Bad communication is bad for business, even more so if it happens in your sales team.
Your sales reps compete to close the biggest deals and earn their bonuses, but poor lead management and a lack of open communication can lead to a high-stress work environment. It can strain and even break management chains and sales pipelines.
However, when you foster knowledge sharing between functional groups and build open relationships, the exact opposite happens. Productivity rises, sales soar, and even customer retention improves!
Let’s take a closer look at how businesses can promote clear communication and performance-driven collaboration:
Demonstrate the value of open communication
Open communication and transparency are critical to delivering and meeting ambitious goals. Productivity rises by up to 25% and conversions are far more successful, thanks to shared insights within your team.
An open exchange of ideas and what can be considered ‘tactical’ data amongst your sales and marketing can be the difference between a cold lead and a closed deal.
79% of all leads never convert to a sale and 44% of sales reps give up after just one refusal.
Talk to your salespeople, be a superhero at demonstrating the value of open communication; when they realize that it translates to fewer meetings, less paperwork, and more leads, your team will quickly come on board!
Encourage salespeople to work together to close leads
A healthy level of competition can be helpful, but pooling in the expertise of your sales rockstars can help them close more leads, faster. 91% of top-performing sales teams collaborate across functions in order to close large deals, clearly showing the multifaceted benefits of open communication.
Make sure that your best leads are always followed-up on
As your sales team begins to communicate openly, various account and lead management strategies become viable. 80% of all sales need no fewer than 5 follow-up calls, so an unsuccessful follow-up can be reassigned to another sales rep for a future upsell. Get them involved not only in what the clients like, but also in what they do not. A free helpdesk ticketing system can provide all the concise information of what needs to be fixed to make a specific client happy.
Foster knowledge-sharing between your salespeople
When salespeople pool their customer intelligence, objection handling strategies, and follow-up notes, they can ensure that all leads are nurtured on a constant basis. Sales are 47% larger for nurtured leads over non-nurtured leads making this a no-brainer.
Promote frequent check-ins to help new salespeople overcome their fear of contacting a customer too often. Track customer engagement to ensure that they are doing everything they can to make customers feel valued in every interaction. A customer that is treated well keeps coming back and has a higher likelihood of sourcing other products and services from your company.
Use every sales call to enrich your team’s knowledge about a lead
Good customer relationships are at the heart of success, so empower your sales team to build these relationships by openly sharing vital information. Every sales call is an opportunity to enrich your team’s knowledge about a lead, so you need to make sure that each interaction is recorded and documented in a CRM tool of your choice. Not only does this lead to more conversions, but good lead management also helps your salespeople use their time and resources more efficiently.
Encourage reps to discuss their prospects and leads
It is getting harder and harder to pinpoint new clients. In 2007, it took three to four cold calling attempts to strike a conversation with a new customer whereas today it takes salespeople an average of eight times to secure a lead. In addition, reps spend almost 40% of their time trying to find a lead to contact. There is no such problem when everyone plays open cards.
Build strong personal relationships with team members
Enabling open communication in your organization means leading by example in sharing updates, celebrating wins, and motivating co-workers to do their best every day.
However, employees can still occasionally feel out of the loop and ignored. Roughly 42% of employees feel that they're not kept fully informed, while 37% want more opportunities to voice their opinion.
Use modern team communication platforms to promote discussions around projects, tasks, and common interests, and for one-to-one conversations with team members that need help. Never forget the value of building strong personal relationships in your team.
Assign dedicated resources for information management
Make a shift towards sales collaboration and your relationships between companies, customers and staff all improve. Software that puts the entire company at your fingertips and enables you to manage multi-channel communication is essential to getting the whole team on board. Develop a sound strategy, implement a solution which covers both your immediate and future needs, and you will soon reap the many benefits of unified communication.
As you strive for success in your enterprise, stay open and united. In the words of Andrew Carnegie:
"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results."
Enabling open communication in your organization helps team members work smart, work better, and work together. It also helps your sales team blow past targets every month and quarter.
Credits: All illustrations are from Katerina Limpitsouni's fantastic unDraw collection.
