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Thinking about some posts I wrote several months back. One was on sales teams and marketing teams collaborating for better results and the other was on shared goals between sales teams and marketing teams. Today I wonder what would happen if we stopped treating them as two separate teams and instead actually combined them into one operating unit that we can call, I don't know, the Sales & Marketing Squad?

Here's what I think might occur. When you're done reading this, feel free to let me know your perspective. Blogging is much more fun that way.

1. Maybe there will be a less perceived them vs. us mentality that typically accompanies the word team. Conversely, when I consider the word squad, I immediately consider it as an integral component of a team. A team that has multiple squads who all strive towards a united outcome. Let's call it The Revenues Team.
2. The leader of this Revenues Team would of course be the Chief Revenues Officer and her/his straight-line reports would be squad leaders with titles such as Sales & Marketing Squad Manager, Customer Experience Squad Manager, and Strategic Partnership Squad Manager.
3. Yep, a team made up of squads partially or wholly dedicated to revenue generation by leveraging multiple and unique skillsets, subject matter expertise, and disciplines.
4. Yep again, customer experience has been included on the Revenues Team. And rightly so, as that group has direct contact with and ultimately influence over the customer. If trained and incentivized correctly, it should have some revenue generation and retention responsibilities as part of its charge.
5. Strategic partnerships were/are conceived with the intent of contributing to if not outright driving company revenue production, and as such are a squad that absolutely lives on the Revenues Team.

So, what's the upshot of this newly created organizational structure? Oh, and if this is not new, please don't tell me. I've given this some serious thought and evaluation and would be crushed to learn that I am not its inventor. Just kidding. But there is definitely an upshot.

Because the three squads in this example work under some distinctly common goals, KPIs, and shared resources & expertise, they will operate as a collaborative instead of as disparate silos within the structure of their organization. Now, making this actually happen is a complex, but not complicated endeavor, that in my humble opinion, will be well worth the pursuit in terms of efficiencies, read cost savings, gained and scaleable revenues growth realized.

In closing, and as always, make sure you are doing something, anything, that pushes you to Achieve Greatness, and please share this with those you think would find it valuable.