual workflow results in your team selling less, and producing less top-line revenue. This eats into profits, margins and ROI by wasting time and requiring additional, non-productive resources “pushing paper around”. And the lack of visibility prevents you from efficiently managing your teams’ and your business’s results.
The Forest for the Trees
If you can’t see the forest of your business for the countless trees blocking your view, odds are your workflow is to blame. So, you must replace your workflow before a customer, client, stakeholder or executive replaces you.
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