4 must-know strategies for building a killer remote sales team
You want your sales team to dominate their quotas and close deals. But there's a challenge: due to the COVID-19 crisis, all of a sudden your all-star sales team is now working and selling remotely from home. Now what?
And to be frank: for a first time manager, making remote sales work is not a walk in the park.
As of 2019, the amount of companies with a remote workforce is getting larger. 66% of companies allow remote work, and 16% are fully remote.
At Close, not only do we run a 100% remote sales team and have seen first-hand the value of a remote sales team but also understand the challenges that come with it.
Making use of a remote sales workforce requires lots of planning and thought, while putting your team and company in the best position to be successful. And in light of current events, companies are forced to make the transition a lot quicker than usual.
Many businesses can fall into challenges when they attempt to incorporate a remote workforce. Other companies can maintain their remote team, but they struggle to get them to thrive. In this post, our goal is to help you uncover the ways in which you can overcome these challenges and avoid the struggle.
With having a remote sales team, comes the issue of having control.
You can’t just walk over to somebody’s desk to find out what’s happening with a coworker’s work.
So, how do you build a killer remote team? Here are four must-know strategies for building a killer remote sales team.
Set clear expectations
People can learn a lot from context.
As a sales leader, you need to be explicit about what the remote worker must bring forward. The parameters, details, and details of each task must be clear enough that everybody knows what needs to happen.
When your sales team knows what is expected from them, they are more likely to deliver. And agreeing on specific goals gives you a framework for assessing their performance.
A poll of German workers found that when managers set expectations, held employees accountable for meeting them, and responded quickly when team members needed help, the workers took more initiative and had better performance.
Expectations should be set by sales management about sales quotas and processes. You need to keep track and monitor your internal sales goals. As a sales leader, you need to use a sales leaderboard to have an understanding of the activity going on and if expectations are being met.
Without clear expectations, things can get complicated. There is no easy way to measure success and evaluate team performance, without agreed upon standards.
Hire experienced sales professionals
You want to hire people that have had a year or more in sales. These people have a strong understanding of what makes a good sales professional.
These people are more mature, have a strong track record of being disciplined and are very consistent with their work.
You want to hire salespeople who view themself as a go-getter. They will be dominating prospecting, following up, solving problems and thinking outside the box to get the deal closed.
When you have a more experienced sales rep, you don’t need to stress about a long onboarding process. With an experienced individual, they will most likely need to be trained on your sales processes, CRM and be told what is expected of them.
Companies that hire experienced sales reps will most likely reap big benefits and have lots of success.
Promote employee engagement
It can be common for remote sales workers to feel less engaged and disconnected from your company since they are not in a traditional office or with a group of colleagues. This can harm their morale and productivity. And believe me, morale is crucial for keeping your team functioning through the COVID-19 epidemic.
You might want to consider implementing a Slack channel for your sales team. This tactic will minimize the idea of having a “gong bell” in the office that would get banged when a deal is closed. Instead, the Slack channel would put a notification in the channel every time a sale is made.
Congratulate each other across the sales team on Slack. Consider sharing insight behind the sale, such as sharing any challenges or lessons learned, so your colleagues can learn from it. Additionally, using GIFs in the channel is another way to keep people engaged and having further conversations.
Consider encouraging pods. This involves two sales leaders working together (the best and worst of the team) to try to reach their quota. The pod with the best result gets an incentive. With this, it can help encourage more engagement across the sales team.
When your remote team cares about what they do, they are likely to provide excellent work because they are happy and engaged.
Companies have an opportunity to boost their employees’ experience into one that allows them to feel engaged.
Provide the right tools
To make it easier for their remote employees to have a flexible and stress-free environment, businesses are incorporating tools to help replace the office touch with technology.
Sales leaders need to equip remote sales teams with the tools necessary to help them be successful.
Having a CRM is critical for sales teams to follow up with leads and for leaders to track their progress. A CRM allows remote teams to update it with prospects, leads, and existing clients as often as needed.
Mastering remote work is all about finding more than a CRM to stay on top of your work and connected.
You want to familiarize yourself with a set of tools your team can use to help become more productive and accomplish their work on time. These tools cover all the bases a remote team needs. From remote chat to project management to video conferencing to cloud storage, there are so many options out there.
Many of these tools are essential to good remote work. They can make your work more transparent and available to your remote team at any time.
Finishing Up
Managing a remote sales team is not easy, but there are many ways to have an environment that allows you to have a killer remote sales team.
Leaders that make the extra effort will see the benefits of a remote sales team that boosts productivity and close more deals.
A remote sales team gives you the advantage of having a sales presence in many places. And if you do things right, it’s not too hard to see the success.
If you’re thinking about building a remote sales team or shifting your current team to a remote one, these four strategies are just what you need to get started.
Want more tips on building a killer sales team?
Download a free copy of The Sales Hiring Playbook, where you will receive the best advice on hiring and managing sales reps and check out our guide on remote sales.
