Get Your Salespeople to Listen

The biggest challenge to communicating messages to the sales force is ensuring message absorption. While sales enablement and communication teams strive to constantly provide reps with the most up-to-date sales information, reps often complain about communication overload. In fact, reps are often overwhelmed with the number of channels used to communicate messages—struggling to sort through relevant information in weekly newsletters, narrowing down product specification updates, finding time for new product training communications, and preparing for quarterly town hall meetings.

In our recently completed research brief, Effective Communication to the Sales Force, we brought this common problem to five member organizations to identify potential strategies for managing communication to the sales force. We asked five main questions:

What are your primary modes of communication to sales reps?
Who designs, vets, and delivers your communications?
How do you tailor communication for different audiences within the sales rep community?
How do you measure the effectiveness of your communications?
What lessons have you learned from your experience communicating to the sales force?

All of the companies we spoke to use different channels to strategically emphasize different types of messages. Communication segregation by channel enabled companies to increase message clarity and reduce communication confusion. Companies also found that by streamlining the intake process, with an online form for example, communication was more easily filtered to the “need to knows.”

CEB Sales Members, check out the full report: Effective Communication to the Sales Force to maximize messages absorption and mitigate the risk of over-communication.