Sales News, June 2022

This month we’re talking about communication, and as you’ll read below, so is everybody else. Welcome to the Maestro Mastery Sales News Roundup!

TALKING TO NEW HIRES

What’s the first communication that you have with new hires? It comes well before interviews and onboarding. The first time you communicate with potential job candidates is often through your job description, so make sure you have a strategy for creating a good one. HubSpot posted a great article this month on how to attract your ideal candidates by optimizing your job description. It’s full of examples and helpful hints on what to do (and what not to do).

Harvard Business Review (HBR) just published an article about how your hiring practices could be costing you future talent. How well are you communicating your company culture? How strong is your company correspondence when it comes to providing feedback? In short, could your communication (or lack of it) be costing you talent?

COMMUNICATING IN A HYBRID ENVIRONMENT

It can be difficult to communicate with your team when some are onsite and others remote. A recent survey, however, indicated that nearly two-thirds of workers would consider looking for another position if they had to return to the office full time. That means, despite the difficulties, the hybrid model is likely here to stay.

How can performance be measured and tracked effectively in hybrid settings? HBR provides some suggestions on how to build visibility into today’s hybrid work environment. The level of visibility needed will vary greatly based on position as well as what kind of flexible arrangement has been adopted. Senior leaders will need information that helps them ensure high-level strategic alignment, while mid-level managers will need more granular data on the productivity of their teams. And key to all of this is, you guessed it, communication. Leaders need to be transparent about the information they are monitoring and what they are using it for.

DO YOU HEAR THAT?

Communication isn’t communication unless someone is listening. There are plenty of resources out there on how to be a better speaker or writer, but what about how to be a better listener? Do you tend to dominate conversations and not listen enough? This HBR piece on how to stop rambling in meetings is for you. Do you know your own listening style? I didn’t even know we had listening styles, so I found this HBR article on how to identify and adapt your listening style eye-opening.

Maybe you’re a pro at active listening. You know not to interrupt others, to suspend judgement, ask open-ended questions, paraphrase responses as an accuracy check, and reflect emotions to convey empathy. Good for you! Ragan has loads of suggestions for how you can implement these listening skills into more aspects of your work culture. No matter where you are with your listening skills, there are resources available to help.

SHARING YOUR MESSAGE

Whether you’re communicating through your website and company collateral, over the phone, or via email, there’s new information out this month to help you. Having trouble developing a B2B-appropriate but still personal brand voice? This Forbes piece has some great suggestions. We wrote last week about how our voice characteristics contribute to how confident we come across. If you’re working on how to sound more confident, this Forbes article on phone skills contains lots of tips and tricks.

Finally, since we all write so many emails, I wanted to share Saleshacker’s weekly show called “1 Email. 2 Takes.” It’s a quick review of an email, where it went wrong, and what could be done to fix it. Check out this one on why this email should have been a sequence, or my personal favorite on why, even when you’re selling technical products, you still have no excuse for writing complex emails.

Saleshacker’s “1 Email. 2 Takes.” is hosted by Interseller’s Director of Growth Marketing, Kristina Finseth, and Lavender’s Will Alred. And speaking of Lavender, what a cool tool for improving your emails! It’s a Chrome extension that helps you write your sales emails. Lavender is like Grammarly on steroids and specifically for sales emails.

Sometimes people are surprised that, as the head of content and messaging, I look to writing tools like Grammarly and Lavender for help. Never stop learning, people. We can all benefit from discovering and sharing helpful communication tools. Like just now, I had used the word learn too much, so I used my online thesaurus and chose “discover.” And when my Grammarly tone detector tells me my email sounds angry, I cool off and rewrite it later. After all, it’s not what you say—it’s how you say it.

Contact us at mastery@maestrogroup.co to schedule workshops for your team or ask about sales strategy engagements.