3 Methods to Ensure Team Communications

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As B2B marketers - especially in larger organizations - leaders struggle with ensuring communications excellence. In this article, I’ll explore 3 methods I’ve used over the decades to ensure that teams are communicating regularly and with transparency.

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Method #1: RoB Meetings

As we all know, regular (aka Rhythym of Business) meetings is a great way to get a group of people together. But a missed opportunity that I see over and over again is that they tend to focus on line-of-business or project-based meetings. Another great ROB meeting structure to put in place focuses around best-practices.

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In a recent project we stood up a Center of Excellence for a large B2B marketer. One of the key outcomes of the strategy work, was to institute a quarterly half-day meeting across multiple lines-of-business around marketing disciplines. For example, moving forward all the marketing team members working on Social Media & Marketing get together to review new and existing technologies, discuss best practices for LinkedIn, etc., Review big wins, etc. This meeting wasn’t just for the social media team, but also for any other marketer that where social is of interest to them. This leads to better team collaboration and teaming on initiative or project based work.

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Method #2: Structured Ad-Hoc Communications

Whether you prefer Slack, Teams, or other tools, ad-hoc communications platforms are more and more important. This is particularly true in our world of remote work. But to be really successful it needs to be structured by subject matter and integrated properly with other day to day management tools.

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But in addition, it needs to have a regular rhythm of content to engage the audience. The way we use Slack at the Buzz, for example, is we have channels for each subject area that we cover. This allows those who want to discuss those topics (e.g., content marketing) a place to put their thoughts.

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Method#3: Team Offsites for Excellence

At MSFT, I would use team offsites for three main purposes, organizational buy-in to our GTM strategy; Ideation for solving business / marketing challenges; and of course team-building. But all too often I see poorly planned offsites that don’t drive the marketing team forward towards excellence.

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One of my strategies to ensure both team-building and strategic buy-in was workshopping big ideas as a team (or group of teams). This allowed each of the team members to make a solid contribution over the few days at least once or twice. Additionally it forced collaboration across the organization with people that team members may have never worked with or met before. But the most important outcome of these workshops was that we shared the decision making - which is key to organizational buy-in.

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What are the methods you use to ensure team communications excellence??Share your reactions in our community on?Slack.