A 5 Step Framework On How To Manage Your Remote Sales Team

Similar to weekly team meetings, it’s vital to take the time to meet with each of your sales reps individually on the same consistent schedule. Leveraging a good cadence is a critical component of successful sales leadership. This is especially important when you’re managing a remote sales team. Ending on an optimistic note, we want to say that despite the challenges, it is possible to manage a sales team remotely and keep everyone on track to hit their goals. With the right technology and everlasting communication, you can overcome any obstacle and win a high-stakes deal.

Stand-up meetings create transparency on what everyone’s doing, greatly increase communication within the team, and also provide a moment of reflection on what you’ve done and what you’re planning to do. There’s tools like DocSend and Attach that will allow you to upload them and then tell you when someone reads them online. When we just started Salesflare I https://globalcloudteam.com/ would go on the road to visit prospects. A perfectly planned day with no incidents would mean that I would visit 4 prospects maximum, assuming one hour meetings with each one. First, imagine the day of a field sales person, driving from prospect to prospect, waiting in lobbies, getting coffees, walking in and out of meeting rooms, … It’s a lot of time lost.

Establish Clear And Effective Communication Channels

Once these habits are in place you’ll find it way easier to stay on track, regardless of your motivation levels on a particular day. It’s evidently possible that a big part of your sales process is remote and that you’re meeting up with the client once or a few times throughout the process. You can also use gamification to encourage friendly competition and involve all team members in morale-boosting sales activities. Consider rewarding employees for being the first to close some deals or coming up with a winning name for your new project. Give reps the ability to see all of your company data and how you’re meeting KPIs.

They have become responsible for communication efforts, time zone differences, mental well-being, and so on. Managers need to ensure they keep their remote sales team engaged and motivated. The global pandemic has forced companies to reevaluate the way they do business. For many of them, this has meant shifting to a remote work model. If you’re in sales, you may wonder how to manage a remote sales team.

Thanks to video calling software, you can see each other and read some body language, but this technology by itself never fully solves the issue. We’ll send you regular dispatches from Superhuman — with exclusive content and productivity best practice. Even a “job well done” to the whole team on occasion will boost employee morale and make your team feel appreciated, seen, and heard in a more invisible remote environment. But this often happens in remote environments because you’re not interacting with them face-to-face. Allow reps to track their goals and initiatives and take accountability for reaching KPIs.

With Gong, you can track adoption of best practices and new initiatives. You can also set alerts to be notified automatically when these phrases get brought up on calls. And if you have any questions, hit me up in the comments or send a message to the team on the chat on our homepage. You can run through the pipeline and make sure it’s all up to date.

Couple that with the inability to control your sales team’s workflow and activities, and it compounds the challenges. Encourage your remote sales team to speak with each other outside of the usual business hours, as it makes gatherings extra productive and develops a robust team relationship. When it comes to working with a remote team, it takes a bit of work to develop trusting relationships with everyone.

All of this was important to us before the pandemic, and it’s even more so now. Seamlessly integrate with apps that are specific to your business and let CRM speak your language. Get notified immediately when someone visits your website, opens your email, or mentions your brand on social media. SalesSignals alerts your team immediately, so you don’t miss out on a sale.

Ensure all of your team members know how to get a hold of each other and can easily access updated information. Create a repository that includes each team member’s contact information, working hours, location, and timezone. When a team member contacts you and you can’t reply right away, send them a quick note that you’ll get to them when you’re available. Then send yourself a reminder with an app like Superhuman to remind you to action the email when you’re ready. Stay in constant contact with the recipient until you’re fully aware of the situation. Brightful’s games transform your meetings into a fun and joyful experience.

Tools like Miro and Google Jamboard offer features such as file sharing, whiteboarding, and screen sharing tools that can be used to facilitate collaboration and boost productivity. We have put together a video tour on how to go from zero to hero becoming the best remote sales team in the world. These five short videos will show you how to put up your remote setup, how to pitch and the best ways to close a deals remotely. A remote sales team can be a great asset to your company – but only if you manage them correctly. Without the right tools and processes in place, it can be all too easy for things to fall through the cracks. Even if you’ve never managed a remote sales team before, it’s not as daunting as it may seem.

You can use it to hold team meetings, give presentations, and train new salespeople. We run all our sales meetings via Zoom using the Pipeline Kanban as our key discussion agenda. All new leads have been automatically farmed out to the relevant salesperson via our slack integration. We have also now placed the sales dashboards on the executive teams home screen so we don’t need to have a our regular sales discussions.

But technology holds the answer to them (like it does for most human issues!). If you are managing a remote sales workforce, the tools shared above will help you improve their productivity and close more deals. Setting up clear expectations for your remote sales employees presents them with a standard that needs to be upheld. The benchmark needs to include sales mission statements, online procedures when seeking out leads, and resources for managing time more effectively. Remote working changes the ways people can share files and information.

Closely Track Your Customers Interest And Interactions

In sales we can calculate a basic growth co-efficient by taking total annual revenue invoiced and dividing it by the cost of acquiring that revenue . If this number is less than 1.0 think about how you can improve this to ensure you have a model which can thrive in a remote setting. Remote sales refer to the notion of a sale being made where the seller and the prospect never meet! You should also hold regular team meetings to provide updates, give feedback, and answer any questions. Webex by Cisco – one of the global leaders in cloud-based collaboration, providing tools for video and audio conferencing, messaging, and live events to businesses of all sizes.

Take the time to schedule some meetings only on a bi-weekly basis where everyone is kept up to date on the latest project or company event. However, these meetings should also provide a way for everyone to communicate with each other. Before or after the start of a meeting, you could do some team-building activities that keep everyone engaged and learn more about each other. When the sales team is scattered all over the world, managers are not only handling performance strategy.

What Makes Zoho Crm The Right Fit For Remote Work?

Schedule a strict cadence of 1v1 meetings where you can take a virtual stroll through each of your remote worker’s daily work routines. Join the 40,000+ sales and marketing pros who recieve our weekly insights, tips, and best practices. The second is educational content – which is designed to assist in developing a relationship and preventing deals from going dark by purely talking about the product/service on an ongoing basis. This is generally industry level and speaks to the pains they may face in everyday life in the role. Remote selling has always been questioned and there are some that are repeated.

Superhuman helps sales teams manage their email blazingly fast, boost productivity, and build relationships with potential clients. AI and social insights, meeting scheduling, Split Inbox, Snippets, and email scheduling are just a few of the productivity-boosting features Superhuman offers. Remote working comes with its barriers, but we’re here to tell you that it’s highly doable! With a few tweaks and adjustments, your remote sales team can become a well-oiled machine that is just as productive and cohesive as an in-house team — if not more.

• Every application we use is cloud-based including the Zoho suite, so working remotely wasn’t a stretch for us.
• Plan virtual weekly/ monthly sit-downs with your team, and discuss 1 Knowledge Point per session which can directly or indirectly help them sell better.
• Our clients maintain a healthy pipeline and thanks to Zoho, we are able to work with them from any location.
• Perfect for sales calls, conferences with your partners, and training sessions with your sales representatives.

Sign up for Superhuman today and learn how to improve your remote sales team’s working environment with increased productivity, streamlined processes, and the fastest email experience in the world. As a sales team lead, it can feel daunting to think about managing your entire team and sales process remotely while maintaining a high level of productivity and momentum. Just make sure these meetings are not only about work-related issues. Remote sales teams are missing out on that critical need for casual conversation with each other. Managers need to set channels that simulate these conversations on ordinary subjects, such as the latest sports game event or blockbuster hit. These online gatherings offer a way for your team to develop relationships and prevent feelings of isolation and loneliness from becoming a thing.

Extend Your Office To Your Home

With this change – it can difficult to find useful information to define best practices, forge new strategies, uncover tips and craft management plans for your remote sales efforts. With a remote sales team, you can use sales tracking software to see how each employee performs. It is a great way to identify top performers and troubleshoot any problems. Whoosh, for example, offers video calls with advanced analytics on meetings and the performance of attendees. Remote sales teams are just like any other remote team and require a leader that can keep them engaged while they work from home. If the manager is not ensuring that everyone is remaining engaged, it could lead to disastrous results in the future.

SDRs, for instance, need to regularly pass on leads to Account Executives after qualifying them and coordinate with them to move leads down the pipeline towards closure. With people far away and scattered, all that’s starting to wilt. The trust that you had in each other and the team spirit that you painstakingly built..

How To Manage A Remote Sales Team: 4 Tips To Tackling The Challenges

For these types of training, you have the chance to lead by example, show your reps what needs to be done and what is expected of them when they run their meetings. Discussing the progress of your sales targets is best accomplished through effective virtual sales meetings on video conferencing apps such as Zoom, Hangouts, GoToMeeting or Skype. A sales process will ensure that you have a well-defined and repeatable group of activities that you can perform to reach a certain target like the number of deals closed, $ value generated, etc. It’s all fine and dandy as a sales manager when you’re all in the same location next to each other and you can rely on face to face interaction to take leads down the funnel and close deals. Say you read an article or watched a video that emphasizes a current trend in your industry or shares an especially important sales strategy.

Conduct Sales Presentations And Meetings, Right From Your Crm

A cadence helps create and maintain communication consistency across the team. It’s a set of common guidelines and expectations that everyone understands. During the 2008 economic crisis, firms which had a growth coefficient of above 1.0 showed a higher likelihood to emerge from the conditions stronger than competitors.

You might change the stage, probability, or value of an opportunity. This will result in a better overview and better revenue forecasts. Proposal solutions like Better Proposals take care of this for you. Almost none of them also send you live notifications of the tracking on your phone and/or computer. Use video calling over phone calling and always turn on your video, even if just for the beginning of the conversation .

Managing Your Remote Sales Team

Encourage your employees to become efficient during the working hours which would allow them to peacefully pursue other aspects of their lives during the remaining time. While working from home, the lines of logging in and out become blurred, employees no longer adhere to the concept of work timings and consequently augment their workday. Show your employees that you continue to be a Student of Sales yourself by posting your own efforts to stay updated in the field, be it through peer discussions, courses, books or articles. This invaluable osmosis of field knowledge can go missing when you take your team remote. To do that you need to possess an eternal learner’s mindset in order to stay ahead of the game.

Send A Monthly Recap With Sales Updates, Client Feedback, And Best Practices

Maximize your sales team quota as you have accelerated your remote selling plans. How to stay productive, how to engage your team to reach new activity levels, and how to crush quota. By encouraging collaboration and networking, you’ll help your employees build relationships, share Managing a Remote Team ideas, and stay connected. This will ultimately make your team more cohesive and effective. Additionally, you can create incentives for team members to collaborate. For example, you can offer bonuses or prizes for those sales reps who successfully collaborate on sales deals.

Don’t limit yourself to business, but also bring up personal interests of your prospect. Be yourself and a bit more informal than you’d be in a face-to-face meeting. It’s good to compensate a bit for the difficulties with creating a personal connection remotely. Much of what we’ll discuss in “How to sell remotely like a pro” is how to deal with this difficulty and make the best of it regardless.