8 strategies to effectively manage cross-functional teams 1. However, implementing effective management techniques can eliminate the roadblocks holding your teams back and set your business up for success. Managing all of these moving parts and personalities is no walk in the park for a project manager. These same cross-functional teams can introduce inefficiencies and biases as well as conflicting personalities, miscommunications, competing priorities, and more. This cross-functional collaboration can also speed up coordination and collaboration, minimize communication hiccups, and keep projects aligned around shared business goals and objectives. Bringing together people with a diverse set of experiences, skills, and backgrounds can infuse your projects with creativity and enhanced problem-solving. There’s a reason leading tech companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon embrace cross-team collaboration. Creating and managing truly cross-functional teams is a tall order, but project managers who embrace the challenge will see improvements in company culture, productivity, and happiness. These cross-functional teams are walking in lockstep, aligned by shared business goals. Departments are working together to create truly cohesive, integrated campaigns. Workplace silos are being torn down and more visible processes have emerged in their place. More than ever, digital transformation and collaborative technologies have enabled a new era of collaborative work. "We can also replay Zaps, so if we ever reach our Salesforce API limit, we can go through and easily sync the leads we may have missed.Modern work rarely happens in isolation. "What I love about this Zap in particular is that it's so flexible: We can add and remove information from the sync whenever we want without having to go through a sales op person," Micaela says. Lucidchart uses webhooks to pull new lead data from Marketo: Name, email, phone number, etc.-all the data a sales team would need to follow-up-and creates a new lead in Salesforce, ready for the sales team to take over.
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Webhooks carry information from one source to another and are extremely powerful once you know how to use them. Micaela Wright, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, Lucidchart Instead of spending hours and hours engineering a Salesforce sync to pull reports manually, we're able to automate this and spend more time on highly strategic initiatives. "Zapier allows us to send leads from Marketo to Salesforce via webhooks with extreme reliability and ease," Micaela explains. But due to Lucidchart's specific business case, the out-of-the-box syncs provided by Marketo didn't provide the connections they needed. Part of Lucidchart's lead generation comes from their email service provider of choice, Marketo. When these two departments align, leads become conversions and trials become sign-ups. Which team claims responsibility for increased sign-ups, revenue, conversions? Hard to say (it's marketing) but in truth, it's the combined efforts of both departments that creates an environment for a company to succeed. Automatically Pull Data and Create Leads in Salesforce Essential to Micaela's work on the marketing team are two specific Zaps: One syncs leads with the sales ops team and the other simplifies email QA. With a Zapier team account, Micaela and Lucidchart built multiple Zaps and shared them across departments. Using their new secret weapon, Lucidchart's quality assurance (QA) checks decreased by 30% and they optimized the flow of information between the marketing and sales teams. Shared Folders, a Zapier for Teams feature, gives multiple users access to a team's Zaps-a bridge between two or more apps. To help them in that mission, they use Shared Folders in app automation tool Zapier. Taking that principle to heart, Lucidchart worked to maintain cross-team communication and keep different departments collaborating. With group chat and comments, viewable revision history, and more, Lucidchart knows teams that collaborate have a better chance of succeeding. From flowcharts to network diagrams to ERDs ( entity relationship diagrams), Lucidchart makes it easy for their clients to collaborate with each other. For Lucidchart, collaboration is more than just a way to work together-it's built into their product.