How to Manage a Remote Sales Team Successfully? Tips & Tools

Does your sales team spend at least 50% of each day on internal team Zoom calls rather than prospecting?

Or are negotiations failing because no one is sure who is responsible for following up?

Are team members losing their motivation and feeling burned out?

Let's face it: managing a remote sales staff may be difficult. As a manager, you have less access to your staff, less one-on-one time with them, and less influence over the procedures and sales engagement workflows they follow.

Many sales teams were introduced to the remote workforce for the first time with COVID-19. They first ran mostly on adrenaline and novelty, adapting their in-person management techniques as best they could.

On adrenaline alone, though, you cannot manage a productive remote sales staff.

What is remote selling?

Remote selling involves finding opportunities and closing deals without needing to meet in person. The majority of remote sales professionals close deals over the phone, over email, using Zoom, and other online meeting tools. 

You can now sell anywhere in the world by becoming remote.

You may now hire the top salespeople from anywhere in the world by going remote. Your budget and time zone may be the only restrictions. 

What is a remote sales team?

A group of salespeople who exclusively operate remotely is known as a remote sales team. Because of this, each sales representative works from their preferred location rather than a shared office space. Your sales representatives might have offices anywhere in the world.

A hybrid team, in which each employee can choose to work remotely or in-person at a physical office location, is different from a virtual sales team. Remote sales teams are unable to conduct in-person meetings.

The epidemic accelerated many teams' shift from in-person to remote work, but it appears that remote sales is here to stay and will work wonderfully for different types of sales.

Few useful tips to manage your remote sales team successfully

The main issue of managing a virtual sales force is keeping your management process running, even though setting it up is crucial. 

The fundamental components of the job description and sales engagement activities still hold true, but when issues arise, it's not always as straightforward to get up from your desk and go down the hall to speak with someone in person for clarity. 

Here are some tips for increasing your visibility as a remote sales manager and inspiring your team to continue selling.

Setting clear expectations for your sales team

Encourage salespeople to perform at a better level by setting higher expectations.

Your remote sales staff will have a standard to uphold if you set clear expectations for them. The benchmark should include time-saving advice, particular online procedures for interacting with leads, and sales objectives.

Of course, quota goals for sales are still crucial, but remote sales teams can also set objectives that will help them achieve their quota by completing activities that result in closed transactions.

Work backward in your sales process to match your goals to quota: How many closed agreements must be made by each rep in order to reach quota? How many meetings result in signed contracts? How many cold calls should sales representatives make before setting up a meeting? After determining this, you may assign each rep a target number of cold calls per day or per week.

Create a sales leaderboard to keep track of these crucial actions, to boost your sales process, and watch as salespeople engage in healthy competition while accomplishing crucial sales tasks.

Focus on prioritizing communication, transparency and trust

Regardless of whether we're talking about team meetings or sales calls, trust and transparency go hand in hand.

It's critical for them to have a transparent understanding of what is occurring in sales and with the firm in real-time if you want your remote sales agents to trust you as their boss and the company overall.

The majority of their team members' work schedules should overlap with that of the sales managers. Try to create overlapping hours for part of the day if your sales force is dispersed across different time zones and sales regions. In this approach, team members can communicate online at any time to discuss crucial information if any problems or queries come up regarding simplifying your sales process.

You develop trust by attending to the requirements of your staff. Though it may seem more difficult to monitor their progress afar, it's crucial to avoid micromanaging. To make it easy, you can use PSA software aka professional services automation system. Using that, you can streamline the process of managing your remote sales team with efficient task management and remote oversight.

Set measurable goals and track sales KPIs

Do your salespeople fully understand the performance indicators that will be used to evaluate them? 

If not, the time has come to be very clear about the metrics and KPIs your team needs to be tracking.

Following are some sales KPIs you should monitor you can add or delete from the list as per your business needs. 

Sales activities per rep

This shows you how active each rep is and which activities are more successful for them.

Pipeline conversion rates

You can analyze your sales pipeline stages and determine whether it is healthy by keeping track of this. Any changes to these figures serve as a warning sign that your approach may be flawed.

Sales by contact method

You can decide which team-building events are most helpful by learning how your prospects prefer to be approached.

Average conversion time

You can test to enhance this statistic or identify issues in your process before they actually cause the sales cycle to slow down by keeping track of how long it takes from the point of contact to closing the purchase.

Sales by lead source

You can instruct your team to concentrate their efforts on a particular lead generation strategy if you observe a higher percentage of sales coming from a specific lead source.

These are just a handful of the KPIs that your remote sales staff may be tracking. Set up tracking so you can monitor your procedure and your salespeople, even from a distance, and identify the indicators that have the biggest influence on achieving sales goals and impacting your bottom line.

Focus to enhance remote-specific sales enablement strategies

Making sure your staff has the resources and tools they require to succeed is a crucial component of effective management. Make sure your sales enablement strategy is in place right away.

You can encourage sales enablement for your remote sales staff in the following ways:

Optimize sales content

Make sure your representatives have access to the data they require at the appropriate time. This frequently entails creating a distinct electronic asset management system for virtual teams.

Use videos to train your sales rep

A rep can share their screen with you during a video conference in order to rapidly get an answer to their query or pick up a new skill, even though they can't just walk up to your desk with their laptop to ask for assistance with a CRM - the savior of your organization.

Zixflow is a one-stop shop that motivates your sales representatives to learn remotely while also having fun. This feature encourages learning and allows your sales representative to improve their sales skills while relaxing at their own home.

Refining the sales process

To make sure there isn't any needless friction for your reps, review your current sales process. Periodically going through the procedures a rep took to complete a recent deal and working with them to find areas of simplification are valuable.

Regular 1:1 meetings with your sales team

Regular 1:1 sales meetings with each of your agents ought to be a regular part of your routine, not just a contingency plan you use when something goes wrong.

Pick a day and time of the week that works for your salespeople after discussing it with them. Then, add this to your calendar as a regular event. 

If the representative is on a call or has another urgent business, you can leave the door open to adjust this meeting using Google Calendar and grant invitees access to do so.

Regular face time with each team member enables you to monitor both their work and to keep your sales team motivated and inspired. Make detailed schedules that you and the representative can both add to or modify, but also provide time for casual conversation. 

These meetings can help you establish trust with your team, monitor the state of their working environment, and determine when it might be appropriate for you to step in and provide assistance.

Celebrate each win with your sales team

It's difficult to ignore the mini-celebrations that occur after a deal closes or a quota is met if you've ever worked in sales in an office. 

But that doesn't imply that the celebrations have to stop just because you're in charge of a remote sales team.

There are a lot of ways to recognize your team's achievements in a remote situation, even though it's not quite the same.

Even when working remotely, your team will remain engaged and bonded by celebrating milestones and goal accomplishments.

Avoid micromanaging by building an atmosphere of accountability

Creating an environment of accountability within your team is one of the best strategies to avoid falling into the trap of micromanaging your remote sales staff. Sales representatives are encouraged to continue working in this environment because they feel personally responsible for the outcomes.

Here are some suggestions for doing it:

Ask your reps to create agendas for 1:1s

Or, at the very least, encourage them to add things to the list of topics for discussion.

Encourage reps to use new processes and methods

Request suggestions and ideas from your team, then ask them to test their own ideas.

Make the sales rep take responsibility for their own performance

When you define performance objectives, assign accountability to each rep for monitoring and modifying their own sales engagement process.

Create a safe environment to ask for help

No one has all the solutions. Make sure your reps are at ease enough to ask for help from the team. You could, for instance, set up a particular channel in Slack where sales agents may ask questions about deals in their pipeline and receive comments and guidance from you or other members of the sales team.

Encourage each rep to find their suitable WFH timing at home

Allow each rep to be responsible for their own WFH schedule because everyone has different personal circumstances. Allow for flexibility whenever possible so that each person may balance their job and family responsibilities.

Use the right tools to manage your remote sales team

Are members of your sales team considering or currently working remotely? 

Although managing a remote sales staff can be difficult, it can save money and produce even more notable results. The proper sales engagement tools must be provided to your remote sales crew.

Here is a list of tools to keep your crew well-prepared wherever they are:

Slack

A well-liked tool for team communication is Slack. Slack is preferred by managers as it offers the ability to manage numerous teams' conversations through a single interface. One communication channel for all of your remote sales personnel will streamline information sharing and task monitoring.

Dropbox

We've all faced situations where we were unable to locate particular documents. Your team can share and keep all the crucial files in one location thanks to Dropbox. Any authorized employee from your remote sales team has access to documents from anywhere, at any time.

Google drive

One of the most often used options for file storage is Google Drive. Organize and distribute to your group and partners. Set permissions, color-code files, or add comments to each one you've given access to are just a few of the tool's useful file organization capabilities.

Google chats

Sales teams can schedule video conferences with specific URLs and invite participants using Google Hangouts in order to understand and discuss  sales engagement practices. Use Google Chats for your sales teams' and video conferencing needs if you currently use Google products like Calendar and Gmail. It will increase the productivity of any team with its numerous automatic functions.

Google calendar

Utilize Google Calendar, one of the best meeting scheduling tools, to plan your day. You can share one calendar or more with your team members and leads using the service. As Google Calendar interfaces with a variety of applications frequently used by remote sales teams, it becomes incredibly useful. From a smartphone, set up alerts and reminders and access the calendar.

Trello

One of the all-time favorites for managing teams is Trello. For remote sales teams, Trello is one of best project management software. On a single platform, create boards, assign tasks, and track progress. Trello is also an effective alternative for Airtable users.

Zixflow

By using a comprehensive sales operating system (OS), like Zixflow, leads may be converted across many channels by performing multichannel sales engagement campaigns.

The capabilities offered by Zixflow are the most practical for your business's sales workflows. You have the option of starting from scratch or using an existing template to implement sales automation.

Do you forget to follow-up with your prospects?

Do not worry!

By automating your sales cadence up to 100% across numerous platforms including email, sms, and WhatsApp with different tasks to be given such as call, meeting, and proposal, Zixflow takes care of it, immediately relieving your salesperson of a lot of work.

Are you ready to manage your remote sales team successfully?

Although it is difficult, it is possible to motivate and manage a remote sales crew. Actually, a lot of remote sales teams are just as successful as internal teams; it all depends on how you handle your reps.

Any type of organization shouldn't have any trouble putting up a fully-functional remote sales staff with the technology available today. And management shouldn't be challenging either if you have the correct plan in place.

Why should you wait?

Try out Zixflow for free and give your remote sales staff the tools they need to be successful.