When it comes to sales performance, hiring good people is only half the battle.
Any sales enablement manager worth their salt knows even the best sales reps can only get so far on talent alone. To truly succeed, your team needs to be tightly aligned around a shared goal — and fully aware of what they need to do to reach that goal.
But as you probably also know, this is easier said than done.
In terms of good internal communication, traditional sales strategies have some pretty serious deficiencies. This is especially true in today’s fast-paced sales environment, where savvy customers expect more from their buyer journey.
If you want your sales team to hit and exceed sales goals, month after month, you need to find ways to keep the lines of communication open — in both directions — even as things change quickly. With a few strategies and the right tools, good internal communication is possible. And it can have a significant impact on your sales performance.
Info dumps don’t cut it anymore
Sharing information is good. We can all agree on that.
Your sales team needs intelligence on everything from buyer behavior, to market trends, to sales strategies. But simply sharing information isn’t enough to align your team and drive them toward top sales performance. To achieve this, you need to create a well-tuned system of internal communication.
Unfortunately, many sales teams struggle in this area.
56% of companies say they’re just average or even below average in delivering buyer insights to sales and marketing teams. And 90% of sales and marketing pros say there are a number of strategic, process, content, and culture disconnects in their organizations.
However, those same companies often underestimate how much this issue impacts sales performance. According to industry analysts, companies with well-aligned marketing and sales teams achieve a staggering38% higher sales win rates. And companies with ongoing sales training programs close 10% more forecasted deals than companies without.
Good internal communication matters. And its impact on sales performance can’t be understated. But how exactly do you get there with your own team? For the answer, we’ll turn to Pepsi.
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Pepsi and the “brown sugar water” supplier
Is it really that important to train and align your sales reps on an ongoing basis?
After all, skilled and talented reps should know how to ask the right questions and make adjustments on the fly. Equipping sales teams with buyer insights and playbooks in advance should be a bonus if you have a good sales team, right?
Not quite.
Contemporary buyers have a lot of choices, and a lot of information already at their fingertips. They expect more from sales reps. It’s no longer enough to show up, ask questions, identify a problem, and present your product or service as the solution.
Buyers expect sales reps to be highly tuned into their needs. They want reps who can build relationships and solve problems that may not be directly related to the product or service your company is selling. To achieve this, your sales team needs up-to-date insights, with enough context to make those insights actionable.
Byron Matthews, the CEO of the Miller Heiman Group, illustrates this phenomenon with a story about a deal between Pepsi and a brown sugar water supplier.
The supplier couldn’t differentiate themselves from the competition in the usual ways — price, delivery options, volume, etc. They needed another way to make themselves indispensable to Pepsi. Their sales team needed to think outside the box.
The sales team knew Pepsi was working to expand their market presence in South America. And the supplier just so happened to have a large book of clients and business partners in South America.
Ultimately, the sales team won the contract by simultaneously brokering a data-sharing deal to help Pepsi expand their business on the continent.
This was only possible because the sales team had access to a ton of market research data that gave them information about which markets prospective buyers were trying to break into. And the sales reps had sales enablement intelligence about what else their company could do for buyers, beyond supplying brown sugar water.
But all of this information wasn’t just dumped on the sales team. The information was developed into actionable insights and communicated in a way that was impactful and easy to digest. Because of this, when the sales team was building the deal with Pepsi, they were able to draw on this information and connect the dots.
The sales enablement manager developed an information package and communicated the information in a way that changed the sales team’s selling behavior. That’s the key: driving action and changing selling behaviors based on timely, well-curated buyer insights.
But to make this happen consistently and successfully, you need a carefully refined internal communication strategy, using the right set of comms tools.
Communication technology turns information into action
As a sales enablement manager, you’re in a unique spot. Not only do you have to develop better sales strategies and tactics, but you also have to sell those improvements to sales reps and prove the impact to the executive team.
It’s a challenging mission. This mission is further complicated by the need to manage distributed sales and marketing teams, especially in organizations that have transitioned to remote or hybrid work.
Whether you’re managing an in-house sales team or a distributed one, an internal communication framework that drives action consists of three activities:
- 1. Real-time discussion to make decisions and get sales and marketing aligned on strategic direction.
- 2. Ongoing coordination to keep teams informed and working in the same direction.
- 3. Creating resources that ensure everyone is following up with action.
But here’s the kicker: defaulting to email whenever you can’t chat in person doesn’t cut it. Not if you want a solid internal comms strategy that drives sales performance.
Email has its place. But emails get ignored and buried in busy inboxes all the time. A whopping 30% of employees admit they don’t read company emails. Back this up by the fact that sales reps ignore 50% of marketing leads and you begin to get the picture.
It’s not that sales reps don’t want to be fed quality leads and solid buyer insights. It’s just that the information is being delivered in a way that takes up too much of their time and doesn’t grab their attention.
You want your messages to impress people into action. To do this, you’ll have to break out of the conversation-or-email binary. That means leveraging additional communication tools.
Zoom, Loom, and text-based communication
Most professionals already use Zoom and Loom, or similar tools, to some extent. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use any tool. And these tools get misused a lot.
At the strategic level, Zoom calls for real-time discussions and decision-making. Zoom is also great for sales coaching and remote team-building exercises.
Informal video messages, delivered through platforms like Loom, are best for sharing instructions and team coordination for ongoing projects. They convey information quickly and memorably.
These are the first two stages of the internal communications framework. They make it quick and easy for teams to share the information they need to establish strategies and cooperate in executing those strategies.
However, when it comes to delivering buyer insights, training reps on best practices, and otherwise influencing their selling behavior, Zoom and Loom are subpar. For this, you need to turn to short-form videos.
Short-form video
Video is one of the most efficient communication methods we have.
Video marketing stats show us that people remember 95% of a message when they see it in a video, but only 10% of a message they read. And data from social media indicates 82% of people would rather watch a video than read text.
Additionally, videos are easy to access and watch on demand, whenever and wherever it’s relevant.
All this points to one undeniable fact: short videos are the best resource for turning all of your behind-the-scenes information and coordination into action. And not just any action. Action that supports a coordinated, aligned, and successful sales strategy.
In the world of sales enablement, short videos are ideal for:
- Briefs on buyer personas and market conditions.
- Outlining sales playbooks and frameworks.
- Updates to sales messaging based on new product and service developments.
- Sales training.
- Walkthroughs that show teams how to set up and use new sales tools.
- Presenting rewards and giving recognition for outstanding performance.
- Sales performance reports, for sales teams and executives.
Yes, all of these resources can be presented in writing. But video makes the information much easier to absorb. And videos stand out from all the other written material that sales teams must sift through.
Video goes a long way toward influencing the selling behavior of your team. Videos get attention, and they make information engaging and memorable. With video analytics you also have an easy way to track engagement with internal messaging.
Short videos are the primary tool for accomplishing the third stage of the internal communication framework. They ensure everyone has the best information at their fingertips when they need it, so they can use that information to make the most impact.
Add video to your internal comms with Biteable
Video is the last piece of the puzzle in turning your sales intelligence into sales results.
Returning to the Pepsi story from before, imagine if one piece of information in the deal with Pepsi had been lost in someone’s inbox emails or missed as someone skimmed a market research report. The result could’ve been very different for the brown sugar water supplier.
Video highlights important information and keeps potentially valuable details from getting lost in the communications fray at every level.
Most sales organizations don’t use video for internal communication because they believe video creation to be difficult and resource-intensive. But this just isn’t true anymore.
Biteable makes it quick and easy to create sales enablement videos with branded templates and a simple, browser-based video maker that requires zero production experience.
It’s the easiest way to level up your internal communication and make an impact on your sales numbers. With Biteable Teams, you’ll make your first video, and see your team’s sales performance soar, before you can even say, “show me those first-quarter numbers”.