The Importance of the Ding Email

As leaders, one of the toughest jobs we have is keeping a team motivated… When you break it down, we all spend on average 7.9 hours at work, and it is difficult for anyone to stay motivated 100% of that time. We are all human after all, and it’s natural to have cycles of intensity on the job. As leaders, we all have our tactics and secrets to team motivation… One that I wanted to share with you today is the concept of the “Ding Email”, which is something that not only can help motivate a team, but something that can help a team perform more efficiently as well. So, what is a Ding Email?

Well, a common practice within many sales cultures is to celebrate recent wins with the ringing of a bell! The purpose of ringing the bell is simple: get people excited about the sale and improve overall morale…

Not only does ringing the bell celebrate a win, but within sales cultures, it has an interesting side effect of team motivation. If you look within the DNA of any sales team, you’ll find that an overwhelming majority of salespeople have some type of competitive sports background and are extremely competitive by nature… As a result, the ringing of the bell, is an extremely public way of raising the competitive bar for others on the team, and by nature, it will motivate other team members.

Here is the fundamental problem with ringing a physical bell: only people within the vicinity of the bell can hear it when rung. This is where the concept of the Ding Email comes into place. The Ding Email is not a new concept; in fact, it was implemented at HubSpot back in the day. The Ding Email was to take the concept of ringing the sales bell to the next level. Not only did it celebrate a recent sales win, but it provided intelligence to the team abroad around the recent win–essentially the who, what, when, where, and how details of the win.

Here’s the thing: everyone wants to be part of a winning team. And nothing shows individual team members that they are a part of a winning team more than seeing new customers come on board, and the Ding Email is a very public way of showcasing this… However, sharing the details of the deal takes everything to the next level as it provides motivation to the individual departments that things are working and also provides actionable intelligence on the deal itself. In this essence, HubSpot had the Ding Email loaded into their Salesforce.com instance, in which when the email was sent, it was then uploaded into the customer intelligence aspect of their Salesforce.com instance…

What this did was provide the following teams intelligence on the deal:

• Account Management – Had intelligence on the complete deal and cycle of the deal
• Customer Success Team – Had intelligence on who bought, why did they buy, and what were they hoping to accomplish
• Sales Team – Provides a virtual battlecard of intelligence that might help them win their next deal
• Marketing – Knew instantly what brought the customer into the funnel and what marketing programs were working
• Product – Knew what parts of the product customers were most interested in using
• Finance – Knew who were the billing contacts
• Support – Knew who were the key users and various details on expected software usage

Each and every one of these teams benefited from this intelligence creating an overall better customer experience… and with one additional interesting side effect: creating a more efficient team. As an example, one of the biggest annoyances for a sales team is constantly being asked by various team members questions such as who a key point of contact for a customer might be or questions on what exactly someone bought or why. However, on the flip slide, nothing annoys teams such as customer success or account management more than getting a new customer with zero information about the deal or customer. The process around the Ding email solved for this and many items.

At the end of the day, the Ding is not just a celebratory email, but it something that can better align a team closer to a customer’s core goals providing customers with overall better customer experience within a company. This is why we recommend this tactic to every new company we work with… Try implementing it and see what happens. And, if you need help, we are always available to help develop this strategy for your company.

Originally published on 3Sixty Insights: The Importance of the Ding Email