There is nothing more rewarding than knowing that you and your team helped contribute to landing a large client or contributed to the success of a new launch. The success of a team is usually tied directly to how closely aligned and familiar your team is with their own unique points of contribution. Therefore, a team’s effectiveness is not based on either their ability or experience, but rather tied to how closely aligned and familiar they are with various projects going on.
To be successful at customer alignment, it is crucial that you establish a seamless strategy that will directly or indirectly influence the customer experience. Here are some tips to help improve your strategy, whether you are a small or large organization.
Institute a bottom-up alignment mentality.
An organization is only able to move forward and grow when everyone is in sync. Establishing clear and measurable objectives for the team will help keep everyone striving towards joint organizational goals and holds everyone to a common standard that is foundational in all successful endeavors.
By identifying everyone’s unique talents, strengths, and skills, you can quickly take stock of what the collaborative group strengths are and begin to leverage them to work towards common goals.
Stay focused on key objectives.
The key goals and objectives for team members should all align to help achieve the goals of a business, which for many, is to bring in revenue. The first step to alignment is understanding opinions and feedback on what current trends are in the industry. Once the team shares input, it’s time to create a plan that will help you and your team clear out all the other clutter. Have explicit roles and make sure you stay in sync with customers and their needs.
Of course, communication is essential to deliver encouragement. Reinforcement inspires everyone to work towards delivering a product, service, or solving customer issues — then ensuring you remain on target towards your goals.
Analyze the data.
As the team works through its strategies and activities, you’ll quickly see where your business is presently, as well as where you want to take it. Taking a look at the data that sales and marketing campaigns have generated will help you to adjust your objectives on the fly. See what performs best with your team and its set of strengths and analyze the information provided. Then integrate that information into your development and growth initiatives.
Once information is digested, you can pivot to best serve your customers and what they need — or what the market appears to demand from your business. Receiving honest and forthcoming information from your team helps you determine exactly how in sync their efforts are.
Fail together and build trust.
When times are tough or the team isn’t working as strongly together as it could, there is an opportunity to forge trusted relationships, which in turn fosters natural accountability to the team. When situations arise where a team member is struggling, there is an opportunity to build trust and camaraderie around the team. Rally around the shared team goals and each other’s strengths to help discover ways to drive improved performance.
Productive teams will work together, communicate, trust in each other’s strengths/weaknesses, and then leverage the collective alignment to offer customers a greater experience than they would as individuals. Use the collective strength of the team to achieve short-term goals, understand the “how” for achieving the growth that the business wants, and create alignment for long-term success. 
