Many of us have been part of an organization where company goals are presented to the team at the beginning of, or sometimes halfway through, the year. Employees pin it to their office wall or file it away until they are reminded year-end reviews are around the corner. The importance of keeping company goals front and center is critical. We set goals and consistently measure them, to accurately track business performance. But how can we ensure that relates to cross-functional team alignment?
Meet company goals
Cross-functional teams should work together to understand how they can jointly accomplish the established company goals. Make performance to these goals readily available for weekly team meetings for discussion, learning and open challenges. Teams should spend their time discussing how to use data to make improved business decisions. It’s critical to spend time upfront aligning all teams on key data. This way you have more time to strategize. A recent study published by Harvard Business Review1, shows 85% of teams spend less than one hour per month on strategy!
Digging deeper is critical
You can simply measure ‘sales’ as a company objective, however, think of all the additional measurements, where teams can dig deeper into the business. Click here for a list of over 100 metrics to explore with your team. 
Cross-functional team alignment to achieve sales
All teams play a part in achieving sales within a business. Think about the impact of sales alone, within your organization:
In the chart above, you can see the importance of digging deeper into sales within the Merchandise Planning and Allocation team in order to ask and most importantly, answer, the following example questions: How was sales performance not only at total sales, but at the individual channel level? Why did some stores perform and others not? Why was online business stronger than expected? Which classifications performed well/which ones did not? Did your sales consist of regular-priced sales or was sales driven by promotional or clearance activity? Do I need to adjust the promotional calendar or pricing based on results? Was inventory in stock in stores and online to support the sales? If in stock issues occurred, how is the team fixing issues for future? What were my top sellers? Are we on forecast or above, and what does our team need to do to ensure in-stock position?
A second example showing the value of digging deeper is the impact of sales performance to the Stores Team. Did customers visit my store? If so, what drove the traffic into my store? Was I able to convert the sale? What could we have done differently to increase conversion? Did I upsell their purchase and increase dollars and units per transaction? What would the impact have been had we added one accessory to 50% of the purchases? Did we have enough labor planned to support the store traffic? If not, do we need to adjust future weeks where we are promotional? Did all employees work to achieve high sales per hour? How did we compare to the rest of the company? What could we do better and learn?
Real Value
As you can see, reporting sales at a total level is not enough. The real value comes when working with your cross-functional partners to learn, explore and strategize how you can dig deeper into the analytics of your business. It’s amazing what you uncover when teams align and work together.
Download the eBook. Explore how it’s critical for teams across the company to tie to the same goals, the value of alignment on metrics by which to measure the business performance, and how analyzing attributes at a deeper level can be a game changer!
