How to Encourage Cooperative Communication from Sales

Many in competitive intelligence, marketing, research and product development complain about poor communication from their sales force. You need to nurture this communication due to Sales’ connection with your customers. Customers are one of the best sources about what your company is doing right and wrong. In addition, they often share ideas for new products, services and tweaks to your existing products that can be revenue generating!

So how do you encourage cooperative communication from Sales?

1. Give to Get

This is a golden rule with any person or group that you deal with, but especially with Sales, who has a very short attention span. You need to feed them snippets and golden nuggets which help them sell. I can’t tell you what they are. You have to figure that out since it changes constantly. Responsiveness and a cooperative attitude of giving, along with supplying those nuggets, will convince Sales that you’re worth giving back to.

2. Teach Sales How to Give

As you provide Sales with golden nuggets, teach them how to give. One way I have been successful is by teaching sales people elicitation skills. This means creating a purposeful conversation to get customers to share what they know about the competition, innovation, and improvements to your products and services—including customer service.

Elicitation skills help Sales close more deals, sooner, which is the value proposition to Sales. In my experience, customers are almost waiting to be asked. It’s human nature to want to teach, share and correct you. Beware, as your sales force starts asking, your customers will start asking more about your future products and services. Make sure Sales is armed with the right information to share at the right time!

3. Make it Easy for Sales to Share

This is the downfall of many organizations. They make it hard for Sales to share. What are they already sharing through their sales process that you can access? (e.g., Salesforce.com or NetSuite) Can your information sharing be tacked onto something they already do? Can you set up a tips line, so they can just call it in? Text it in? Email it in?

4. Recognize Sales Contributions

Go beyond Thank-You. Write up the best sales tips in your company magazine, Intranet site—wherever is most likely to be noticed and read. Get on the agenda for sales force gatherings such as conference calls and meetings where you can share the good news about great tips that individual sales people have given. Specifically cite how they have helped. Write their boss and/or Sales VP about their contribution.

5. Share Share Share

Go the next step and set up a mechanism to share tip you hear from one sales person to your sales force. This can be high tech if your company is set up that way, but it doesn’t have to be. Talk to top contributing sales people to get clarification and insight that goes beyond information sharing. Share that insight with your sales force, marketing, product developers and whoever else will benefit from this insight. Acknowledge and cite the sales person or sales team that’s sharing these great tips.