You have a group of all-star sales reps, and they’re selling a high-quality product. Your team’s success is pretty much a slam dunk, right?
Not necessarily.
Even the best reps in town can end up with lackluster sales numbers, and they probably aren’t the ones to blame. If your team’s sales performance falls short of expectations, it’s time to take a long, hard look in an unexpected direction.
It’s time to look at the way you communicate.
When your sales performance numbers falter, there are usually a lot of variables at play. But there’s one sure bet that you can count on: all high-performing sales teams have three traits in common.
And all three of these traits boil down to communication.
What do all high-performing sales teams have in common?
No matter what you sell or how you sell it, your sales team won’t live up to its potential unless these three ingredients are in place:
Awareness
Even when things change quickly, your team stays up to speed. They have all the tools, intel, and materials to do their jobs well.
Alignment
Your team is aligned around a set of common goals.
Action
Your team has the tools and information they need to achieve their shared purpose. They know what they need to do and how to get there with quick, decisive action.
This level of awareness, alignment, and action drives some pretty impressive results:
Studies show companies with aware, aligned, and engaged employees out-perform those without by up to 202%.
- Companies with good sales-marketing alignment close 38% more deals.
It makes a real difference. And with the right communication strategies, it’s achievable.
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1. Creating awareness
Awareness isn’t just a buzzword.
Your sales team has to navigate a huge amount of information. That information also changes constantly. Buyer insights evolve over time. So do the products and services you sell. Meanwhile, new team members come and go, sales targets change, and new compensation structures and incentives take shape.
While all this is happening, your marketing team is busy tweaking the way your company talks about its products and how it positions itself in the market.
That’s a lot to keep up with, especially for a sales rep who in theory should be spending most of their time selling, not reading internal memos.
Here’s where sales enablement comes into play (and why it’s become such a hot topic lately). Your job is to cut through the noisy landscape to give your reps the most timely information in the most streamlined way.
Your high-performing sales team should always be aware of:
- The latest market intel and customer insights.
- Product developments.
- Sales targets and compensation structures.
- Changes to the sales playbook.
- New team members and their roles.
- The latest tools and training materials (and where to find them).
2. Achieving alignment
Remember when we said companies with good sales-marketing alignment close 38% more deals? That’s no coincidence. When it comes to sales performance, awareness and alignment always go hand-in-hand.
Your sales reps might be up-to-date on the latest product developments and market intel, but this alone isn’t enough. They also need to understand what this means in the context of your company, your product, and your sales strategy.
In other words, they need to be aligned around a common goal and fully understand the shared strategies that will get them there.
Your high-performing sales team should always be aligned around:
- Company and team goals.
- A common strategy for reaching those shared goals.
- Current market positioning for your company and products.
- A common approach for communicating this position to customers.
3. Moving to action
Once your sales team is aware and aligned, it’s time for them to put all their knowledge into action. This might seem like the simplest of the three steps, but don’t be fooled. Just because your reps are aligned around a common goal, that doesn’t necessarily mean they understand how to get there.
Many a sales rep has been shaken off course because they misunderstood what was expected of them.
Your sales team should be crystal clear about what they are expected to achieve and what tools they should use to get there. On your end, this requires ongoing training, clear communication, and regular feedback.
To make quick, decisive action, your high-performing sales team needs to understand:
- How to find information quickly.
- How to implement the latest strategies.
- How to access resources and make decisions on the fly.
How video communication helps you get there
Keeping your sales team aware, aligned, and poised for action is no small feat — especially these days. Buyers are savvy and the market moves fast. Sales reps have a lot of information thrown at them. It’s easy to get overloaded, overlook important messages, and misunderstand critical instructions.
Our traditional ways of communicating only make this problem worse.
Email overload, meeting fatigue, and PowerPoint missteps
We waste a lot of valuable time dealing with the onslaught of emails. The average employee spends 13 hours (28% of their workweek) managing emails.
If we spend so much time on email, you’d think it would be for good reason. But here’s the thing: a full 30% of employees don’t even read internal emails. And when we do read emails, it’s hard to retain all of the information shared in them. The human brain only retains 10% of what it reads in text-based messages.
Static PowerPoint presentations and bloated meetings don’t fare much better. It’s easy to forget what we hear in long meetings, and it’s even more difficult to recall that information when we need it on the fly.
Traditional modes of communication have their place, but they usually aren’t the best way to communicate dynamic information to busy sales teams.
Video and your high-performing sales team
Increasingly, companies are discovering the power of adding video to their sales enablement strategy. When it comes to informing and aligning your sales team and preparing them to act quickly.
Video messages stick
Remember how we humans only retain 10% of what we read in text-based messages? Compare that to 95% retained when we learn about something through video.
When you need your sales reps to remember training points, market data, or sales strategies, an 85% better retention rate is no small deal.
Video reduces overcommunication and improves clarity
According to brain scientists, if you want information to stick with people, you need to do two things: share that information sparingly and repeat it often.
Video is a lean way of communicating. Because of its format, we’re forced to share only the most important information and let all of the fluff fall away. Video also lends itself to repetition. You can easily tweak a message five different ways and share it in five very short videos without overwhelming your team.
Pro tip: Use video templates to speed up the process. With a video template (like the ones available in Biteable Teams) you can rework your message in a matter of minutes.
Video is easy to reference on the fly
Your sales reps are busy. They need easy access to all the tools and information that will help them act quickly. If you only have five minutes between sales calls, it’s hard to sift through a thirty-page PowerPoint or remember what your manager said in a meeting three weeks ago.
A one or two-minute video can give a sales rep all the information they need in a very short amount of time. House your messages in a video library for easy access and your reps will have valuable reference material at their fingertips.
Take your sales performance up a notch with Biteable
Video has all the ingredients you need to help your sales team stay aware, aligned, and ready for action. Biteable has all the ingredients you need to make great sales enablement videos.
Sales-focused templates and hundreds of brandable scenes take the guesswork out of video making. Even if you’ve never made a video before, you can make one in minutes with Biteable.