Integrating Sales Strategies and Corporate Objectives

In a perfect world, the C-suite and the sales team work together to seamlessly integrate long-term corporate objectives with the usually shorter-term sales strategies that salespeople operate off of. This is not often the case in real life, however, where rifts between the C-suite and the salespeople “in the trenches” occur frequently.

For example, there might be a marketing push by sales which is nullified by the CFOs demand to cut costs. How can sales managers and executives bridge this gap, and similar ones to it?

Involve Sales in Decision Making

The first step is to include the top sales managers in the strategic planning sessions, if not from the beginning then at least early enough to where their input can influence the tactical execution of those plans. In this way, items such as sales personnel hiring and training, as well as marketing budgets, can be addressed from a realistic point of view.

The business world is filled with stories of lofty plans dreamt up in an ivory tower, only to have those plans crash and burn because the lower level troops were not consulted in figuring out how to actually execute them.

Keep It Simple

In order for every employee to understand and support the corporate objectives, and how they tie in with sales strategies and their specific jobs, the objectives must be communicated simply. The language should be cleaned up of jargon and legalese, because people cannot comply with things they do not understand.

Although the strategic plans can derive from complex data sets and business intelligence, clever executives will work with the sales department to distill everything down to digestible bullet-points as much as possible.

Drive the Message In

Once the corporate objectives have been made understandable to the layperson, the best way to drive the message home is to communicate the output at least six times in six different ways to each employee. Some ideas for dissemination:

• Large meeting with briefing to entire firm
• Smaller sales meetings where specific questions and issues can be delved into
• Email campaign
• Company newsletter
• Video
• Mini training course with quiz

You get the idea.

Keep Promises

There is nothing worse for employee morale than having them buy into plans and policies, only to see upper management violating the “rules of engagement.” This means you must:

• Pay the commissions and bonuses you promised to pay
• Fix the issues in fulfillment you promised to fix
• Hire the support personnel you promised to hire
• Discipline the deadbeats according to the policies you set (no favoritism)
• Etc.

Management itself is a sales job — you should be selling your people every day on the vision of the company and why they should work for you. When you fail to hold up your end of the bargain then, just like any other customer, expect your sales force to not want to do business “your way” anymore and either quit or undermine your plans with their own sales strategies.

Invest time in communicating your corporate objectives to your sales team members in a form that they can understand and accept, and you will find success. For more tips on communicating sales strategies, contact us here.