Aligning, Transforming, and Growing your business with Konnect - Part 1

Show Notes

Welcome to Part 1 of our conversation on how communication can align your business.

Is your business misaligned? How can you identify the problem and ensure your business does not follow a silo mentality? This week, Sally and Sam, along with guests Nick Hughes and Andrew Hancock discuss how to align your departments to enhance your reach and provide the best possible customer experience.

(00:05) Welcome to the show and Introduction
(05:54) The business cultural change that’s been going on for many years
(11:47) The importance of alignment from the top to the bottom
(16:26) What happens if you’re not aligned behind a purpose?
(21:28) The importance of getting feedback from all levels of the business

We'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so please share! Tweet us at @meanderspod, message us on Facebook, or email [e-mail]

• Connect with Nick Hughes on LinkedIn
• Connect with Andrew Hancock on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Konnect Solutions or Connect with Konnect Solutions on LinkedIn

Marketing Meanders is hosted by Sally Green, Partner at YMS and Senior Marketing Consultant, and Sam Birkett, founder of Amiable Marketing and Specialist Marketing Consultant.

Sally Green:

I am an experienced marketing consultant who loves helping people plan and implement successful strategies, creating campaigns that both strengthen the brand impact and increase revenue streams.

Working with me will give you a proper understanding of what does and doesn’t need to be done, how you can measure your success and how to get the best return on the effort you put into your marketing. Working with both large organisations and SMEs, I will help you set achievable goals, create a strategy and develop sustainable marketing plans that will show positive returns on your marketing effort.

Connect with Sally on LinkedIn.

Sam Birkett:

I specialise in higher and executive education marketing strategy, and operational and tactical support. Specialisms include LinkedIn lead generation and conversion campaigns, Persona and Proposition development, Content strategy, Webinar, Interview, Podcast and Video creation.

My consultancy works with institutions and organisations both in the UK and internationally, and over the last 16 years, I've been fortunate enough to work for world-leading organisations.

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn.

Creators & Guests

Host

Sally Green

Partner at YMS and Senior Marketing Consultant

Host

Sam Birkett

Founder of Amiable Marketing and Specialist Marketing Consultant

Editor

Nick Short

Graduate Podcast Producer at Story Ninety-Four

What is Marketing Meanders: The Marketing Podcast for Marketers and Small Business Owners?

Welcome to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, the fortnightly podcast with over 50 years of marketing experience squashed into each episode.

We discuss the many aspects of marketing, emerging trends, and challenges we all face in marketing our businesses, sharing our own experiences and advice from industry experts. If you're a marketer, you'll recognise some of the stories we tell, and if you are a small business owner, hopefully, we'll answer a question or two.

Sam Birkett 0:05
Well hello everyone welcome once again to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, and on this beautiful summer's day, as it is at the moment. So I'm very happy to announce that we have some returning contributors and friends of the show today, who will be talking with us about alignment and breaking down of silos. And those contributors are Nick Hughes from Dynamic Coach, a sales coach, and Andrew Hancock from Brand Asylum. And of course, with Sally, in fact, as well, these experts in their fields have actually identified a gap in the market at the moment and come together to form Konnect. Now, I'm going to hand over to Nick to actually give us an overview of what Konnect is and what it means. And then we'll be exploring some of the questions and the themes around alignment and breaking down silos within organisations. And I'm sure we'll be able to do it in a far more comprehensive way than I possibly could. So I know to you Nick to give us the overview and then we'll get stuck right into the conversation, I think.

Nick Hughes 1:05
Thanks, Sam. Hi, everyone, so Konnect - what's Konnect? The three people on the call at the moment, Sally, Andrew and myself, have all come from a corporate background at some stage in our life. And we recognise that in most corporates or in larger businesses, we should say, so talking outside of the micro and small SME markets. Silos - so marketing do the marketing bit, sales in the sales bit, they never talk. They work on different timescales, they work on different projects very often and can be a drain on a business, throw into the mix branding, as well, which is all-important to get that business up and running, if it's to be recognised. And you've got a recipe for disaster, and a recipe for lost opportunities and lost money from within the business. And we recognise that sitting back and looking at some of our clients that actually, the problem is they're in most businesses just to varying degrees, and the businesses that can really capitalise on breaking down those silos and having their businesses to align, really drive through transformation and growth, much faster, much more efficient, and become much more profitable, much more quicker. And that's what Konnect is. Konnect is about is about aligning, transforming, and then growing individual businesses regardless of the size, but we tend to see this opportunity for medium to larger SME and into the international blue chips as well. So in a nutshell, Konnect is about aligning, transforming and growing your business, whether that's from a sales and marketing, a brand perspective, and you could also throw in the other aspects of the business, as well, from operations and so on behalf our main focus is from our expertise, which is sales, branding, and marketing.

Sally Green 2:55
And just to finish the pitch off is what we do, what Nick, Andrew and I do is we will go into businesses, and we will identify the problem. Because often you find that in particularly larger businesses, it's kind of sitting there in plain sight, but nobody can see it. Nobody really knows that sales is working off different goals and targets and marketing doesn't know what they are, and sales don't know what marketing schedules are. Because often they're so siloed that they don't share those nitty-gritty details and you pop, you often, and we feel that somebody else needs to come into the business and say, we can see the problem because people don't really want to admit it's there.

Sam Birkett 3:36
That's interesting because I was gonna go into that, really, it's about how you go about finding the symptoms, I suppose of misalignment and the silo crashing? Because I mean, it'd be interesting I suppose to take this on the top and sort of say, well, what why do we think these, this misalignment occurs? And why do silos generate? I mean, obviously, we can see this as any, whenever human beings come together in any sort of organisation, these sort of things that occur, but if anybody wants to take it, why they think this starts in the first place, and then what's the symptoms, we can diagnose and see that misalignment?

Sally Green 4:07
That's a really interesting one. And it's not going to be the same for everyone. So I'll just put one thought out there. And part of its as businesses grow, you probably get you will, then suddenly, you once upon a time, you'll have had a sales and marketing team. And they'll have been, it'll be one person doing both and the marketing team will have done a bit of sales and the sales team have done a bit of marketing and it's because there's probably only three of you. So just like our business, now we're all doing a bit of everything and then you suddenly get bigger and as you grow, we'll have a marketing director, and we'll have a sales director and we won't actually get them to work together straight away. So they'll disappear off into their own alcoves and it just begins to happen from that point, and then they'll recruit their own people, they won't talk to each other about who they're recruiting. And then in time, you find that you don't need sales anymore, because I'm running perfectly good marketing plans here that are all going tremendously well, I mean, it's a bit annoying. They're asking us for leads, what do they know? And you get these people not really realising how much they need the other departments because they're doing fine in their silo, thank you very much. And the bigger you get, the more it grows.

Nick Hughes 5:15
And from a sales perspective, we are notoriously bad, poor and terrible for on the selling the value of our business, our marketing campaigns, and particularly our brand. And I see this on a fairly regular basis where people or sales teams don't really understand what their brand stands for. And then how that fits into the marketing, and then how it fits into sales and how we drive value. And added value from from those from those benefits as well. So it'd be interesting to see what Andrew's view is on how brand aligns with sales and marketing and what we've been talking about in the first couple of minutes.

Andrew Hancock 5:54
Yeah, thanks, Nick. I think there's a business cultural change that's been going on, it's like, you know, bigger businesses have kind of been being ran the same for many years and recently, and certainly through COVID, and the younger companies coming through, the younger generation. They're all looking on how to differentiate and do things differently and I think it's people who've got set in their kind of their ways in their silos. This is how it was done for years and I think now people want to change that and they want to be disruptive in the market space, and marketplace and to do that, that kind of looking at, we've got to actually look at things holistically, and work out what actually needs to go where. So the brand needs to be replicated and spoken through throughout the business, throughout the sales channels, other marketing channels, and vice versa with sales and marketing. So it's almost like this cultural changes is happening within how people look to do business going forward. And I think the new tech companies, the younger companies, that kind of you know, the really forward-thinking companies are doing this. And what we're hoping to do with Konnect is like, you know, almost show people, that's not a hard thing to do. It's something it's very easy to do and transform, you've just got to, not be brave as such, but as soon as you see it, you'll go, "Oh, God, I wish I'd done that sooner".

Nick Hughes 7:09
I think one of the things to add to that Andrew is it's been probably an agile and agility isn't it, you know, if you go prior COVID and traditional ways of running the business, sales, market sales director, marketing, Director, operations, HR, etc, etc, etc. But what we've learned quite a lot over the last couple of years, and probably certainly pre-COVID, is the businesses that are agile, and can have that multifaceted multitasking approach to their markets and their customers tend to be, well more often not, tend to be the fastest growing and the people that are at the forefront of the bell curve, capitalizing on better margins, better market penetration, and are not the followers, they tend to be the leaders in their market space,

Sally Green 7:52
They're also much more quick to develop to change and the world changes all the time. Economically, culturally, it's changing constantly, and the people who are better aligned are much better at responding to that change, because they will do it at once rather than marketing suddenly doing something different and sales going, "What the hell are you doing, that's not the same". So because it all functions at once they get the strength in numbers going forward. And then the whole company is doing it not just sales.

Andrew Hancock 8:19
I think what's interesting is to add to that Sally as well is that we're there's almost like a third story or fourth person in here, which is your customer. You know, we got sales, marketing and brand. But the key person in this is your end customer. So if you're not talking to, engaging, delivering to those people in the right way at the right time, then whatever you're doing is not going to work as well. So it's kind of understanding what that set end customer wants and needs now, because that's changed again, since COVID.

Sally Green 8:52
And recognising that that customer is the same for all of us. Because I think sometimes we run the risk of confusing customers by brand coming in with it with this brand story and then marketing comes with a slightly different off-kilter story. And then sales is the people that are selling them making them buy something with a completely different story and customers can find that incredibly uncomfortable.

Sam Birkett 9:14
As you say, I mean, it almost strikes me that the customer is your best perspective on assessing how aligned or misaligned you are, I suppose, because they're the ones who are going to tell the story if they say that well, actually yeah, you know, for example, it might be the products categories, you have to say, "Well, actually we have we have a whole vast array of different products where we're offering you but our brand talks all about", I don't know. "It's all high fat, high quality, but you have a massive range of different products and you're always trying to sell me something that is cost-effective, but actually you're going for that that's that sort of misaligned story". I suppose it comes across the customers, particularly customers who've been with you for a long period of time, I suppose. They're the ones really who can give you that external perspective, but the most critical perspective I suppose really.

Sally Green 10:01
Brand is a really interesting one, actually, because I think one of the things you have to be careful with is that the product brand isn't the company brand. So Unilever, I was thinking it was interesting because Unilever that own Kraft cheese, and washing powder. So they do really clever branding they have, they have to align because nobody knows, most people don't aren't aware that Kraft cheese and Persil come from under the same roof. But they do and Unilever are clever because they have realised that Unilever have a brand, which is a really powerful international brand, for investors. That's what they're there for they've invested in it and what part of their benefits is having all these huge brands, but the brands underneath them have to have their own alignment. So Kraft has to align its sales and marketing. But it also has to have a thought to what Unilever is doing. So alignment isn't 100% obvious. But you've got to think about it all the way through the journey, because actually, if people, it's just possible that your customers might absolutely hate Unilever, they might have lost loads of stocks and shares on Unilever the waste of money, oh, my God, I'm never going to invest in anything that Unilever does and so Kraft has to work very hard to make sure that that customer doesn't know they're part of Unilever. So there's some quite tricky things that you have to do once you align yourself to make sure that your customer, as you say, is still part of that alignment.

Andrew Hancock 11:30
There's a great stat by a funder in 2019, which states that putting your brand values kind of front and centre can be a greater tool for generating more leads by as much as 89% and that's a massive, you know, amount. That's a massive uptick and again, it's what Sally was saying about, you know, if the business gets their brand values, right and engages in the right way, then it can generate across everything and that kind of feeds down to sales, marketing, and fundamentally engaging with the end consumer and customer.

Sally Green 12:04
There's a really good symptom of companies aren't aligned. If you go into a sales team. And you say, or in fact, a marketing team, you say, When did you last read the brand guidelines? Most people will go "Oh, hang on. I've got them here somewhere." I'm not sure...

Andrew Hancock 12:24
What guidelines?

Sally Green 12:25
Yeah, that too. I've never seen them to know what they are. What's the point?

Andrew Hancock 12:29
Yeah.

Sally Green 12:29
That's a really good symptom and it shows that people aren't thinking carefully at all.

Andrew Hancock 12:33
"Do you mean the 1978 copy we've got in the back somewhere?"

Sally Green 12:37
Yes, that one. Yeah. That one is all "Oh, yeah, read the first page". That'll do because it's usually some kind of tome.

Nick Hughes 12:46
I think the... just to go back to what Andrew was saying a second ago. And it what he just said sort of reinforced what I was about to say before he spoke up before I did we find those brands with alignment is from the top to the bottom, we all experienced this where there'll be a strategic direction set by a board, or the shareholders no more than the board should say. It's then reinterpreted by the individual heads of departments. So by the time it gets down to the customer-facing people, or salespeople or even the customer service people, the message is very often diluted and open to interpretation. Whereas you take the example, Andrew was talking about in the overlay someone like John Lewis partnership, everybody from the top to the bottom is aligned on the one thing, and it's not about profitability, it's not about selling more, it's about providing the best possible customer experience people can, on the high street, for that individual customer at that moment in time. And whether you're dealing with, you know, somebody stacking a shelf in the store in a Waitrose or John Lewis, or whether it is somebody of a management position, it is all about that alignment to ensure that actually good values, good alignment around our customer service expectations, breeds new customers.

Sam Birkett 14:03
Yeah, I'm interested with this. Because I mean, I think looking at, as we've said, alignment is almost sort of strikes me it's everyone's I don't know, it's the right word responsibility. I mean, everyone's got to have an essence that alignment, I suppose it has to be that quite simple central idea, potentially, are arguably that you actually get to, you know, be inculcated, I love using that word across an entire enterprise. But I mean, in terms of actually leading this and driving about driving it through there, if you're getting alignment to the business, do you need to look at the tools and the processes, the leadership, the management, all along the level looks like all up and down the organisation to help actually make this work. How do you think you go about that, and where does that leadership responsibility lie to drive this do you think?

Andrew Hancock 14:51
Can I start just just before that? I think what you need to do is define what alignment is for your business because each sector can say alignment as meaning something completely different, where you silo. So it's making sure that the definition of alignment is the same across all of those.

Sally Green 15:08
That's a really good point and I think Nick said earlier that it does absolutely have to come from the top, what has to happen is that your MD or your shareholders have to want this to happen. They've got to say, this will make this kind of financial difference. And we are going to do this because it's not something I think that you can just hope's going to happen if you just mentioned it enough in the board meetings. It's something that's got to... it's an action you've got to take.

Nick Hughes 15:34
This is about businesses being brave, as well around their alignment Sam, you're quite right, is and what is alignment for that business? And if the business is main drivers of profitability, a solid customer base looking to grow with customers of a similar value set of a similar alignment, that business will grow significantly quicker, rather than aligning itself to just grow in any way, shape, or form. Because you'll end up with different customers with different values wanting different things and then their business gets pulled in, in all sorts of queer areas. That doesn't, it doesn't really want to, but its price, but its margin, whether its sector and then you find a business is diluted, you lose control and actually that alignment from top to bottom then becomes watered down.

Sally Green 16:26
And it's not just about getting better sales, it's about getting return on investment, right? Because what can happen if you're not aligned behind a purpose is that you're spending marketing budget or branding budget, on things that aren't benefiting the vision. On, you know, an advertising campaign, which is actually going after it saying something contrary to what you should be saying. So there's a big risk that you're actually... you're not... that you have to measure more than just sales, you have to measure ROI as part of your alignment process.

Andrew Hancock 16:59
Also, I think you need to answer that it's making sure that you have the regular meetings with the right people in those meetings. It's making sure the right people have the tools available to, you know, communicate with their teams, what the bigger picture is an ongoing, not like, you know, once every three years, when you have a big team away day, and we go this is what we're gonna do for the next five years. It's almost like, you know, quarterly, you're in a half yearly or even monthly, there's like, this is the strategic direction of what the business is doing, what the brands doing what we want to communicate. And I mean, if you look at today's market, and more importantly, with how brands work, and they're engaged with every single potential employee becomes your brand ambassador, with social media that constantly can create, the content they say. So it's really important that all those people, you know, understand your brand values and what message you want to push out at all times because they could be your biggest assets,

Sally Green 17:55
But they are your biggest asset and they are the people that... you're right. And they're probably near the customers than anyone else. They will be much nearer to the actual end customers than the shareholders. So you have to make sure that, you're absolutely right, that absolutely everyone understands properly and it's probably embedded the desire to talk about the brand all the time.

Andrew Hancock 18:21
And I don't think that's so much as like a, you know, an internal comms PowerPoint piece, it's more to it than that, I don't think you can just solve it by sending everyone an email, this is what we're doing. It's not quite as simple as that,

Sally Green 18:34
Or give everyone a coaster, which is got the vision values on it.

Nick Hughes 18:38
But that also comes right back to how you set the business up and recruitment. You know, we talk about recruitment. It's been in the press recently over the over the spring in summer, around recruiting for competency or recruiting on attitude. And recruiting through attitude for me and ability for people to show an expansive mindset to want to learn want to develop is much more advantageous than someone who is competently perfect as a salesperson or as a marketeer. Or as a branding person or as an operations person. I guess there has to be that skill set there. But actually, that ability to be wanting to be part of the team, wanting to grow with the business and wanting to align with its values and where it wants to take it makes life so much easier within a business rather than people fighting their cause.

Sally Green 19:25
That's a really, really good point because I think people being able to think laterally is really important and I think it's really important that people actually genuinely step up, physically step outside their silos. That's another good symptom you can see is if you visit companies where the marketing team never visit the sales team or they've never been to the warehouse or they've never spoken to anyone in operations to see how what they do, impacts the rest of the company. And it's I used to work somewhere where I would force For my marketing people to go out with a sales rep, because only then can they really see the impact of the 22 catalogues they're suggesting the sales rep carries. Because only then will they see the sales rep never takes them out of the bag and you've got to make sure that people genuinely understand what the impact that what their job means to other people.

Sam Birkett 20:22
It's interesting because as you've all been discussing this, it makes me and it sounds terribly sort of arty and out there. But it almost makes you think the internal organisation is less of an organisation more of an ecosystem almost, isn't it? It's trying to get everybody internally to understand that what they do plays an important role, as you say, Sally, with every other part of the business. So it's almost like getting that acceptance of, and the word purpose, of course, is to come up with the idea of communicating that purpose, and not just being a sort of a typical top down, you know, he's a PowerPoint presentation every three years to say, right, this is what we stand for, it almost makes me feel this has needs to be continual, constant drip feeding, and not just drip feeding, because I mean, that's the important, I mean, I think I've learned from my perspective, there's purpose has to be something that is inspiring, that has to be the same with recruitment practices, you're looking to recruit people who are part of your business because they, not completely, you know, comes on and says the old cliches that "I passionately believe in delivering this or that", but if they genuinely have, you know, an interest and they're behind the vision of the organisation, and think, yeah, I want to play my part, my role in delivering this greater goal. That's important, isn't it? And you've got to get that feedback, I suppose from your staff, and at each management level, line management level, all the way to the top, would you... do you think that's important? Sort of get that sentiment and try and... in saying still, I mean, it's how to make that flourish more, isn't it? I mean, it's more some organic metaphors here about how you mostly that thrive in a business.

Andrew Hancock 21:50
I think what we realised is that business owners and boards are busy people, you know, they're tired of running the business as such, and they're working on the business to grow for the shareholders for, you know, to make it profitable, blah, blah. And so gonna, the way we position is like, as Konnect is like, you know, we look into your business, so you can work on your business. So it's really like, you know, it's having an outsider looking in, as we said earlier, holistically go, actually, everything's in place, you just need to like tweak a few bits. You need the messaging to change, you need to have these regular meetings, you need to, you know, do things in a slightly different way. And it almost feels better for them not coming from the board if that makes sense, if it's an external party because it sounds like they're not being dictated to. They're being looked at holistically as a business as a whole and they can then buy into that.

Sally Green 22:45
Yes, that's right. And they've all... all these different sectors, silos, let us say, have been listened to. So we've asked what would have, what happens is that we go in and we ask tricky questions to everybody. It's not just oh, well, sales, obviously is going to be the problem. We ask the same questions to everybody and just see what the different answers coming back are. And that's often a really good symptom if you've got, you've asked each team, you know, have you seen the sales strategy? And it'll be it's very interesting to see that the sales go, yes, we look at it all the time and marketing saying I didn't even though there was one, and then you've got a symbol, not only does it give you a suggestion that there's a problem, it also gives you halfway to the answer. So that you now know what the problem is that you don't share this goal. Let's find a way for you to actually understand the sales strategy and embed it into your marketing strategy.

Sam Birkett 23:39
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, I'm fascinated by that. They must, I think it's very interesting to actually go in and look at organisations, particularly ones perhaps, which have maybe grown quite quickly. So the SME space, and then they've got to this point where they've been successful, they are perhaps successful. But as you say, there's no symptoms emerging, would you say? That they are sort of starting to hint that, those misalignments are taking place. But I mean, what would you say as well, as part of like, as you said, referred to earlier, Andrew about conveying and reinterpreting what alignment means for that business, in their context is that sort of the first step for people to try and understand what it actually means to them, to then get to the point of going in and making those tweaks and those changes in processes, personality, etc, how they've run the business?

Andrew Hancock 24:26
100%, I think it's very much that alignment shouldn't be a scary word. And it shouldn't be a worrying word. It shouldn't think God everything's gonna change. And, you know, it's not that sort of understanding what that definition of alignment is for your business, and how that's communicated. We want to make your business better, not create more problems.

Sally Green 24:46
I think people have to recognise that this is something that you as a business have to do. There isn't a kind of a stamp that you can just look this is what this is how to do alignment everyone does it the same and this here it is, here's the template and off you go and do it because that's not going to align you. Alignment is completely individual to each company, you have to do it from within and you may have, there are some guidance that can be supplied, but it has to come from within the company's soul to make it work and to embed it properly and to make it consistent.

Andrew Hancock 25:20
I think the key to that, and the rationale for that is that if you look at competitive businesses that are, you know, younger, doing better, you know, they're already doing this, they're really changing this, and then, you know, leap-frogging everybody else. So all the young businesses who are, you know, creating difference and differentiation themselves, they're kind of looking at business and how it works in a different way altogether.

Sally Green 25:42
Yeah, they're no longer worrying about their alignment, because it's just, it's something it's like breathing to them, they know they have these systems.

Andrew Hancock 25:50
It's a little bit like the analogy of a, you know, a football team and, you know, used to have a, you know, a right back or a left-wing or a centre forward or, you know, a right-wing or midfielder and now you get these, like utility players who come in and are able to play anywhere in those situations. And they can just be bought in and like, sought out and then drag the whole team together to move the team forward.

Sam Birkett 26:14
Yeah, and something crucial with that seems to fix it is similar for football analogy in the past, it's good to describe something similar like that I think, was around, you know, the best football teams, the ones that, you know, they make the best of what they have all the parts working together. It's that crucially, from that seems to be there's a shared sort of vision of how they want to play but crucially, communication and again, it always seems to me, it comes back to this communication side. So whether that's direct communication, or more sort of intuitive communication, where your say your player comes in, and they know that you know, stand up front is going to you know, I'm not gonna go too far into football stuff, getting a long ball into the box, and that's where he's strong, and I know that if I, you know, pass the right that since I was going to run onto it, because they're really fast, etc. and you know, how all the different parts work together. But you've got to have that understanding, haven't used that player of that individual within the business to know as you say, the sharing of plans, understanding how different teams work, what the kind of priorities are, etc. and then how to best fit into that situation, given where you are as a business from where you are as a football team offensively with that analogy.

Well, that's it everyone thank you very much for listening today. In the meantime, if you want to keep in touch you can find us @meanderspod on Twitter, or you can get to us on Facebook. You can also email us which is [e-mail]. So hope to see you or hear you or you to hear us next time anyway and good luck everyone. Take care bye for now.