Over the last few months, many organizations had to quickly shift and do things in new ways:
- Restaurants switched to a take-out only model.
- Grocery stores added one-way aisles, floor markings for social distancing, and special hours for the elderly and at-risk.
- Doctors began seeing patients primarily via telemedicine.
- Many retail shops started delivering orders to the curb.
- Office workers of many different kinds worked from home.
Understandably, lots of us are anxiously awaiting the day when things go back to “normal” and we no longer need many of these safeguards. But there’s one change that we hope sticks around.
We ran across an article titled How Coronavirus Sparked Industry Collaboration, Team-Based Care that explained how the crisis is helping break down silos in the medical field. Doctors, nurses, and other providers are usually pretty good at working within their existing teams and departments, but they haven’t been very good at working across those groups.
Until now.
To deal with the pandemic, physicians have to collaborate with social workers and in-home care providers. Hospitals need to coordinate with other facilities that aren’t part of their network. Technology companies and non-profits are working together with healthcare organizations to improve outcomes for everyone.
One doctor said,
“I have been blown away by how people are creating teams of teams. This goes to this removing of silos, and recognizing that everybody’s on the team, and the team’s going to follow the patient. So when the patient moves from being diagnosed, or coming to be tested, then there’s another group that’s going to ultimately have to engage and connect with that patient and there has to be something that continues to tie it all together.”
Like medicine, pricing is a team sport. In order to be successful, you have to create cross-functional teams of people from different departments who are all working together toward the same goals.
This type of teamwork goes far beyond communication. It’s not enough to just invite all the department heads to a meeting and tell them what you plan to do. You need to actually work together actively toward accomplishing your goals.
But that type of collaboration also poses challenges. We recommend that you be very thoughtful and strategic about prioritizing which teams are going to be involved in various initiatives. Think carefully about which individuals and departments are able to make the changes you need for your project to succeed. For example, if your prospects aren’t aware enough of your differential value, you probably need to involve sales and marketing in your efforts. If you want to improve your analytics, there’s a good chance you’ll need to collaborate with Sales Ops and/or IT.
A lot of this isn’t rocket science. But unfortunately, many organizations don’t give their cross-functional collaboration enough thought. We cover this prioritization issue and seven other key aspects of working with other teams in the Cross-Functional Pricing webinar. Check it out for a lot of tips you can use to improve collaboration during the crisis and long after.
More Effective Cross-Functional Pricing
Pricing in a B2B environment is cross-functional by nature. In this on-demand webinar, learn about improving overall pricing performance by working more effectively with other groups and departments.
