If you’re in a Sales Operations Leadership role, you’re consistently asked to analyze business problems or trends and come up with recommendations AND you need to leverage written communication to present your findings. Do your Sales Ops analyses delight or get deleted? Do they compel or repel your audience?

Marci, why are sales down in the Southeast Region? Tom, how can we optimize sales territories in Texas?  Frank, how should we change Sales Compensation to meet our business objectives?

The people who ask you these questions, SVPs and C Level execs, don’t have a lot of time to waste. They’re likely getting up to 300 email messages per day, spend their weeks traveling or in meetings and have mastered the Blackberry/Conference Call/Multi-task Gymnastics.

When communication with this audience, your written messages must be effective and engaging, in order to get read and make an impact

I would like to share three techniques that I consistently leverage when communicating written information that I’ve proven will help engage your audience, increase productivity and speed up decision making in the workplace. These tips are geared towards internal communications, but could also be leveraged in customer and external messaging.

1.    Engage With Executive Summaries
2.    Less is More- The Power of The One Pager
3.    Potent, Persuasive Powerpoints

Engage With Executive Summaries

How often have you started to read a communication, your mind wanders and you think “What is the point here?” The writer presents lots of details, and makes you wade through paragraph after paragraph and at the very end, finally presents their point of view or the purpose of the memo. Busy leaders don’t have time for that.

A more effective approach is to start your email or memos with an executive summary. This is the first paragraph and should summarize what you want to communicate, why it’s important or relevant to the reader and what action you want the reader to take after they finish reading the communication.

You should use powerful, concise language and avoid fluff and catch phrases. They should be two to four sentences in length and may also include a few bullet points. The rest of your message, should support or be the “back-up” to your executive summary

Here is an example of an Executive Summary you might use in an email:  “Per your request, the operations team completed an analysis of sales performance in the Midwest Territory. We identified several interesting trends tied to product line, seniority of sales representatives and state. I’ve added more detail below, and recommend we meet to discuss the entire analysis. Does Wednesday work for you?”

For more information and examples of executive summaries, refer to this article: “How to use an Executive Summary To Improve Your Business Writing” published on Hub Pages.

Less is More – The Power of The One Pager

Whenever possible, keep printed communications and memos to one page. If Twitter users can get their point across in only 140 characters, leaders surely can get their main points across on one, 8 ½ by 11 page.

My memos tend to follow the same format.. I start with an executive summary, present some “current state” or background info, present my recommendation with the appropriate supporting data & information, then wrap-up with an action statement. If the length flows past one page, I look back at the text and attempt to streamline my thoughts and make them more concise.

If your memo has to be more than one page, put the most important information and calls to action on page one, and use the remaining pages as back-up.

If most of your communication is done via email, you may want to check out the article “How To Write More Effective Emails for a Blackberry Audience”.

Potent, Persuasive Powerpoints

We’ve all sat through what I’ll fondly call Powerpoint hell. These are long meetings that have many speakers and each one has a Powerpoint deck of 10 to 100 pages. There are some speakers that put only one thought on each slide and others who fill up their slides with dense text that the human eye can’t even read.  When you look around the audience, you see lots of Blackberry reading, glazed eyes and the occasional dozer.

I have a few recommendations to make your powerpoint presentations more potent and persuasive:

First, don’t hand out your presentation before the meeting or at the very beginning, until you’ve had a chance to kick off the meeting. This may sound counter-intuitive because you may want to prepare your meeting attendees. But, a wise colleague once told me that once you share your presentation, you lose control of the content and I think she’s right in most cases. Instead.. kick off your presentation adding the relevant context and commentary, then only hand out copies after the into or at the very end when you feel the timing is right.

If appropriate, include a “scary slide”. This is a slide that has charts and/or graphs that literally scare – then engage your audience, based on how they visually portray your information.  For example, you could have a slide that has text stating “New Business has declined 20% year over year, for the past 5 years.” BUT, it would be much scarier and impactful to see that decline on a brightly colored chart with a prominent down arrow. Boo!

And…. One of your first few slides should be an Executive Summary (can you tell that I like these?!). We’ve all been in meetings that are supposed to be focused on one topic, but jump to other topics, especially when C-level executives are involved. I’ve also been in many meetings that start late or have to end early and I’ve had to adjust my presentation strategy. When designing your presentation, think about what would happen if your slide deck had to go from 15 down to 1 slide. Your most important messages should be at the beginning on the Executive Summary slide.

Do you have other suggestions to Power Up your Sales Operations writing? Please add your comments here.