3 Ways to Improve Interdepartmental Collaboration Across Your Org

Does your organization collaborate well? Despite the 44% rise in the use of workplace collaboration tools from 2019 to 2021, recent 451 Research findings suggest that roughly 79% of business professionals lack the information they need to drive strategic decisions with complete data.

Most organizations work in islands due to teams’ specialized tasks, but the information they collect and create has power beyond the departmental divides. Process ownership typically overlaps far too much for teams to work in isolation.

Teams work better when they understand how the rest of the organization influences their work — which means they need the ability to access and analyze data across the entire organization. In this article, we explore how breaking down data silos can improve interdepartmental collaboration and unlock business insights for sales, marketing, accounting, and more.

Customer Journey: Sales and Marketing

The term “smarketing,” popularized by HubSpot Sales Director Dan Tyre in 2008, is used to describe the need for sales and marketing collaborate in order to reach your intended audience, bring in quality leads, and close deals effectively.

Communication between the two departments can take many forms, including regular check-ins, mutual accountability, and information sharing.

Despite 87% of sales and marketing leaders claiming their collaboration supports invaluable business growth, teams still limit their growth by operating in silos. In a 2018 study by InsideView, 43% of professionals across sales and marketing claimed they lack the shared and accurate data necessary to align their processes.

How Sales and Marketing Work Better Together

When your sales team has easy access to marketing leads, persona data, and market analytics, they go into customer conversations armed with valuable information needed tailor proposals and make sales. Marketing can also double down on specific demographics, channels, and selling points when they know the trends behind successful sales. Together, your sales and marketing teams attract the most qualified leads and close more deals.

Expense Forecasting: Accounting and Finance

Enterprise budgets take shape from the interaction between accounting trends and finance teams’ forecasting. Today’s economies shift too rapidly for your organization to stick with static, cumbersome budgeting processes. However, the manual nature of forecasting makes budgeting time-consuming and error-prone.

If accounting is waiting on department heads to provide expense justifications and approve invoices, expense reports face costly delays and financial analysts are left to manually dissect outdated spending trends for your budget decisions. Where today’s budget modeling leans on manual spreadsheets and siloed input, modernized expense forecasting leverages automation across department lines to craft more agile budgets.

How Accounting and Finance Work Better Together

For instance, when accountants need to chase department heads to correct errors and fill in missing information on expense reports, they risk delayed updates to financial records. With automated data processes and notifications, accountants can improve interdepartmental communication, mitigate delays, and reduce manual work. Financial analysts can then access up-to-date accounting data to compile more predictable, accurate expense and budget forecasts with a comprehensive audit trail.

Product Lifecycle: Product, Support, Sales, and More

When multiple teams are involved in product design, rollout, and maintenance, collaboration proves tricky. Product, engineering, support, marketing, and sales all have a part to play in the product lifecycle. With access to interdepartmental data, each of these teams can improve their understanding of the product roadmap, target audience, customer expectation and sentiment, and more.

With only 14% of organizations achieving a 360-degree view of their customers,, the product lifecycle can be difficult to align with customers’ expectations. Rather than lean on lengthy revision cycles, product teams can expedite product updates with open access to marketing, support, and sales data.

How Product, Support, and Sales Work Better Together

Your product and engineering teams depend on customer data to inform their product roadmap. But what happens when they don’t have access to marketing personas, or sales and support records? If product is flying blind in their development cycles, they risk missed opportunities to align product features and updates with customers’ needs.

What’s more, if support and sales have access to your product team’s dynamic roadmap, they can shape their customer interactions to resonate with users’ needs and deliver refined proposals that align with long-term product plans. Meanwhile, your support team can resolve customer concerns with an estimated timeline of product updates — or pass automated requests directly to the product team for more immediate changes.

Enabling Interdepartmental Collaboration with CData

Every effective organization’s success depends on their disparate departments coming together and sharing data to make informed decisions. Interdepartmental collaboration requires more than just weekly meetings and quarterly reports. Teams need to effectively access and share data across the organization in order to automate processes, improve analytics and reporting, inform your product roadmap, and more.

CData enables you to connect, integrate, and automate your interdepartmental data, allowing your teams to streamline processes and move your business into the future.

Reach out to one of our data experts today to explore how CData enables better collaboration across your teams.