When division managers designate a customer as less critical now but having the potential to evolve, we add “virtual members” to the teams — in effect, inside consultants from nonparticipating divisions who gather information and freely voice their opinions and concerns.
Adopt flexible measures of success. We pay our marketing people on the basis of performance — hardly a revolutionary idea. But we found it’s not enough for senior management to designate rigid performance measures based on simple revenue goals. Now we tie compensation to measures that we negotiate with the teams. Such a system allows us to balance the goals of the corporation, the divisions and the customers. We gauge team performance on milestones the division itself determines (25% of the total), revenue benchmarks (25%) and measures of customer satisfaction (50%).
In our initial blitzkrieg, we clearly had more resources than organization. In the space of three days, five marketing and sales people were wandering around our biggest customer’s offices independently, bumping into each other and calling on the same people two and three times. No wonder we seemed unfocused.
Below are some useful guidelines for adapting marketing operations in a Europe that, while increasingly open, is still a collage of widely differing local markets.