Sales Communications

A blog post on Sales Communications from rcommins.wordpress.com from April 29, 2009 [links added by the author of this blog]:

“[…] A group of about 30 sales, sales ops and marketing leaders discussed their challenges in most effectively enabling sales and getting “the word” out to sales team without propagating billions of emails and creating random chaos. All of this while the rep really only cares if he is a hero or a zero this quarter.

[…] there are lots of good sales communications methodologies. What makes them suck or not is not the methodology in itself, but whether it was executed well. […]

So, what does it take to execute a sales communication strategy?

• leadership – the whole leadership team must be bought in and singing the same song every quarter
• technology – in order to scale well and not slaughter the rep, a good tool must exist
• metrics – a closed loop that tells the content creators what’s good and what blows. (some of this is qualitative, some of it quantitative)

I think so many “corporate types” kill themselves over developing a killer strategy, only to put it on the shelf when the end of the quarter rally comes along. Leadership is by far the killer success factor here – focus on that, and you may have a chance to pull things off.

Another hot topic (for another night) was how to leverage social media tools for sales enablement. […]”