Eliminate duplication
In any large, divisionalised company there is bound to be an element of overlap. That’s why finance, HR, and IT shared service centres are proving to be so powerful in reducing costs while improving and homogenising accuracy and responsiveness. In more creative or individualised areas such as marketing and sales, it is not always regarded as so easy to concentrate resources. Nevertheless, the hidden penalty of doing nothing at all can be quite disturbing.
There are, of course, necessary separations. One would not expect the salespeople or channels that shift, say, desktop PCs to also sell multi-million dollar software application packages to multinational corporations. But the fact remains that customers for the one product frequently buy the other. So the places to look for duplication are the touch points where customers interact with different parts of the organisation. Do you know, for example, how many outbound communications such as magazines and ezines are aimed at the same customer set – or even the same customer – by different parts of your organisation? Can you quantify the costs in terms of cash and a less-than-cohesive image?
CCI can help you to think through where synergies might be leveraged: situations where greater consistency of messaging would go hand-in-hand with reduced expenditure. Vehicles that, if integrated, would yield opportunities for subtle cross-selling cues alongside elevated awareness of your end-to-end offer. And, returning to the top, areas where precious marketing budgets could be made to work harder by adopting a more centralised approach.
