Submitted by tylercroft on
in
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Hello All. I am trying to find a solution to the following problem. We have a geographically diverse workforce, all over the world. Most of the time when someone wins a big deal, only their direct manager and maybe one or two others get notice of it. I would like to find a way to easily update the entire workforce of big sales wins. This serves for motivation and morale, as people see that we are doing great things and want to be a part of it.
At first I though of Twitter, because it is short and instantaeous. I want the sales force to be able to send the notifications from Blackberries or other smart phones as they are walking away from signing an agreement and are in the euphoria of the moment. But Twitter has the limitation of needing one person as the central poster, and everyone subscribes to that one Tweet string. Or everyone has to subscribe to everyone else's, which gets messy. Also I'm not sure my business wants our information to go through a public site like that.
People get too many emails, so simply setting up an email distirbution list isn't exciting and isn't the motivator we want.
Does anyone have any other ideas for how to do an effective Many-To-Many communication about sales wins?
One to many
I've seen this done a couple ways.
One is via email, but from the CEO or other executive. It's done monthly or so, covers the outstanding deals, singles out top performers. It's written by someone else, and sent by the CEO.
The other is through a regularly scheduled "all hands" meeting (usually quarterly).
John Hack
Have you tought of
Have you tought of building a wiki?
Pbworks.com have some great tools, Google Site can do the job too.
You could create a really easy to use private wiki for your team and they can get e-mail updates if they so desire when something change on the wiki.
There are many other solutions, but those seem the easiest to manage asynchronously(sp?), in my opinion..
You could go with the
You could go with the Twitter solution, but pass out the 'ABC Co. Sales Team' Twitter account information to all of the relevant sales managers.
This would alleviate from having several accounts to subscribe to, and anyone you trust can post from it.
~12string~
Another option to Twitter
Another option to Twitter would be a "private label" microblogging service such as Yammer. We have a corp wide Yammer account at my business and it is quite useful. Then you'd need to ensure everyone on the team created an account. The info would be private, etc....
It seems to me the tool should also be dictated by the frequency of the communication. Daily or more frequent wins lend themselves to a micro-blogging type service. Less frequent wins (but presumably larger in amount) might merit a more extensive and formal communication plan such as an e-newsletter. Readership is always an issue with these. I personally have found the more valuable you can make these for your team, the more frequently they will be read. Treat the storytelling like a white paper/education session on how the deal was won, what elements, strategies and tactics impacted the sale etc...
My two cents. Your mileage may vary. Best of luck with whatever you move forward with!
Sean