For many of us, the idea of managing a remote sales team is an exciting prospect. But in reality, it can be challenging to keep everyone on your team motivated and productive. If you're struggling with keeping your remote sales team happy and productive, this post will provide some helpful tips for you!
Communication is an essential part of any relationship, and it's especially important in remote sales. Communication cadence is the frequency and duration with which you communicate with your remote sales team.
Communication is a two-way street: just as much as we need to maintain contact with our customers, they also need to feel that we're accessible and responsive.
And while we may be tempted to set up a one-size-fits all communication plan for our entire company, there are three levels at which your communications should vary: board members, management/executive team, employees.
Board Communication Cadence The board of advisors or directors are responsible for setting direction, ensuring your company is compliant with laws and regulations, providing advice on the business side of things (i.e., finance), as well as making high-level decisions about product development, marketing strategy, etc.
The board should be set in terms of quarterly check-ins and the frequency should be consistent. Communication to the board should also increase when you have big news or updates about your company, product, or solution.
Management/Executive Communication Cadence Management and executives are responsible for setting direction on a more day-to-day level: they're tasked with ensuring the day-to-day operations of the company are going smoothly and in a timely manner.
Cadence to management or your executive team should be set quarterly, but in terms of asking for updates on existing projects so you can identify where you need to step in with additional support.
Cadence will increase when they have big news about initiatives that affect your company, product, or solution.
Communication cadence will increase when there's a big change in direction about initiatives that affect your company, product, or solution as well as milestones reached for those projects.
Use these tips to develop the right communication cadence to keep your remote sales team productive, efficient, and effective.
"Which day and hour would be best for sending this email?"
Employee communication specialists, unsurprisingly, want their emails opened and read, thus this is a reasonable topic to pose.
Is there a satisfactory response?
We investigated this subject using published email research as well as our own substantial data analysis of over half a billion internal email messages.
Email blurs the lines between business and personal life.
Because of the widespread use of computers, tablets, and smartphones, traditional working hours have shifted away from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
We all have personal and professional lives that are both digital to some extent and frequently overlap. Think about the following issues:
• Do you check your personal email mailbox at work?
• Do you check your work email inbox when you're at home or on vacation?
The majority of us, as well as the employees of our organisations, respond yes to both of these questions. This means that communicators must consider timing and scheduling when sending emails to ensure maximum readership and efficacy.
Mornings on workdays are the finest, according to research.
We're lucky in that digital team communications leave data footprints, which we can examine to see how and when messages are digested.
My company, PoliteMail, produces annual research on employee email communications across our enterprise customer base and segmented along 10 industry sectors aligned with the Standard & Poor's and Dow Jones industry sector stock indexes.
MailChimp, a leader in email marketing software, has put together research on email send time optimization for users of their service, and my company, PoliteMail, produces annual research on employee email communications across our enterprise customer base and segmented along 10 industry sectors aligned with the Standard & Poor
Here's an interesting statistic from our study:
Employees read only approximately 59 percent of the emails they receive. This isn't about marketing emails; this is about public messages from and about their own company.
Which day of the week is ideal for sending an email?
Surprisingly, both the MailChimp study data and our data, which is exclusive to workers at work, arrive at the identical best-day conclusions:
1. Weekends are the most inconvenient. When compared to weekdays, both datasets demonstrate a considerable drop-off in email activity on Saturdays and Sundays of around 50%.
Saturdays are slightly better for customers than Sundays, while Sunday evenings are better for employees.
2. The best days are weekdays, but there is no discernible difference between them. Thursdays are somewhat better up to 1% in both the consumer and employee datasets, whereas Fridays are slightly worse.
What is the optimum time to send an email during the day?
Mornings are better, according to both email research data sets.
According to MailChimp's research, email activity peaked at 10 a.m., whereas PoliteMail's data showed that email activity was split over five days, with mornings outperforming afternoons by a little margin and a dramatic drop-off in the after-work commute and after hours.
Interestingly, there is a large amount of employee activity before work, during the morning commute, but it is still less than half of the activity during the day.
The correct response is to stick to the same day and hour every time.
Our research delved deeper into the concept of cadence, or sending on a set timetable rather than a random one.
The majority of corporate staff email broadcasts are sent as soon as they are ready.
When we evaluated emails sent from the same address to the same list over time, we found that those sent on a regular schedule — that is, on the same day of the week and at the same time every day, whether the schedule was daily, weekly, or monthly — fared better.
The open rate increased by 2% when emails were sent at the same time every day. The read rate increased by 20% when emails were sent on the same day of the week and at the same hour.
The results of the frequency data are even more startling. Daily emails had a higher open rate and readership than weekly emails, weekly emails outperformed monthly emails, and more than once daily emails outperformed once daily emails.
Use these five basic email best practises to get the most out of your emails.
While general principles for optimising email broadcast scheduling are produced through mass research, gathering your own data and email analytics to optimise communications for your own consumers is even better.
This research, on the other hand, can be used to advise certain email best practises:
• Send emails first thing in the morning; you want to be near the top of the inbox when people go to work, so scheduling emails by time zone is a good idea.
• Sending an email in the late afternoon or evening is not a good idea.
• Sending over the weekend is the most probable time for your message to be disregarded.
• Send out less stuff, but more frequently.
Given that email is the principal means of company communication, consider the following:
When do you think the email will be opened?
What percentage of staff read?
What are the most popular links?
What is overlooked, and what gets noticed?
What is the level of interest in my audience?
What is the efficacy of this email campaign?
The answers to these questions can assist corporate communications teams in making more strategic decisions about what to send and when to send it in order to maximise uptake and effect.
Selling is a difficult process, as sales professionals are well aware. Many sales professionals thrive on the reactive aspect of increasing sales. With so much to accomplish, salespeople will frequently stick to a good sales cycle once they've found one. Beyond basic communication strategies, enhancing employee user experience can profoundly elevate productivity and job satisfaction. This involves not merely the tools used for communication but understanding and improving the entire employee journey from recruitment to retirement.
After all, why mend something that isn't broken in the first place?
However, no sales cadence is flawless, and it can always be modified to boost success. This is especially true as our clients' and markets' needs change, making various aspects of sales cadences more or less effective.
We'll walk you through how to test your sales communication cadence and how to enhance it in this article.
Recognize Your Current Pace
You must first understand the components that make up your cadence before you can improve it. You may already have a good notion of how your cadence works in your brain, but putting it down will allow you to test it and identify places where you can improve.
Make a note of your sales cadence, including the number of times you make a transaction.
These metrics may vary from company to company, however they may include:
You may determine which stages are contributing more or less to your success once you've determined which metrics and activities get your prospects closer to a sale.
If email openings are one of your important metrics, you might notice the following pattern on days when emails are delivered to a prospect:
This definitely indicates that your third email contact should be reconsidered.
It's also necessary to compare them to other indicators and measure the cadence's overall success. Email 3 might, for example, request a sales meeting directly. This stage may still be regarded as valuable if all 12 openers accept the meeting.
You should also keep in mind that not every level is intended to elicit action. Some stages may be utilised to increase client trust or educate them about your product or service.
In these circumstances, only a few steps may be made right away, but they will help you develop more conversions in the future.
A/B Testing is a method of comparing two options.
Identifying and measuring critical metrics at each stage of your cadence can help you identify areas for improvement.
After you've discovered them, you'll need to take steps to try to improve them. A/B testing is the most effective approach for accomplishing this.
"The technique of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing product and assessing the difference in performance is known as A/B testing (also known as split testing)." Crazy Egg is a term used to describe a
Using this method of testing, you can easily and rapidly assess the effectiveness of a sales cadence option. Only one variable should be updated to really comprehend the impact of a change in your sales cadence.
When numerous factors are altered, determining whether one had a positive or negative impact on your results can be challenging.
Timing
When it comes to good sales, time is everything. If you communicate too seldom, your prospective client may become annoyed with your attempts to sell. If you communicate too long, your prospective customer may lose interest.
Trying out alternative timings can help you increase your cadence's overall success. You could try prolonging or decreasing the duration between interactions to achieve this.
If you normally contact prospects every day, for example, you can try waiting two days to see if this improves the rate of engagement.
Modifications to the content
You might also experiment with minor changes to your communications. Even if they are modest, they can have a significant impact on your cadence's effectiveness. This is especially true if you're making a minor, easy mistake that's turning folks off.
The number of little changes you may make to your cadence is limitless. To guarantee that you learn from the deployment of these modifications, it's critical that you measure any improvements they make on a regular basis.
Alternative Techniques
Consider adding something completely new if your sales cadence is performing poorly or you're starting to witness a reduction in results. It could entail experimenting with multiple modes of communication, such as direct mail, text messages, or even social network DMs.
You might also try adjusting your communication style entirely from formal to informal, or having a different member of the sales team contact you on your behalf.
