How Strategic Communications Stimulates Sales - Part 1

When people talk about value creation for an organization, most of them instinctively think sales. After all, there is no corporate department that more directly produces revenue, and superstar pros can almost singlehandedly generate momentum and take out competitors. It makes sense.

That said, in my experience, the most productive salespeople, teams and departments are the ones that strategize and integrate with strategic communications. They have an ongoing relationship with regular two-way dialogue. They brainstorm ideas together and share resources. There’s even an implicit trust that both sides are looking out for each other. So many times, I’ve seen these partnerships lead to more ink on paper – so it’s not a stretch to say that good strategic communications stimulates sales activity.

There are two primary ways I’ve seen this value creation take place. We’ll talk about the first one in this post.

Sales Stimulation Strategy #1: Convert Leads More Efficiently

Believe it or not, strat comm can move leads through the sales cycle. It enables leads to self-select their way through the buying process and ultimately take action. It also can do this without requiring a lot of a sales professional’s time.

Here’s how:

• Make your corporate messaging and brand as sharp and resonant with your target audiences as possible. Know exactly what they want and what their pain points are, and develop value propositions that extra clearly show how your products/services deliver. Even if you think they work pretty well, I’m here to say there’s almost always improvement that can be made. Any sales effort is only as good as the words/phrases being used.

• Make sure you understand exactly how your target audiences consume information. Do they like email, social media, etc? What day of the week and time of day do they respond most to inbound communication? What voices do they like to hear from?

• Develop a variety of content assets that showcase how your entire product/service suite delivers for customers. Be sure to mix up your media formats too; while video is trendy and popular, don’t discount the value of a well done, tried-and-true white paper.

• Make sure those assets have clear, compelling calls to action. Don’t just encourage people to visit or click somewhere. Find a way to make them feel like they’re losing out on something by not engaging.

• Spoon-feed those assets to your target audiences through a “nurture cycle.” Give them something new every so often – not so frequently they think you’re pestering them, but not so infrequently that you aren’t top of mind. Again, this is where your research comes in.

• Track how those assets perform. You could put them behind a gated form on your website, or use metatags to track site visits and clicks, or any number of other strategies. The better you measure, the better/faster you’ll prove your value to your sales colleagues.

I started doing a lot of this work as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the world. Companies needed to generate quick revenue to keep their lights on and make payroll; these programs helped them enough that they grew during that horrible time. They’ve been popular with clients ever since…because they work. I’d be happy to talk with you about how to do the same for your organization.

I’ll talk about the second way to stimulate sales using strategic communications in Part 2 of this series…coming soon.