5 Steps to Create a Winning Sales Communication Strategy

It’s easy to assume that your team’s communication strategy is working well simply because nothing is falling apart, but chances are there’s room for improvement.

The benefits are clear: effective communication can increase productivity by 25 percent, increase retention by 4.5x, and develop trust between employees and your company. 

At the same time, 86 percent of employees and leaders say a lack of effective communication is a leading cause of work failures. A clear sales communication strategy will help your organization boost engagement and productivity. Discover what a winning sales communication strategy looks like, and how you can create one. 

What is a winning sales communication strategy?

An effective communication strategy is focused on keeping your sales team informed, prepared for changes, motivated, and focused on the right goals. 

The goal is to ensure that communication is targeted toward one of these goals and has a clear value. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with emails, meetings, one-on-ones, Slack messages, and more, and after a while, your reps will decide which messages are important and which ones aren’t.

You can help your reps set priorities by being strategic about what, when, and how you communicate with your teams.

Sales enablement’s role in sales communication

Sales enablement is the best team for creating a sales communication strategy. Your team has visibility into the entire sales process and knows the training schedule, upcoming changes, sales rep performance, and more. That means your enablement team can craft a well-informed sales communication strategy without missing anything crucial.

In creating this strategy, the enablement team acts as a coordinator between sales-related teams and projects. You can get ideas and communication requirements from other departments and distill them into a winning approach that allows sales reps to get the information they need and focus on what matters most.

Sales enablement is uniquely positioned to create a filter for what communication is most effective and important for the sales team.

Five steps for creating a winning sales communication strategy

So what does it take to create a winning communication strategy? This step-by-step process can be your roadmap.

1. Understand your current communication strategy

Most organizations don’t have a clear strategy for communication, which means everything is ad-hoc. Anyone with access to the team email list can decide that they have an immediate priority that needs to be communicated.

Too many emails with different ideas, updates, strategies, and company information can overwhelm sales reps. The first step in creating a communication strategy is to assess where you are now.

First, write down all of your communication channels. Then, ask these questions about each one:

• Who has access to this channel to communicate with sales reps and/or managers?
• Are there any existing rules or guidelines about communicating on this channel?
• How many messages/meetings/calls does a sales rep or manager get in a day or week?
• What do sales reps and managers report ignoring, and what do they say they pay attention to when it comes to this channel?
• What communication would sales reps and managers like on this channel? 

Knowing where you’re starting is the first step to making improvements.

2. Create communication priorities

Now that you understand how you’re currently using your communication channels, it’s time to set purposeful goals. The easiest way to set clear priorities is to talk to reps, sales managers, and other departments that need to share information with sales.

Those sharing information with sales can list what they consider important. Reps and sales managers can let you know what they consider most important to receive.

Once you have those two sides, you can bring them together to create a clear strategy that allows the most important information to get to sales while filtering out what doesn’t matter. 

This will require diplomacy from the enablement team, as you might have to explain to some groups that sales doesn’t need the information they’re sending over. It may be best to find a way to share or post that information in a centralized location where reps can review it if they would like to.

3. Determine appropriate communication channels

Once you have the sales communication priorities set, it’s time to determine the best channels to share specific information. 

For example, a quick email is great for many things, but other topics need a virtual or face-to-face meeting. Training needs a high-quality all-in-one learning platform like WorkRamp that makes it easy to engage sales reps with new information and track results.

For example, Handshake uses WorkRamp for both new hire onboarding and continuous learning. With a single easy-to-use platform, they have decreased ramp time by 33 percent and increased average deal size by 15 percent.

Dividing the essential communication into different channels will ensure that no one is overwhelmed while key information is shared.

4. Create communication guidelines

Once you’ve set your priorities and channels, your winning sales communication strategy is almost complete. Next, it’s time to create processes to ensure your strategy is executed correctly.

Here are some examples of guidelines that can keep communication in line:

• Limit who has access to broad communication (ie, who can email the entire sales department)
• Use meeting-specific software instead of scheduling meetings via email
• Have FAQs for common concerns so the same questions aren’t asked repeatedly
• Use a sales dashboard to give reps visibility into their current performance and goals
• Encourage managers to set office hours to answer questions from sales reps instead of being interrupted by questions
• Institute a no-email-Monday or similar policy to boost focus and productivity

By creating simple guidelines like these, you can make it easier to take the final step: implementing your new strategy.

5. Implement and monitor your new strategy

Finally, it’s time to roll out the new strategy. It may take time for everyone to adjust, but because everyone has a voice in the process, there should be less resistance or pushback.

Monitor sales communication closely to see where there are weaknesses in the new process. Don’t be afraid to make changes, but don’t do it on an ad-hoc basis. Instead, schedule regular reviews of the process.

After the first few months, you might be able to scale back your communication review to every quarter but don’t go too long without checking in. It’s very easy for things to creep in and cause overwhelm. The sales enablement team can get feedback from the sales department and other sales-related teams about how things are going and incorporate that into the strategy moving forward.

It’s time for an effective sales communication strategy

Now that you have a roadmap for creating and implementing a world-class sales communication strategy, it’s time to take action. 

As we mentioned, your strategy will only be effective if you’re able to use the right communication channels. That means having training centralized in an all-in-one learning platform like WorkRamp. 

Our goal is to help make learning a growth engine in your organization, and we want to help your sales enablement team be as effective as possible in your work. If you’d like to see more about what WorkRamp can do for you, schedule a demo today!