Does your team collaboration strategy IIoT style impact customer retention and employee engagement?
It seems like last week, yet I launched the Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Blog 9 years ago this month. What a journey it not only has been, but also continues to be!
I sincerely thank you, dear readers: both new members of our Sales Aerobics for Engineers® community and old friends who have been there from the beginning!
Along the way, something significant happened to us all. Industrie 4.0 was born in Germany or, as we know it in the US, the industrial Internet of Things.
As a result, sales and engineering have never been the same since.
There’s no doubt about it. The hallmark of the IIoT is interconnectivity and collaboration. Not only are systems, machines and software connected. Also, workforce teams are interconnected in ways never before imagined.
As a result, team collaboration strategy IIoT style absolutely must poke holes in legacy mindset, bias and baggage.
In addition, team collaboration strategy IIoT style pokes even more holes in corporate silos and departmental mindset. There is no room for Us versus Them mindset in the globally competitive IIoT business ecosystem. In fact, there never was.
Consequently, the ability of today’s workforce teams to create and articulate the value of their output becomes critical to creating enduring client outcomes in this challenging business ecosystem.
Team collaboration strategy IIoT style keeps everyone proactively positioned for “What’s Next” to retain loyal customers.
When I wrote the first post for the Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Blog on April, 2009, the primary focus was lack of communication and collaboration between technical and non-technical personnel. I know what I was experiencing, as a scientist with hybridized skill sets serving as a collaborative sales professional to engineering and manufacturing clients.
However, I found that technical colleagues sitting around the business table were impatient when speaking with sales professionals. I also discovered that sales professionals seated at the same table were intimidated when speaking with skeptical technical decision makers.
As a result, there was a lot of money – and even more innovation – being left at the table due to stalemated conversations and Us versus Them mindset. I knew that scenario had to change.
So I sat down on April 18, 2009 and wrote my first blog post. I was inspired by your conversations. Consequently, I was inspired to create this blog as a forum for continuous discussion about these ongoing issues.
That was in 2009. Enter the complex selling, sales engineering and sales operations environments of the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem.
Unfortunately, organizations which lack synergy across the sales-engineering interface® become spectators rather than competitive participants.
That is why team collaboration strategy IIoT style is more important today than it ever has been. Your organization cannot afford to sit this one out and hope to play catch up later.
The impact of the industrial Internet of Things challenges status quo business models and legacy hiring models. Employees now find themselves in uncomfortable situations, being asked to collaborate with colleagues across the organization. Some employees are intimidated due to lack of education, generationalism, confidence, command of technical terminology or all of the above (and more).
The role of human resources is challenged to evolve from a procurement model fulfilling departmental headcounts. Instead, HR is asked to create a collaborative workforce, tailor- made for the challenges of the IIoT workforce environment.
As a result, the concept of team collaboration strategy IIoT style is changing as well.
Where does your organization stand, when it comes to team collaboration strategy IIoT style? Are you short on employee core competencies and organizational strategy?
Throughout this week, we honor the 9th year celebration of the Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Blog. I offer three posts, addressing three sets of evergreen questions.
- What does a rock-solid Customer Experience, Customer Success, Customer Loyalty and Customer Retention look like in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ecosystem?
- How can we optimize and execute a finely-tuned Technical Workforce Hiring Strategy to fulfill IIoT Human Capital Strategy?
- Why do clients and colleagues continue to not grasp the relevance and value of what sales, technical and engineering professionals are trying to communicate? Perhaps more importantly, why continue to communicate in a legacy manner when no one understands what you are saying in the first place?
My professional mantra continues to be: Depending on where we sit around the business table, we see the same things differently. When these differences create synergy, instead of barriers, we collaborate to create innovative and enduring outcomes for our customers.
In today’s blog post, I’m re-setting our business table for team collaboration strategy IIoT style.
I offer these select articles for you to chew on this week. I welcome your questions. Let’s continue the conversation we started on April 18, 2009.
Read these articles. Ponder the variables that are the same and those which have become different in within the IIoT business ecosystem.
I can’t wait to see where our journey leads us next. How about you?
Marginalized Employees need Glass Slippers to shine in the IIoT
IoT Buying Decisions need IoT Sales Insights
Connected Internal Teams retain Connected Customers
IT Tech Support Teams catalyze Line of Business Value
Why Transactional Upselling Activities do not Retain Loyal Customers
Sales Engineering Mindset is Tailor Made for IIoT Challenges
Why Your Sales Operations Strategy may not be Robust Enough
Babette Ten Haken is a catalyst, corporate strategist and facilitator. She writes, speaks, consults and coaches about how cross-functional team collaboration revolutionizes the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) value chain for customer loyalty, customer success and customer retention. Her One Millimeter Mindset™ programs draw from her background as a scientist, sales professional, enterprise-level facilitator, Six Sigma Green Belt and certified DFSS Voice of the Customer practitioner. Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Visit the Free Resources section of her website for more tools.
Excerpts of this blog post are reproduced from April 3, 2017 and April 5, 2017 Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Blog posts with permission of the author, to provide continuity of thematic content.
Image source: Fotolia
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