‘Round and ‘Round

Communication keeps the wheel of sales turning 

By Andrea Hill

It’s rather uncommon to see very large families today, but when I was growing up it was not unusual to know families with 12 or 13 children. I grew up with the children of two of these families, and I was always fascinated by their orderly homes. Whereas my relatively small family of six always seemed to be on the verge of chaos, the Webers and the Tarboxes were a miracle of order. Everyone knew what to do, when, and with whom.

Later in life as I made my way up the corporate ladder in companies that served small businesses, this paradox came back to me. I was fascinated to observe that companies with 500 or 1,000 employees seemed to communicate better with one another than very small businesses with only 10 or 20 employees. In a large company, I generally expected a person in the marketing department to be aware of the needs of salespeople 2,000 miles away, whereas in a small company the marketing coordina...