October 06, 2015 | Andrew Lawlor

Enterprises can’t afford to let communications slide into opacity – not within their sales teams or between sales and those performing other key functions, such as marketing.

Fractured communications risk your business’ ability to identify, pursue, and close deals in the most efficient and effective manner possible.

 

The loser in poor communications scenarios? Your company.

 

So, there’s no time to wait to get on top of sales teams’ communication problems that may well be impacting your business in a negative way.

If any of the pain points below look familiar to you, read on to discover some steps to take to relieve them.

 

Sales colleagues aren’t speaking the same language

It’s important that salespeople mean the same thing when they are discussing terms like opportunities, decision criteria, pipelines, cross-selling, and so many more words and phrases particular to the profession.

When employees operate with different definitions in mind for critical sales language, they wind up interpreting the sales process in inconsistent ways.

That can’t help but introduce confusion – especially for sales managers – about exactly where a particular effort stands, how it is being executed through to completion, and whether it even was appropriate to pursue in the first place.

 

Communication confusion at this level can make it hard for supervisors and peers to understand if a deal has stalled so that they can work to get it back on track, for example, or hamper them in their goal to accurately predict future revenues based on true pipeline status.

 

Tackle that by establishing clear definitions for important terms and ensuring that everyone abides by them in their references, documentation, and reporting in CRM and sales force management software.

Specificity in defining sales stages and the key activities aligned with each of them is a big part of changing this communication dysfunction.

 

Some sales colleagues aren’t speaking at all

Some high-performance sales professionals are reluctant to say too much about how they’re outperforming their colleagues.

Like magicians who don’t want to share their secrets, they’re afraid that if they communicate too much internally about their process, they’ll lose their advantage.

They’d prefer to keep their can’t-miss scripts and closing strategies to themselves, and who can blame them when doing so has netted them a darn good living so far?

 

Of course, it’s in the business’ overall interest to expand its star salespeople’s knowledge to the rest of the team, so that everyone can capitalize on those best practices and corporate revenue can grow.

That means sales managers and other business leaders need to give their top salespeople good reasons to communicate their tips and strategies with their colleagues rather than continuing to keep things to themselves.

Money, new responsibilities, and public recognition are all ways to encourage them to be more open.

 

You know the mix: raises, bonus increases, higher commissions, expanded territories, and loud kudos for useful contributions made on internal knowledge-sharing platforms.

From there, take what you learn and, as much as possible, embed it in corporate sales processes so the knowledge lives on even after employees leave.

 

Ultimately, if you can multiply your top-tier salespeople’s individual successes across the company, any costs incurred in doing so will have been worth it.

 

Sales and marketing units are operating in silos

In a world where buyers are educating themselves online, your prospects typically have a lot of data about your company’s products or services by the time they make their way into the formal sales pipeline.

In fact, research suggests that the average B2B buyer is 57 percent of the way through the purchasing decision before he or she ever makes first contact with a member of your sales team.

That’s why your own marketing campaigns are so important.

But how much better off would the entire enterprise be if salespeople themselves had a better handle on what was being communicated in those marketing campaigns?

 

Indeed, how much better off would it be if sales teams played a bigger role in helping to define that marketing content so that customers were optimally prepared for engaging in live sales consultations and conversations?

 

Getting to that point, experts say, requires that sales teams engage with marketers in ongoing conversations both on content creation and curation.

Doing so helps ensure that critical sales highlights are prominently featured in marketing materials and that the final results are easily accessible in a centralized repository for sales to view and utilize as needed.

 

Along with taking this step to raise conversions and move deals along faster, it’s also important for sales teams to bring their marketing peers into alignment on what’s being established among themselves as appropriate language for key terms.

Processes and metrics should be coordinated between the two teams, too, and presented for common viewing on sales software dashboards.

 

Collaboration and communication suffer whenever sales pros roam

We’ve said it before: Businesses must be able to leverage mobile devices and mobile sales and customer apps to move the sales cycle along in real-time.

When sales pros cannot connect from wherever they are, they cannot reliably communicate and collaborate with colleagues on sales opportunities.

That leads to delays and potentially the loss of new client business.

 

With a mobile app that lets sales teams in the field connect from the road to update records on opportunities and work with others in pursuing them, communication takes on a whole new level of agility.

 

When the opportunity further exists to add custom functionality to that mobile app — or build new mobile apps that further extend the communication/collaboration experience — there’s practically no limitation to how you can boost your team’s collective sales power.

 

Clearly, a more communicative sales force and a better communicating one is a more productive and more successful sales force.

Organizations can begin to realize those advantages by exploring how to maximize the tools and platforms that vendors such as Salesforce provide for building sales success.

 

If you’d like to talk with Aptaria about how to get started on improving your sales team’s communications, we’re always ready for a chat.