Leading Growth

3Communication

YOU'RE BUSY RUNNING a sales team and racing toward your goals, which means spending most days talking to senior leaders, your sales team, important clients and prospects, and the rest of your organization. It feels like you are always communicating in one medium or another—talking, typing, asking or answering questions, and providing or receiving information.

But all that communication may be doing little to promote revenue growth. Communicating for revenue growth requires a different approach, with more direct conversations that carry more information. Bringing your vision to life, enrolling your team in an adventure, and successfully transforming your team and your results requires more of the right communication.

As a sales leader, I never stop telling my team, “Go acquire anchor clients.” I never miss an opportunity to tell my team what I want from them, even though they have heard me say “anchor clients” hundreds or thousands of times. You might call these key accounts, dream clients, must-win, high-visibility, high-value, or some other moniker—they're the kind of clients you can create significant value for and who believe the outcomes you can help them improve are strategic. Growing these larger clients adds more to your numbers than growing smaller clients, especially when the smaller clients don't consider what you sell to be particularly vital to their work.

What We Value and Why

More broadly, your communication must convey what you value and why ...