3 min read
In the beloved age of information overload, the ability to send a message that actually gets opened and reviewed by your sales team has become ever more challenging. If your work depends on you being able to successfully transmit information to a large group of sales reps – perhaps because you are a marketing or sales manager – you are more than familiar with this challenge.
You could still use some useful tweaks to improve your sales emails and it would still be of no help. Because how many times have you carefully crafted an important message and then wondered if it would actually end up being read by everyone who received it? Probably better not to count. Ultimately, getting field sales teams to read your messages is the main idea. Check out these sales strategies to increase your open email open rate.
Of course, one can always resort to the addition of an oh-so-friendly “URGENT!” in all subject lines, but I think we can all agree that we just don’t want to be that person.
It’s easy to see that read receipts have a role to play in all of this – but let’s examine for a second where read receipts can be helpful and where they may leave something to be desired. The idea behind the read receipt sounds perfect. One person sends a message and requests a read receipt from all message recipients. When these recipients open the message, the sender is notified, allowing him or her to feel confident that the original message has been read. Sounds perfect, right?
But if you’ve ever tried to use read receipts to send important information to a large group of people, you know it’s not so simple. When the solution you’re using doesn’t force the recipient to manually confirm they’ve received the message, you’re stuck not knowing the difference between opened and actually read. To get around this, many email solutions request an extra click on the part of the receiver.
But what happens if the sales rep receiving the message opens it while they’re running into a meeting? They may or may not have read it but nothing stops the important email from getting lost in a pile of other emails (perhaps even, dare I say it, intentionally), leaving you, the sender, in the dark. And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of an email requesting a read receipt, you can probably identify with a feeling of doubt over whether to send it, because – let’s be honest – you’ve pretty much read the email but you haven’t necessarily reflected on its implications or understood all of its contents.
Imagine if this email informed the sales team of a new product integration – a game changer with the potential to push those tough deals over the line. Great news, you would think, only if more than 20% of the recipients had actually read it…
And if you need to send an important message to the entire sales team, things can get even more complicated. Some commonly used solutions notify you with a separate email each time someone reads your message – flooding your inbox and testing your patience with the need to compare incoming read receipts to your original list of recipients.
What is often missing is what sales managers most need – a list of those who still haven’t reviewed your important message and automatic recurring reminders for that subset of people.
In an attempt to resolve the problem of read receipts once and for all, ForceManager recently released NewsManager, a simple but powerful communication solution for sales and marketing managers. Created with heavy input from senior field sales managers from around the world and integrated into the all-in-one ForceManager sales assistant platform, NewsManager allows a user to send an important message to a group of sales reps. When a sales rep receives the message, they are asked to confirm that they’ve actually understood it by clicking a “Got it!” button. Recipients who don’t click the button will receive daily reminders about it until they do. Meanwhile, the manager has a simple dashboard giving them the real-time information they most need about each message – who still hasn’t opened it, and more importantly, who still hasn’t clicked the “got it” button.
Regardless of industry and location, if you have a field sales team, it’s likely that internal communication is one of your biggest challenges. Read receipts may relieve some of the burden, but are unlikely to provide a complete solution.
If you’re struggling with how much effort it takes to transmit important messages to a large field sales team, you may find it well worth it to give NewsManager a try.
