SPANNING BOUNDARIES

Warning! Your companies market research data has just been hacked! How did this happen? Some sales guy just "spanned his boundaries!" thus the State of a Free Capitalistic System and that is a GOOD thing!Spanning Boundaries is a Sales Training Drivers World Class Sales Competency. It falls under the category of "business insight" and involves the active collaboration of cross functional teams or work groups. The purpose is to collecting critical information on organizational challenges. Sales training and the need for knowledge management will be invaluable to this process as it relates to team building, prospect data collection, cultural behavior analysis and market trends.

Knowledge Management is focused on leveraging different knowledge bases that can provide Sales Trainers up to date resources faster and more efficiently than one leader, group or organization can do by itself. In other words, two or more resources working together towards a common goal is better than one. Wikipedia describes it this way - "Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences."The incoming information is shared, stored and analyzed by knowledge management so that sales leaders and upper level management can address the business climate and organizational development concerns quickly. Boundary spanning teams and workgroups will continue to collect and bring in the information for problem solving and finding new ways to capitalize on learning and development opportunities.

The organizational challenges being examined externally by a cross functional sales and marketing teams could include: business intelligence, global competition, changing marketing demographics, cultural development or technological advances by a competitor.

Internal boundary spanning by the team could look at challenges and root weaknesses in executive leadership behavior, succession planning, and an in depth look at interpersonal communication breakdown between senior leaders, departmental directors, and managers.

Sales Directors and Sales Trainers will look to give Senior Leaders information on how to solve sales revenue and sustainability problems collectively. This will require the deliberate initiation of highly trained boundary spanning teams.What may be most difficult for Senior Leaders, Talent Management and Marketing / Sales Analysts, is that the re-organizing the traditional vertical organizational charts showing how employees directly report to one another will be changed for open source communication.

This is no easy task. It pushes the critical need for knowledge management expertise front and center to measure the success of changing people processes. It will need to ensure the alignment and commitment to a collaborative business strategy. However, it has been found that teams engaged in boundary spanning are more likely to achieve team goals. Just be careful of how you collect and distributeculturally diversity information. Gathering this data and dispersing it into the wrong hands could pose serious organizational concerns. Everyone wants real time business intelligence that is critical to stay competitive.