Onboarding, training, support, feedback, representing the Voice of the Customer… and doing all this with Marketing, Sales, Product, Operations, and Customer Success.
That’s a big job.
Cross-functional teams are a powerful tool for solving high-level problems that overlap many topics. But they’re also difficult to manage.
Everyone has different incentives and processes.
But it’s your job to reduce churn, grow accounts, and ensure everyone knows the latest about your product or process.
How do you bring everyone to the same page?
What’s needed is a nimble solution.
Cross-Functional Benefits and Costs
When a cross-functional team is at its best, you get:
- Improved communication and collaboration
- Faster decisions
- More innovation
- Better accountability
- More experience
But when they’re not clicking, which is most of the time, you struggle with:
- Worse communication
- Slower decisions
- Less innovation
- Worse accountability
- Bad experience
The most frustrating part? A bad cross-functional team is worse than no team at all.
The secret is in the systems used to create cross-functional excellence.
Use Smart Systems to Support Cross-Functionality
A system is an interconnected network working toward a single goal. When systems are working well – like the immune system in your body – great outcomes seem to happen like magic.
But chaos ensues when the system’s broken or is the wrong system for the job.
To make a great cross-functional team, choose the right system.
What defines a great system?
- It’s nimble. The system creates agile opportunities to work innovatively to help everyone.
- It’s easy. The system should always be experienced as an ally, not an obstacle. The less training and admin work, the better.
- It’s complete. The best systems integrate every step of the problem, from the first input to the last output and feedback cycle. Any time you have to integrate an outside process or tool, you create failure points.
Creating a Single Source of Truth
We’ve talked about Sam before. As a busy Customer Success Manager for a high-growth company, Sam has a lot of customers to take care of while also interacting with Product, Sales, Marketing, and Operations to support the latest updates and bring customer feedback to the table.
Sam knows he needs a better system than the manual chaos created by documents, slide decks, inboxes, chat tools, calls, and 1:1 requests.
Getting everyone on the same page is Step 1.
Sam needs a tool that easily creates a Single Source of Truth for everyone to work from. For humans, “show me” will always work better than “tell me”, so Sam’s tool needs great visuals in an easy format.
Extelli Guides turn clicks into screenshots and easily integrate your links, videos, and other content to create a one-stop shop for truth.
Enabling Collaboration
But making the document is just the beginning. Sam’s product changes every day.
He needs to turn every team member into a co-author of knowledge. That way, the best perspectives on Sales, Marketing, Operations, Customer Success, and Product are always available.
The tool must make it easy for anyone to create and edit content.
And for users to find knowledge how they need it: in small chunks, as toolboxes for specific problems, and in guided learning paths.
While we’re at it, Sam knows he has no time to constantly revise documents. So his users need a one-click solution for flagging process steps for review and update.
Extelli’s Guides create bite-sized answers to bite-sized questions. Collections create toolboxes for more complicated topics. Learning Modules lead a user through a specific learning path. Red Flag feedback makes it easy for any user to become a co-author.
Leveraging True Best Practices
Sam’s having a great quarter. He found the perfect tool for cross-functional collaboration. His team is loving it. Customer churn is already down 1% after his team quickly turned 3 customer complaints into the solution to an old bug.
It’s starting to feel like there’s no limit to growth.
But sustaining growth is really hard. What got you here won’t get you there.
Sam’s on the hunt for a solution to innovation.
Innovation starts with capturing the best knowledge and bringing it into one place for everyone to work from.
The good news? Because Sam’s using a great tool, his work here is already done.
Up-to-the-minute knowledge lives automatically in his Library. Every team member can find anything they need. Every member of his cross-functional team just completed the latest Learning Module about their exciting new feature launch, so today’s working session on growth is off to a perfect start before Sam enters the room.
Extelli helps you create, organize, and collaborate on everything about your product and processes in one nimble tool. By using Extelli, you’re guaranteeing that the truly best knowledge is always at everyone’s fingertips.
That’s magical.
Nimble Knowledge Management Creates Consistently Great Teams
Sam and his cross-functional team face a tough challenge: Educating everyone on their product and processes to create innovation.
Making documents. Organizing libraries for self-service. Guaranteeing learning outcomes. These are the core activities for knowledge management.
Using Extelli, Sam and his team drastically reduce their time making, organizing, and delivering education.
Their teams start working from the best knowledge, selling more, and learning faster.
Their customers have the best knowledge at their fingertips, becoming more loyal to Sam’s product and spending more as it serves their needs.
All because Sam invested in a system that auto-magically turns lessons learned into team knowledge.
Be like Sam. Try Extelli for free for 14 days, no credit card required. Then you can join Sam to turn your cross-functional team into a powerhouse for growth.
If Extelli doesn’t become your team’s go-to knowledge manager in 30 days, your next month is on us.
Today we discussed how Extelli helps the busy Customer Success Manager for a fast-growing B2B eCommerce platform help his company keep growing fast while slashing his team’s time and effort.
Join the Conversation
Extelli lives in the world we’re discussing here, and we would love for you to join the conversation. Check out our post about this topic on LinkedIn.