As companies grow, it can be difficult for them to maintain the same level of cohesion they had when they were smaller. What used to occur naturally often starts to require a concerted effort on the part of leadership. That’s why aligning company segments is an essential part of hitting your goals. In this article, we’ll highlight some actionable steps you can take to keep your company segments aligned while you grow. Keep reading to learn more.
Understanding company segments
A company segment is a part of a business that’s distinguishable from other regions through shared characteristics. Sometimes, a company segment produces its products or services.
Other times segments are defined by the role they play within the business. For instance, a company might refer to its sales and marketing teams as two separate segments.
Some companies will also define segments based on their geographic locations. For example, if you have offices throughout the United States, you might define a Western segment, a Mid-West segment, and an Eastern segment.
Why segments are worth defining and thinking about
Companies think in terms of segments because it helps them determine how different parts of the business perform.
If a company isn’t hitting its goals, that doesn’t necessarily mean every business component is underperforming. Instead, it’s often possible to trace a problem to a specific branch of the business.
When a company defines its segments, it creates a framework it can use to analyze performance and improve in more agile, dynamic ways.
Why alignment matters
The more segments a company has, the more difficult it is to keep everyone on the same page; each segment tends to focus exclusively on its goals unless prompted by management to do otherwise. If left unchecked, this can create a situation where a company’s ‘big picture’ is ignored or under-prioritized.
This is where alignment comes into play. If you can keep your various company segments in sync with one another, you can enjoy the benefits of thinking about your business without worrying about the downsides.
Generally, this means keeping your segments aligned with a particular set of goals. That could mean selling a certain number of products or building a sound reputation for your brand.
Aligning your business segments around a common goal has the following benefits:
- It boosts employee engagement and morale
- It improves the speed at which your business hits its major goals
- It helps your company become more agile and responsive
- It promotes collaboration between distinct teams, which can lead to creative, powerful solutions for important business problems
- And it infuses your company with a shared sense of purpose, helping to refine brand identity
How to align your company segments
These are six strategies you can use to promote alignment between your company segments.
Be more proactive about communicating company goals
Alignment is about uniting all of the different parts of your company for a shared purpose.
The first step toward aligning your company is defining company-wide goals and getting proactive about communicating them. That may look like getting leadership to discuss tasks and projects about how they contribute to company goals. Take some time out of each meeting to talk about your goals and any updates on the progress you’re collectively making.
It doesn’t matter how you do it. The key is to ensure your company’s goals are defined clearly, and that each part of your company knows it’s an ongoing discussion and a priority.
Outline the specific role each segment plays in reaching your goals
Once you start defining your goals, it’s time to tell each segment what they can do to contribute and what kind of impact it will drive.
Say your goal is to hit a certain number of active subscribers this year. When you talk to marketing, you would want them to start thinking about their work in terms of how it will help you get more subscribers.
The same is true of all of your other departments. If you can get each department working toward the same goal, they will begin to align with one another.
Connect everyday tasks to company-wide goals
In the last point, we talked about making sure your employees know the role their segment plays in achieving your overarching business goals. But it’s also useful to be a little more specific with your workers. You should try to connect the everyday tasks to your long-term goals.
If someone in your marketing department or brand team is writing your next advertisement, you’d want to connect this specific task (the writing of the advertisement) to your company-wide goals.
By getting specific, you make your company goals a part of everything your employees do. And when each of your employees is thinking about company goals throughout the day, it becomes easier to stay in alignment.
Get buy-in from your employees
While we discussed how important it is to share goals with your employees and make those goals a part of their everyday tasks, communication alone isn’t enough to get buy-in from employees.
One of the most effective strategies is to make employees feel more involved with your plan by detailing your thinking and soliciting their feedback. Just make sure you take the time to address their concerns so your employees feel like you authentically want to keep them involved instead of only feigning interest in their thoughts.
Reconsider your meeting strategy
Meetings can play a role in keeping your company’s segments aligned. Start hosting meetings that bring different teams together, like legal and marketing.
If you can get them together for a quick meeting, you could help employees on both teams forge new relationships with one another — and this connectivity will build the alignment you want between your segments.
Get leadership on the same page
It’s also imperative to make sure that your entire leadership is on the same page about your company goals and how you’re going to reach them.
Company alignment starts with your leaders. You may not all agree on the specifics of the goals, but those discussions should happen behind closed doors and should be finished by the time you begin communicating goals to your employees.
LeadLander makes it easy to keep marketing and sales aligned
When it comes to aligning company segments, marketing and sales are two of the most essential segments to start with. If you can keep these two parts of your firm aligned, then there’s a great chance you will hit your long-term company alignment goals.
That’s why you should check out LeadLander. Our website tracking software provides a wealth of information about who’s visiting your website and how they’re interacting with your brand.
The LeadLander platform presents this data in a clean, easy-to-read way and it can be accessed by anyone in your organization — including everyone from marketing and sales.
When you give these two segments a powerful tool to share, it becomes much easier for them to work in partnership.
Try a free 14-day trial of LeadLander today to experience the difference we provide for yourself.
