Part of being a leader of a direct sales team is making sure you are working on their training at all times. But, depending on how big your team is, it can take a lot of time and effort to make sure that you are in touch with everyone on a regular basis to update them on anything that is relevant. You may find that it is beneficial to create a newsletter to do this task for you.
There are many ways to create a team newsletter and many styles, so it is up to you how you do it. Some leaders prefer to mail them out, so they can include other brochures or information with the newsletter and others prefer email due to speed.
Team Recognition
The first thing you want to include in your newsletter is recognition to your team, especially if they are all spread out and are not able to attend a local meeting. If you are doing any contests, you would want to announce the winner in this section as well. Point out the top sales; the top recruiter, anyone who has qualified for various rewards, or anything else that you feel is important.
Important Information
From there, you may want to get into any changes within your company that you feel it is important for your team to know. A lot of demonstrators do not bother to read the company newsletters, so give them the updates here. If there are any cutoffs coming up for promotions, incentives or catalogues this may be a good place to include it as well.
Article Content
Beyond this, content is up to you and what you feel that your team should know. Articles come in handy for content, and it is easy to find this type of content on the Internet. Please make sure that when you are using an article someone has written to give them credit – either with a link back to where you found the article or including their resource box (like a biography at the bottom of the article).
Author Comments
You may want to include a few comments from yourself at some point as well, like if you went with a particular theme in the newsletter you could explain your choice, or you may want to talk about something a bit more general about where you hope to see the team going in the future. You may prefer to leave this out entirely.
Finish off the newsletter with your contact information. While your team should know how to get a hold of you, people do not have the greatest memory, and they tend to delete older emails.
While there is no guarantee that your team is going to even read these newsletters, you at least have done your part in making sure that they are informed. A newsletter is a great option when you have a long distance team, or a large team, and do not have time to call everyone. Remember though, a newsletter does not replace a phone call.
Sharon Katzman - Sharon has her finger in many different pies. By day she works as an accounting clerk for a large Western Canadian company. During her ...
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