This week, Forrester published Introducing The B2B Sales Communications Rules Engine. This new model is designed to help revenue enablement teams better filter all the incoming requests, demands, and downright “noise” that well-meaning colleagues aim at sales and other customer-facing personas. Most sales-adjacent functions such as portfolio marketing and revenue operations, as well as supporting departments such as HR or finance, earnestly seek to enable the revenue team for their own, (usually) legitimate reasons. But without coordination, context, or calendar control, their aggregated efforts often result in turmoil and end up ignored by sellers who are appropriately more focused on the only thing that matters to them: their current deals, opportunities, renewals, and accounts.
This is where the best enablement teams add value to sales communications and rep advocacy: providing a circuit breaker to better feed the revenue team members only what helps them, with timing and delivery mechanisms geared toward the audience, not the originators of the messaging. The B2B Sales Communications Rules Engine focuses on the who, what, why, when, and how for every sales communication request through a seller’s “What’s in it for me?” lens. It optimizes incoming content for the field and teaches requesters how to better frame and rethink their own needs.
In researching and producing this report, we connected with a wide variety of practitioners to understand what works (and doesn’t) in streamlining communications to sales and revenue teams. While the B2B Sales Communications Rules Engine concentrates on how revenue enablement can effectively filter incoming requests, a number of best practices for downstream activity — how to best implement effectively managed communications requests — arose from our interviews. Here are some of the best pieces of advice, including from two of my valued Forrester colleagues:
- Cameron Tanner, Cisco: Mimic best practices in customer communications. Think about the ideal time of day, relentlessly review content clarity and simplicity before launching, and make your sales messaging as predictable as “I know my newspaper arrives daily at 6 a.m. to my tablet over Wi-Fi. I want to knowt hat it takes 3 minutes to read, the articles have been peer-reviewed, and it has clear recommendations for me.”
- Mike Kunkle, SPARKiQ: Select a single, primary channel for regular and important updates, from the same acknowledged source of truth, and use other channels and sources only as reinforcement. Store updates in a searchable location so that they can be found and referenced as needed.
- Kathleen Pierce, Forrester: People need a clear mental map of what goes where and when. We all know where to go for HR policies, but sales information runs through all sorts of channels from all sorts of people. End the chaos by concentrating on the user experience.
- Jackie Menzel, EliteGTM: Time is revenue for your audience, so use live meetings sparingly when introducing core communications. Trim down your high-level summary or announcement to 1 minute, then hand things over to the enforcing “partner in crime” for the remaining 4 minutes. Practice your presentation, keep it brutally short, and provide entertainment when appropriate.
- Suzanne White, Smartsheet: Communications is incredibly personal, and choice of venue matters to your audience. You’ll never nail down one channel to rule them all, so be sure to balance corporate channel mandates with meeting your sellers where they prefer to get information.
- Zachary Lukasiewicz, analytics consultant: If you are trying to communicate critical information, you’d better not have links, banners, or graphics.
- Luke Martin, ZoomInfo: Leverage your digital adoption platform to deliver situationally relevant roll-over and pop-up content — which can be text but also animation and video — to the right people at the right time. That almost always means within the context of their current deals, opportunities, and projects.
- Jon Symons, Forrester: Use TLDR creatively to both grab attention but also to give folks a legitimate opportunity to opt out. Even The New York Times leads with short-form content, with a roll-over if you want to see the details.
