Since the start of the Covid19 pandemic, a majority of workers have moved to remote work. This has equally impacted sales teams in both positive as well as negative ways. On one side, the workforce is able to save more time for families which was earlier spent on travel. At the same time, organizations feel they miss the benefits of working with a co-located team such as more collaboration, more knowledge sharing, healthy competition as well as team relationships.
Moreover, sales teams tend to be more impacted with this since a majority of sales used to be face-to-face sales and while working with co-workers, they used to get trained on various sales techniques while watching their peers do the same.
Like it or not, Industry analysts predict that remote work culture is here to stay for longer than we would have imagined. In this post, let us explore the ways you can manage your remote sales teams better.
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1. Well Defined Sales Process
When the sales teams are co-located, teams can easily align themselves with the process their peers follow for sales. But when it comes to remote teams, salespeople rarely get to watch their peers throughout the day to learn the best practices. As a sales manager, the best you can do is to define a well structured sales process for your team so that team can follow them as a guidebook. This way you can avoid unnecessary experimentations by every team member to reinvent the same wheel.
2. Make SMART goals specific to remote selling context
Remote selling differs from the way sales happen in co-located teams or face to face selling. So you may be required to redefine your sales goals for remote sales context by assessing your past sales data. Try to make SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals for your team as per the remote sales context. This will ensure the team can quickly align themselves on the same.
3. Make team aware of goals and commitments
Remote teams get very less chance to meet the sales leaders of the organization. This may bring in the risk of working in silos where the team is not having a clear and common understanding of the organizational goals and commitments. It is the duty of the sales leaders to constantly communicate their business objectives, short term and long term goals. Keeping everyone on the same page and reinforcing it with constant communication helps everyone aligned to common goals and timelines.
4. Invest in remote tools for effective sales and team collaboration
While working remotely, a team may require a set of tools which can help them collaborate in real time as well as engage in remote sales. Some of the tools may include online messenger for your organization, VoIP telephony, video meeting tools like Zoom, Google Meet, etc.
In addition to these, the sales team shall require a CRM software so that the team can collaborate together on multiple leads, deals, sales tasks, etc. If you are yet to adopt a CRM software for your business, feel free to check out our cloud based CRM software which is built for startups and small businesses.
5. Monitor sales reports & metrics
In order to gauge the performance of your team, it is necessary to regularly track your sales reports and metrics. This helps you step in at the right time and help out your team members exactly at the time when they need some help closing a deal.
You can track the same via an excel sheet or if you have a notable team size, it is recommended to use a cloud CRM which can generate real time reports for you without you having to manually extract data, clean it up and create dashboards in excel sheets over and over again.
6. Organize remote social gatherings for team building and connect
The real missing element in remote teams is the social connect and the relationship which they have with their peers. Organizing online social gatherings periodically helps build the connection and relationship among the co-workers. Nobody likes to be working in a factory around machines. They like it when they find humans with whom they connect, share and learn from them.
7. Take every opportunity to celebrate, appreciate and motivate
To keep up the momentum, you should make use of every opportunity to celebrate small milestones, appreciate the performers to drive innovation as well as motivate your team to keep up the same momentum. Sales is largely motivation driven. Do every bit to keep the team’s motivation level high.
8. Train, Give feedback and Mentor
During the course, many new members shall join the team who may be new to your way of working. Support them with good training, give constant feedback and mentor them towards success. This way you shall build a successful team work culture for long term growth and success.
By the way if you are yet to try our CRM software, feel free to try out
ToolsonCloud Sales CRM, It’s Free.
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