A full-service multicultural marketing agency can hire the most precise SEO professionals, the most creative content marketing executives, the best PR practitioners and the most thought provoking and engaging bloggers. However, if they do not coalesce around a single business philosophy, their valuable talents will go wasted.
On the contrary, entrepreneurs or small and medium businesses that have a single focus can create a highly successful company, even with smaller doses of dedicated help from outside agencies and freelancers. They may make more mistakes, but they will eventually learn from those mistakes and find a way to their goal. This is the secret that the first group of precise professionals did not have: a shared goal to accomplish. This shared goal usually comes to a business through a formal vision statement.
A formal vision statement is a more precise, professional version of a general idea. Every business – large or small – needs one in order to fully understand its niche in the market. A company can have the best product in the world, but if it does not know how to bring that product to the public through an emotional connection, it will not sell. The example of New Coke is perhaps the most famous instance of a lack of focus tanking a product that was actually superior to its competition.
Getting Everyone on the Same Page
A formal vision statement is the document that everyone can refer back to if they have a question about the direction of a product, a sales effort or the business in general. No one wants to have philosophical discussions; there is real work to be done. However, the unspoken directive that is stated will tend to move all efforts in the same direction.
In the modern global economy, there are challenges of Language, Culture and Location to overcome when it comes to creating a single directive. A company may acquire their IT support from Philippines, write their Spanish-language web content in Mexico and promote their services in the U.S. targeting the US Hispanic market through their bilingual website hosted in Dallas, TX with professional advice from a digital Hispanic marketing agency based in Miami, FL. As you can imagine reading this example, lots of cross-channel communication is required.
Sharing a Vision between Cross-Functional Teams
The simple vision statement overcomes the common barriers mentioned above. An easily translatable statement can connect any group of people across culture or geography. It has also been shown to create a higher productivity rate at every point along the chain. People have an inherent need to understand why they are doing what they are doing. A vision statement allows each cross-functional team and individual within each team to see and feel proud of his or her place in the chain of the company they are working for or on behalf of.
Why Sharing a Vision is Vital to Success
Sharing the vision of the company is vital because otherwise the focus of individuals will be lost. Anyone blindly performing small tasks without knowledge of the company philosophy will eventually lose his or her vigor for the process. For instance, the IT team in Philippines needs to know why they are building a mobile site. The writers in Mexico need to have clear guidelines and an editorial calendar to follow. Otherwise, people will tend to fall back on their individual habits when it comes to completing daily tasks. Their methods may or may not be the most effective way to perform in tandem with others; research shows that it probably will not be.
To sum up, developing a team vision is an exercise in putting into words the beliefs, emotions, hopes and desires of all cross-functional teams that will work together for and on behalf of the organization.
So, what did you think of this post? Post a comment (good or bad) and if you liked it, please tweet or email about it!
Also, Hispanic Market Advisors℠, a Miami-based company located at Pipeline Brickell, encourages small businesses to “Develop a team vision statement” to define the future they want to create for their company, and invites them to share via Twitter, hashtag: #createsynergies, telling us their common challenges in working with cross-functional teams and creating a shared vision to align everyone’s goals and objectives towards it.Thank you!
Related: Hispanic Market Advisors℠ releases a white paper named “Hispanic Online Marketing and Working With Cross-Functional Teams” – click here to read.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sebastian Aroca is an entrepreneur and a customer centric professional. He co-founded Hispanic Market Advisors, a company that offers Spanish SEO and English to Spanish translation services. Sebastian has over 10 years of professional experience managing regional customer programs and client acquisition strategies in the areas of sales and marketing communications, primarily for the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American & Caribbean markets.
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