For many of our clients, internal marketing consumes a surprisingly high proportion of their efforts.

There are three crucial elements needed, none of which can be taken for granted:

  1. Help them to understand what they’re selling
  • Make sure they know about/remember what they have to offer
  • Develop an “elevator pitch”, rather than force staff to pick through complex lists of features and benefits. It’s unlikely customers will get a consistent and strong message, otherwise
  • Arm staff with answers to sticky questions, such as competitor feature comparisons
  1. Inspire passion, so they believe it’s a great or at least competitive solution for their clients
  • Launch with fanfare and a bit of theatre. Especially if that product has taken so long to get to market that it’s become “old news” internally
  • Reps often have a whole raft of products – yours might be vying with a colleague’s “new and shiny thing”. A campaign might be needed to remind them why it’s so great, ideally with excuses to revisit customers, such as a new paper or visual asset explaining how it works
  • They might need a bit of extra motivation. A little “gamification” can go a long way to encourage competitive personalities, such as leader board and rewards
  1. Arm them with the tools they need to do a great job
  • This will vary of course. They may need a “sales narrative”, either just in “internal” form as a basis for conversation or to feed into brochures and presentation materials
  • An interactive e-book might be invaluable, so they engage customers with exciting visual assets and easily select the most appropriate “sell” for the audience, e.g. health economics based, clinical or workflow benefits

As a strategic marketing agency, we often help clients work out which of the above is most important. For example, we’ve interviewed international sales teams to understand their various needs. Led sales narrative workshops to develop a common set of messaging and tools. Created staff questionnaires to understand their current mind-set towards a planned activity. All of which helped to ensure the eventual marketing activity was accepted and appreciated by the wider team.