Know what your team knows
Managing a sales team - any team, for that matter - is hard. Doing it across geographies, in a virtual landscape, is harder.
Last week we spoke with a major health company that sells technology solutions to hospital systems. They told us that even with their vast resources and dedicated, aligned sales teams in the field, managers are having trouble verifying what people know and understand about the latest market intelligence, pitch materials, or company strategy.
Newsletters and emails go out. Nothing comes back. The data is either being digested processed and acted upon - or it isn’t.
Strategies and insights fall on deaf ears most of the time. Forbes reports that even at high performing companies, only 29% of employees are aligned. When it comes to sales guidance, think of the money that is being left on the table!
What if aligning teams were easy and you could know for sure that everyone was on the same page?
The trick is getting away from broken systems. Today we rely on email to share information. But everyone in the field is loathe to fill inboxes with “Read it” emails that confirms they understand. Meanwhile, managers are simply unsure if anything has been read at all. Worse still, employees might read something, but who’s to know if it helped?
To find out, teams will meet on conference calls that end up being challenging to coordinate and irritating to follow, leaving everyone feeling like this:
In our world of fast moving information we need to know when our teams understand information, or at least if they’ve read it.
If you can say with certainty that is happening, congratulations. You’re in a tiny minority in the business world.
