Understanding inter-departmental conversations about your company’s product may often feel akin to deciphering intricate code – a perplexing task.
To ensure the success of your company, it’s imperative for Product, Sales, Customer Success, and the C-Suite to synchronize their vocabulary and messaging with Marketing. To accomplish this seamless alignment, consider implementing these eight foundational principles.
- Know Your Position
- Get the Facts Straight
- Simplify Your Messaging
- Centralize Your Message
- Integrate Brand Training into Your Onboarding
- Create Open Communications Between Teams
- Send Frequent Internal Messages
- Hire People Who Live and Breathe Your Company Culture
In the tech industry, emphasizing internal communication hasn’t always been the norm. However, amidst the burgeoning HealthTech landscape and the ongoing healthcare digital transformation, companies that excel in seamless communication stand to differentiate themselves.
Facilitating a synchronized narrative across all departments, fostering consistent information sharing, and promoting collaborative efforts toward common objectives are essential. Taking the lead in this endeavor is Marketing.
1. Know Your Position
Do you understand your distinct edge over competitors and how to articulate it?
Your primary positioning statement encapsulates your identity, purpose, and target audience. Progress will be elusive until every team member can flawlessly reiterate this verbatim.
Avoid verbosity or jargon; clarity outweighs poetic flair. Many companies strive to appear trendy, embrace innovation, or forge new terminology, inadvertently sacrificing the clarity crucial for market success.
2. Get the Facts Straight
Create a clear internal communications workflow that designates information sources and recipients.
For example, the Product Team provides product details to Product Marketing, which organizes content for Marketing. This enables the Product Team to refine clarity and Marketing to develop campaigns, empower Sales, and support Customer Service.
3. Simplify Your Message
In the realm of tech companies, especially in HealthTech, a common issue is the overwhelming communication of complex information from technical founders. Intended to engage prospects, this approach can often result in confusion.
To counter this, embrace simplicity. Beware of the three pitfalls of technical founders: complexity, ambiguity, and verbosity.
Focus on accuracy. Prioritize clarity. Strive for conciseness. Ensure your message is easily deliverable.
4. Centralize Your Message
Establish a comprehensive repository for each product, accessible to all levels of your organization, from the CEO to entry-level customer service reps, ensuring quick access to vital information.
For instance, consider creating for each product:
An introductory video
Sales slick (in PDF format)
Demo video
Sales presentation
Webinar
Case study
Stat sheet
Three relevant blog articles
Collaborate across teams to curate this repository with valuable content. Furthermore, compile a central document containing key company details like positioning statement, core mission, value proposition, employee count, endorsements from satisfied clients, and product adoption stats.
Maintain this document in a collaborative platform like Google Docs, facilitating updates without outdated information being shared. This approach ensures data accuracy and consistency.
5. Integrate Brand Training into Onboarding
Ensure the insights crafted in step #4 are effectively conveyed to every incoming employee. Collaborate with your Human Resources team to incorporate a branding immersion during onboarding. Craft an engaging and memorable experience, enhancing the likelihood of information integration into their tasks.
Equally important, provide this training to existing staff. A mere Slack message won’t suffice. Opt for a comprehensive approach. Arrange departmental luncheons. Create desk merchandise with reminders. Harness your team’s abundant creativity to facilitate seamless, enjoyable, and lasting adoption.
6. Create Open Communications Between Teams
Sales and marketing alignment is crucial, yet it’s equally vital to establish alignment between sales and product and sales and support teams. Encourage an atmosphere of transparent communication that inspires sales to seek clarifications and pose queries.
To meet sales’ immediate information needs, consider staffing the team with a sales engineer with prior support or product role experience. This equips the sales team with product knowledge, fostering effective communication and alignment.
Idea: Prioritize internal communications to cultivate camaraderie and company culture. Institute a company-wide initiative where individuals from different departments engage in monthly one-on-one meetings to discuss their roles and collaborative strategies for company growth and enhancement. This concept, dubbed “random coffee,” has effectively connected and facilitated communication among numerous colleagues.
7. Send Internal Messages
Whether you opt for a monthly newsletter or have a senior leadership member share weekly updates on Slack, ensure a steady flow of information.
If you choose a newsletter, utilize it to nurture your company’s culture. Acknowledge achievements and personal landmarks like weddings, births, and engagements. Since departments might not always connect for work matters, providing a platform for reaching out, extending greetings, and celebrating colleagues foster the open communication essential for overall company achievements.
8. Hire People Who Live and Breathe Your Company Culture
At Ratio, we openly discuss our values during the hiring process and evaluate candidates based on their alignment with these values.
We also integrate value alignment into our employee evaluation process to ensure ongoing adherence. Quarterly surveys create a feedback loop, enabling our team to communicate anonymously with senior leadership about their commitment to our values.
Our team’s focus revolves around our positioning, residing in the solar system of our mission and values. This approach is replicable for your organization as well.
If you observe any gaps in the information flow or witness disjointed communication between marketing and sales, reach out to your sales counterpart and arrange a meeting within the next three business days. This proactive step will set you on the path to streamline and integrate your communication effectively.
