Equipping Your Sales Team to be Remotely Successful


By Steven K. Haught, MBA

I could not resist posting that title… “Remotely Successful” means being successful remotely!

Okay, now that you have decided to begin the process of reducing your operating costs, real estate footprint, and allowing teams to work remotely, its time to consider the practical necessities that must be implemented to ensure a successful transition from stationary office to working from home.

While I’m not personally predicting that the office will go away entirely or in-person sales presentations and meetings are now extinct, I do think it’s likely that more and more of your prospects and clients will still prefer to “meet” virtually when things reopen. It is most than likely to be the mode of doing business for the remainder of 2020.

Positioning your company to adapt to remote and regroup in pursuing its revenue streams, your sales team should be equipped with the following skills and assets:
  • Know how to write emails and texts that are clear, grammatically correct and professional. This may seem obvious, but your team should not decrease its professionalism in its communication just because it’s a text or email. In other words, if members of your sales team tend to spell “you” as “u” or historically are very vague or unclear through email or text, these patterns must be corrected quickly.  Build management approved templates to be used in communication with clients/prospects, allowing limited editing.  Require ALL outbound email communication to be approved by someone in marketing or general management prior to release.
  • Ensure they have the proper equipment to succeed online. If they’re using 10-year old headphones with unclear audio that cuts in and out, or a 5-year old computer which takes centuries to open a Zoom window, these need to be upgrade as soon as possible.
  • Ensure they have the right habits and tools in place to work from home. If multiple members of your sales team used to rely on others getting up and walking toward a physical meeting room to prompt themselves to join as well, they need to adjust accordingly. Meeting reminders, alarms, calendar events, and other tools can help them manage their commitments. They also should keep in mind that a messy, uncomfortable work area is likely to slow down their productivity. Your sales reps should have a dedicated space to work in and the right habits to thrive.
  • Be prepared to sell online. In other words, some sellers succeed because of the physical presence of their prospects. They’re better able to read body language, hear the tone of the prospect’s voice and generally are able to manage the conversation better in person. Your team must be able to deal with internet lag, unclear audio, a prospect who doesn’t want to go on video, and other elements which can make the selling process more challenging even frustrating. These things will improve with practice, and your team can even do virtual role-playing to help adapt their selling to today’s virtual climate.
The list goes on, and “virtual work” means different things to different organizations and comes with a different set of “skills” to succeed at different levels of performance expectations.

But, just like your physical workplace likely has standards on punctuality, communication, dress code, hygiene and other elements in place to ensure a smooth work day, your team needs to virtually be prepared with a set of standards to help them succeed with more and more virtual-type work.

What about technology?  The first thing that you need for a remote sales team is a tech stack that will properly enable, support, and generate success within your dispersed team. 

It’s common to take a walk through nearly any office and see a physical phone on every desk. However, those days are over. Dialer applications, whether it be an in-browser or a desktop application have completely replaced physical phones.

These applications, in conjunction with email, cloud-based document hosting, scheduling tools, communication platforms, and CRMs enable remote salespeople to access and utilize their entire tech-stack to the fullest extent notwithstanding any geographic long distance issues.

When launching a remote work program with your sales team, choose sales tools that are cloud-based and easily accessed from any laptop. That way, reps will be able to use all of your sales enablement applications regardless of where they are.

Fit the tools to your specific sales process.  Sales teams often make the mistake of acquiring new sales applications and then forcing their sales processes to work with them.

If your team is permanently or temporarily migrating to remote work, you should seek to maintain or improve your current processes. The change to a remote sales team will be significant and unfamiliar, but keeping processes similar to those in the office will maintain a comfortable level of familiarity, as well as provide an easier transition and a simpler path to success.

Define and set clear and visible expectations, goals, and responsibilities.  Working together in the same physical space produces a feeling of duty and responsibility. A move to a fragmented and singular environment can lead to neglecting responsibilities. Create a public central repository of sales activities, goals, and progress made so sales reps can remain accountable to themselves, their peers, and their team regardless of their location. 

Allow your remote sales team to access the dashboard from anywhere at any time so they can see where they stand against their objectives and in relation to their teammates.

Additionally, such a dashboard can serve as a point through which sales managers can monitor their team’s progress and ensure that goals are being met.

Create regular sales team meetings.   In the office, sales teams regularly interact with leaders, managers, other reps, support, operations, and other key players and teams that need to remain informed and engaged to ensure things run smoothly. To maintain the flow of information through other teams, as well as between your own reps, schedule regular meetings that are internal to your team, and include key individuals from other teams.

Use these meetings to review current initiatives, discuss issues, find resolutions, and plan the next steps. Also, use this time to disseminate information to those who need it. Once these meetings are scheduled, ensure everyone stays committed to them. 

Do not allow regularly scheduled meetings to be canceled, moved, or missed unless completely necessary or else the key communication that occurs within your team and to external parties will erode.

Make collaboration and communication simple.  One of the most difficult components of remote work, especially on a remote sales team is communication and collaboration. These two aspects are key to a high performing sales group, and must be maintained when the team is working in remote locales.

Ensure that your sales team has tools that enable simple and rapid communication through various channels, including chat, voice, and video. Project collaboration tools that allow sales reps to share documents and presentations are essential, as well as shared calendars.

Additionally, CRM data must be kept completely clean, accurate, and up-to-date to guarantee that every rep and management can easily find and reference the information that they need.

Once you’ve struck a healthy balance transitioning from the fixed office to remote and found trustworthy sales reps that are able to take care of things on their own, you’ll have built a team that can thrive as well as survive in an uncertain age.

One tip you’ll hear from many business insiders who have succeeded establishing remote sales teams is to let your workers find a schedule that works for them. Management must set expectations, but give them enough freedom to feel comfortable in their new remote sales job.
________________________________________________
ENCORE! 2.5 can help your organization prepare the 
Sales Team to make a smooth transition to working remotely.  

GET IN TOUCH…
Questions? Call 267.356.1949 to speak to the ENCORE! 2.5 Solutions 
Founder/President or email — encore2pt5@gmail.com
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