How to Solve Your Communications Gaps to Drive Increased Revenue

Prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic, most companies’ world-wide workforce worked in a traditional office environment where employees commuted to the office and worked their shift under the watchful eye of their manager. Managers were hesitant to allow workers to work from home. One of the biggest reasons was trust; they were unsure if their workers would actually work without supervision. Why was this such a big issue? The reason: organization’s communication misalignment in the office would likely exacerbate with remote workers. This is the #1 Issue in Sales Transformation with Communication Misalignment.

These managers are in deep, profound trouble as SiriusDecisions’ research found that highly aligned B2B organizations achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability when employing a remote workforce. Couple this with the fact that sellers who work from a home office spend 62.8% of their time doing core selling activities like face-to-face Zoom calls, phone calls, and emails—all that drive increased revenues.

In our last blog, The High Cost of Communication Misalignment in B2B Companies, we were astonished to find that the cost of communication misalignment across enterprise B2B companies with approximately 10,000 employees cost companies $6.24M to the bottom line each year. ¹

The main causes for gaps in communications are due to the myriad of communication tools used today such as smart phones, regular phones, SMS, email, text, video, and Zoom meetings coupled with the manner in which we communicate which is oftentimes ad hoc and informal. Few companies have implemented a repeatable communications process that would enable them to measure the effectiveness and the results from all their communications.

We ended the blog by stating alignment in communications is critical. Communication research focuses on interactive processes assumed to be automatic in humans; it also offers important implications for human-machine interaction.

What can be done to help companies close their communications’ gap and drive increased revenue?

First and foremost is for leadership to recognize the critical need to create and implement a repeatable communications’ process. They just have to look at their own manufacturing group that has repeatable processes in place to ensure their defect levels are within or better than industry standards. The purpose of implementing a communications’ process is to clearly articulate all communication pathways; internal and external to the organization, to drive consistent, measurable business outcomes, and to ultimately drive increased revenue.

To be successful in today’s dynamic, fast-changing corporate environment impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic requires human expertise and technology platforms enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and enhance a company’s rapidly changing communications.

The advent of AI and ML in software enables computers to learn over time. This means that with these types of technologies, communication pathways and messaging can be effectively measured and tracked. As more and more people use the software, the system recognizes gaps in communications and can deliver best practices on how to bridge the gap or to alleviate it all together.

At the beginning of 2020, we did a case study on one of our customers, LifeVantage, to show the results they achieved by implementing The Gig Economy Group’s Adaptive Communications as a Service for Remote Teams platform. It was a case study in that the purpose was to understand LifeVantage’s current challenges, what their objectives were in an effort to solve their challenges, what solutions did they review, what solution did they select, and what was the ROI for implementing the solution chosen. They following is a synopsis of the case study.

LifeVantage is a publicly traded, direct selling, company that specializes in a science called Nutrigenomics. They have 70,000 independent contractors also known as distributers in 19 countries where they sell 19 products focused on wellness and personal care. LifeVantage boasts revenues of a quarter-billion dollars each year where The Gig Economy’s Adaptive Communications as a Service for Remote Teams platform delivered their global communication efforts between LifeVantage selling teams around the globe.

Before employing The Gig Economy Group to help solve their communication gaps, LifeVantage had some loosely connected apps to support their business and align their communications, but they weren’t intelligent—meaning they weren’t learning over time and weren’t optimizing the company’s overall business and communications’ performance. LifeVantage needed to make some fundamental changes in how they communicated across their business. They looked to the Gig Economy Group to develop and implement a technology platform using AI and ML that could recommend optimal communications pathways and messaging, determine communication gaps, and recommend best practice solutions—all that were objective-driven to business results and measurable to outcomes.

The results realized by LifeVantage?

A key metric for all independent distributor networks is the concept of first dollar. First dollar means how many new sales distributors sold in the first month.

By implementing The Gig Economy’s solution, they found a 400% increase in independent distributors getting to first dollar sold in 30 days. They also realized a 250% average increase in enrollment rates of net-new independent distributors and buyers purchasing LifeVantage’s products.

At LifeVantage, getting independent resellers to first dollar ensured they had a salesforce that would sell for them for the foreseeable future. But to ensure they could drive increased revenue required their sellers to grow their own downline distribution network where these sellers would, in turn, develop their downstream network. The Gig Economy Group’s Adaptive Communications as a Service for Remote Teams provided best-in-class performance for the sellers by delivering optimal communications’ pathways, proven and effective messaging, and best practices recommendations to enable their sellers to close the communications’ gaps with LifeVantage corporate, their buyers, and their independent downline distribution network. All in an effort to drive increased revenue.