Can Internal Comms Drive Revenue? Some tangible approaches

Ben Verleysen:

Let’s name the awkward truth: it isn’t “normal” for Internal Communications to step into the engine room of sales and marketing. Internal comms is usually cast as the keeper of the intranet, the town hall and the cultural drumbeat—not the pipeline. Unusual? Yes. Unprecedented? No. And in today’s buyer reality, it’s one of the highest-leverage places an internal comms practitioner can create value.

Growth most often stalls in the space between sales and marketing. When these teams aren’t in lockstep, value leaks everywhere: finger-pointing replaces problem-solving; market insight sits in silos; the customer experience turns patchy; and positioning drifts as different ICPs and messages jostle for airtime. Meanwhile buyers have changed the rules: over 70% want no sales contact until they’re ready—on their terms—and 62% of potential customers say they can finalise a purchase on content alone. If marketing isn’t equipping buyers with substance and sales isn’t feeding back what moves deals, you’re invisible until it’s too late.

Where Internal Comms’s mandate meets revenue outcomes

At heart, Internal Comms manages the flow of information so employees are informed, engaged and aligned with strategy.

Translate that into the sales–marketing context and you get a practical, defensible remit:

• Inform & educate → Shared language. Internal Comms curates a concise revenue glossary (ICPs, stages, triggers, definitions of “qualified” and “in play”) and makes it the canonical reference in every plan and deck. People can’t align on concepts they name differently.
• Engage & motivate → Celebrate the right behaviours. Spotlight cross-team wins and fast learnings, not just big logos. Make heroes of people who close the loop between market signal and response.
• Align & unify → One message house. Internal Comms maintains a living message framework—value propositions, proof points, and claims we will not make—linked to talk-tracks, templates and landing pages so tone and promises match across the journey.
• Facilitate two-way communication → Short feedback loops. Internal Comms orchestrates a lightweight rhythm: a weekly 15-minute stand-up where sales brings three insights (objection, competitor move, emerging use case) and marketing commits the counter (content update, enablement, offer test). Same-day summaries become a visible “Decision Drop”.
• Manage change → Adoption at speed. New definitions, ICP prioritisation, pricing shifts—Internal Comms explains the why, the trade-offs and the timeline, and provides leaders with clear talk-tracks to remove friction.

The four failure modes (and how Internal Comms helps fix them)

1) Cultural drag & talent churn
When blame takes root, your best people leave. Internal Comms counters by publishing a single narrative of “how we win” and a monthly one-pager—Why We Win / Why We Lose—drawn from real opportunities. The tone is candid, the purpose is learning, and the outcome is shared ownership.

2) Slow feedback loops
Campaigns miss the moment; reps relive the same objections. Internal Comm’s cadence makes signal-to-action a measured KPI (in days, not quarters). Decisions aren’t trapped in meetings; they’re documented, findable and acted on.

3) Inconsistent customer experience & brand damage
Tone, promises and follow-through don’t match. Internal Comms enforces message hygiene: version control, findability and adoption. An “Objection Library” pairs short demo clips and evidence with approved responses—so claims in content mirror claims in conversations.

4) Strategy drift & muddled positioning
Teams chase different ICPs; content scatters. Internal Comms socialises “ICP cards” (problem, triggers, disqualifiers, buying group, language to use/avoid) and requires them in campaign briefs and account plans. Clarity about what we won’t pursue this quarter is part of the script.

What alignment looks like in practice

• Shared definitions of ICP, stages and signals.
• One view of account progress, opportunity health and expansion cues—marketing, SDRs and AEs reading the same dashboard.
• Content mapped to real objections, not guesswork—each asset tied to a buyer task in the deal.
• Feedback cycles measured in days—signals move from call notes to content updates and enablement within the same sprint.

Internal Comms doesn’t “own” sales or marketing. It owns the system that keeps them synchronised.

The Internal Comms sales and marketing toolkit (minimal bureaucracy, maximum leverage)

• Content creation: shift from newsletters to a “revenue bulletin”—a tight digest of decisions, proofs and what’s happening next. Pair it with five-minute videos from product managers, field engineers and customers.
• Strategy development: set an editorial board (sales engineering, customer success, product marketing) to prioritise the top five buyer questions each service/product/campaign sprint. Internal Comms chairs the meeting, documents decisions and clears bottlenecks.
• Channel management: make the GTM wiki the single source of truth. Pin the glossary, message house, objection library and Decision Drops. Use CRM banners or enablement tools where reps actually live.
• Leadership support: equip leaders with authentic talk-tracks for focus, trade-offs and change. Consistency beats charisma.
• Culture building: recognise behaviours that create alignment—fast feedback, evidence-based claims, clean handoffs—not just individual quota wins.

Internal Comms may not sit inside the revenue org, but it lives at the junction of language, rhythm and behaviour—the very things alignment is made of. If you lead sales or marketing, ask a simple question this quarter: who owns the system that keeps us in sync? If the answer is “no one” or “hmmm, good question”, give Internal Comms the mandate to orchestrate it. Equip them with access, a small editorial board and a clear scoreboard—time-to-signal in days, content adoption in live deals, and message consistency in the field. Then let the system work. Unusual? Perhaps. Sensible? Absolutely. The cost of staying in our lanes is higher.

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Ben Verleysen is Managing Director of BBN | Agency X, EMEA

Written by: Editor