ion” (Schultz, 1993a, p. 12). OPPORTUNITIES AND STRATEGIESAs organizations are attempting to “re-engineer” and strive to become “learning organizations”, communication professionals should look for opportunities to employ new integrated communication approaches. Some specific approaches we recommend are: Focus communication strategies on teaching the audience how to better learn about and respond to the needs of their customers. Meeting marketplace expectations can be a differentiating factor and a competitive edge. An analysis of customer needs can be done through business processing mapping. Then, all communication to the audience can be integrated and aligned (training, incentive plans, marketing materials, etc.), so that people don’t have to put fragments of uncoordinated messages together for themselves. When confronted with a potential communication-related project, explore all the factors that can impact the performance of the target audience. For example, in our work and research in sales training, we have often found that performance gaps that initially look like training problems are actually a result of incentive programs that are not aligned with the business objectives, or or caused by suboptimal business process design. In one situation, a time analysis of sales representatives’ work was performed and it was found that reps were spending almost half of their time doing technical service instead of selling. Their frustration was high because they could not meet their customers’ expectations and because they were not trained to be technicians. In this case, technical reps were added to the sales team, freeing up sales reps’ time to sell. Neither typical motivational nor sales training programs would have truly addressed this performance gap. Communicators should network and collaborate with other communication-related professionals within their organizations. Look for opp...
