The global pandemic is real and devastating. It has turned companies to go remote overnight and because of this, the sales team lately has affected a lot. Your sales reps are not in office anymore but are scattered all over the world.
Let’s face it, managing a remote sales team is not easy. It involves planning, strategies, hyper-attention, motivation, and a lot more. Communication becomes difficult and misunderstandings arise.
Since this industry is dynamic, it does not stop. If you do not adapt and manage your sales team remotely, the competitors will take the advantage and that will hit your revenue.
Also, when you are remotely working, you are away from your team and might feel isolated. To overcome these issues, we will show you strategies for building a remote sales team that will help you communicate better, elevate your sales, close more deals, and crush your targets. All these without leaving your desk.
So let’s talk about these strategies in detail.
1. Scrum Calls
Daily scrum calls are one of the most important tasks that you need to add to your remote sales strategies, right away. Since the entire team is working independently, the scrum call acts as a communication channel for you.
Schedule the scrum calls as soon as every team member has logged in. Task discussions, sales strategies, daily signups, sales pipeline, report and analysis of past days, etc are some of the most important topics that are discussed on the scrum call.
This will help you see the current status and realize where the project is heading.
Since your colleagues are not working next to you, scrum calls will bring back the energy that you miss when you work on the floor.
Tools to use for scrum calls
There are many tools which can be used for scrum calls, here are few best tools which you can use
- Zoom
- Google Meet
- Microsoft Teams
2.Lay Down Your Targets
No goal can be accomplished without proper strategy and planning. You need to have a set of sales methodologies that you can implement. As a sales leader, you need to set clear expectations for your team so that everyone is on the same page. When you know your targets and you already have planning and strategies for it, nothing can stop you from achieving your goals.
Targets and expectations should be realistic and do-able. Consider the fact that how is the market serving for the service/product that you are selling. Once that is defined, prepare a roadmap for your team which will help them move towards the target.
Make a habit to measure your activities to know where you stand. Consider the following tasks on a daily basis.
- Calls dialed
- Emails sent
- Meetings scheduled
- Number of leads generated
- Deals closed
Share these to your teams and talk about it during your daily scrum calls and it will help you to take action for your end goal.
Pro Tip:
Create a sales leaderboard to motivate your employees to crush quotes as individuals and as a team both. You can also track performance across sales metrics and KPIs and then share them later.
3. Choose The Right Tools
Working with a remote sales team without the right tools is a nightmare. These tools will help you ease your work, increase productivity, and save time.
These remote sales teams have to keep records and track their sales activities. It will help them to analyze and scale their sales quotas higher.
Here are 5 ways in which the right tools will help your remote sales teams
- Improve communication
- Keep a record of your activities
- Automate your work
- Increase your productivity
- Save your time
4. Hire Experienced Sales Professionals
You want to have people who have worked for a couple of years in sales already.
These people come with experiences and strategies that have worked for them in their previous organizations. It will help you to scale and reach your target faster.
Also, when you hire experienced people, your sales onboarding time is reduced dramatically as they already know what they are doing. An experienced sales professional comes with strategies and out of the box ideas that will help in moving towards your faster.
As a leader, you should hire people whom you can trust and be transparent with them. It will help you to communicate easily and will motivate your team to work peacefully.
5. Reward Your Sales Team
Incentives and rewards act as a driving force for your sales team. Sales is a tedious and frustrating job. It is common to feel demotivated and lose interest in work because of monotonous daily activities.
But before rewarding your team, be very sure about your goals and the specific rewards that accompany the achievement of those goals. The rewards do not have to be in cash. It can be anything, like gifts, coupons, vouchers, etc.
Also, one of the reasons why sales reps look for a change is because they feel under-compensated. So when you have rewards and incentives your team will find a correlation between their increased effort and their compensation and recognition. With such solid rewards, your best sales reps will be compensated and they will stay with you for years.
6. Bring Home Your Office Culture
When you work remotely, you will miss the fun activities that your HR teams organize every month. These activities are very important as they help you Unplug or disconnect from your day to day life. Virtual team building efforts can be strategies, games and activities that bring more human interaction to virtual work. It helps your team connect with each other and make them feel like they are actually part of a community.
Make family members of your teams a part of your fun sessions. This will help unite your team and give a deeper sense of community. Virtual team building efforts also consist of strategies, games and activities that bring more human interaction to virtual work. It helps your team connect with each other and make them feel like they are actually part of a community So make a ritual and schedule such games and activities.
7. Review Meetings
Once a month or bi-weekly, take some time out and schedule a review meeting with your sales reps. Talk about how things are going on at their end. Listen to the problems that have and try to help resolve them
Might be possible that the targets assigned to the member may seem to be unachievable because of the sudden change in the market. So a transparent and open review meeting will help you understand the problems that your team faces.
8. Provide Assurance
One of the most important parts of the remote job is security. Because of the global pandemic and current situation that is seen around the world, it is possible that your team members feel insecure. Large organizations have laid off their employees and it is no brainer that your colleagues too feel the pain.
So as a leader, it is your responsibility to let your team members know the current situation. Make them feel important and assure them that their job is secured.
Looking at the current scenario in the world, this is one of the greatest motivations for any employee.
Well, we have talked enough about the strategies that will help in building the teams. But as we mentioned above, using the right tools is one important task.
So, Check Out These 5 Tools That Will Help Your Remote Sales Team
If you are into sales, you definitely need to have a CRM. It helps you to keep your leads, contacts activities, and tasks all in one place. With Hubspot, you can automate your follow-up emails and personalize/ tailor every message.
This tool helps to build real connections for sales professionals. It also offers advanced features such as lead generation and automated tasks.
Your sales records are a gold mine of data that you don’t want to miss out on. Convin uses conversation Intelligence technology that helps you with engaging conversations, behavioral dynamics, market Intelligence, and forecasting.
Widely used by sales reps, sales leaders, and managers is an important tool that should be on every sales team desktop.
Communication should be as transparent as it can be. And to make that way, slack is a must-have tool. While you are working remotely, there are high chances of misunderstandings and confusions. Use slack for hustle free chat and discussions.
When you were in office, your day to day task was assigned to you by the manager verbally or through email. But since that is not an option here, Basecamp comes to rescue. This amazing project management tool takes care of assigning tasks, has company-wide chats, creates To-Do lists, and many more.
Fuze is a widely used web conferencing tool. It Fuze helps in cloud communications and collaboration for enterprises. IT has a simple UX and enables a seamless transition between voice, video, messaging, and content sharing.
Conclusion
Working remotely is a challenge especially if you are into sales. But you have to adapt to it and act accordingly. With the right strategies for building a remote sales team, you can scale your business and crush your targets. A remote sales team will increase your sales presence in multiple countries. If the leaders have the vision to see the future, it will increase productivity and motivate the team to crush more deals and scale higher.
Using tools like Convin will help your sales team understand calls and close more deals, every single day.
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