Is Your Company Ready for Globalization?

(This is a guest post by Lara Ponomareff of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for heads of Customer Service and Contact Centers.)

One of the main benefits of working at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) – SEC's parent company – is that I get to learn what is going on in other corporate functions and keep pace with changing priorities and new challenges.

Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about globalization's impact on the sales and service organization– especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it's questions about how to serve local markets, work with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Selling to global customers and serving them in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn't anything especially brand new to us in the sales and service organization.  We've seen our organization become more global as our customers become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues around CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while sales organizations may be trying to sell and serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up.

So, what's happening?  Well, CEB found five big barriers to successful globalization and six things leading companies do to overcome these barriers and have an effective corporate core that will successfully grow globally.

The bottom line is that traditional corporate center functions will no longer be able to support global operations from a single, centralized geographic location. While there should be a common strategy clear to all stakeholders, the center must also be agile, manage risk, encourage global collaboration and trust, and think globally about talent.

In essence, it becomes a global 'corporate core' – still the same corporate center functions – but now newly aligned with globally dispersed market-level operations.

SEC Members, you can read the full executive guidance or assess the readiness of your company's corporate functions on our new Executive Guidance resource center.

For more information on encouraging global collaboration across the sales organization, check out our case study from Dimension Data on incentivizing cross-company deal collaboration.