This is How to Manage a Sales Team Remotely Post-COVID

Abe Dearmer

Jul 10, 2020

∙

8 min read

Sales

Nearly six in 10 Americans work from home, according to recent statistics. What started as an experiment for many companies during COVID-19 has become the norm for millions of workers. If you are managing a sales team from home, adjusting to this new way of life can take a while. That's because, as a sales manager, you are used to face-to-face meetings with sales representatives, clients, and business associates like account executives and other job types.

The process of remote sales has many benefits when done right. You can handle leads and close deals without traveling to clients or commuting to an office. You can also encourage your team to move prospects through sales funnels from the comfort of your own home and generate more revenue for your organization. Sure, you might experience challenges such as a lack of motivation or an ability to collaborate with co-workers in a physical location. However, the right tools and techniques can solve these issues! Learn how to manage a sales team remotely below.

1. Realize the Benefits of Remote Selling

Managing a remote team from home is completely different from managing your team in a physical office. However, several benefits outweigh the need to conduct face-to-face meetings with co-workers and prospects.

When learning how to manage a sales team remotely, think about the advantages of remote sales jobs:

Save Money

You'll save money when managing a remote team from home. You won't need to pay for office space and the daily costs associated with running that office, such as utility bills. Nor will you need to spend money on transportation, expensive lunches, and coffee from your local Starbucks!

Boost Efficiency

Managing your remote team from home can improve efficiency. You and your team members won't need to travel to meet clients in person, and you can spend that saved time on other sales tasks such as telemarketing, lead generation, cold calling, outbound calls, inbound calls, lead management, and improving sales experiences. You can also communicate with part-time and full-time team members via virtual meetings rather than organizing gatherings in the office. It doesn’t matter whether team members are in Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, or live abroad!

Improve Global Reach

When managing your team from home, enterprise sales operations are no longer constrained to one physical location. With the latest technology, you can target potential customers in other markets and countries and increase revenue and customer success in your organization. All you need is a good internet connection and a willingness to arrange virtual meetings in different time zones! You can improve global reach regardless of your niche. New technology helps you improve sales in healthcare, business development, retail, finance, life insurance, and other sectors.

2. How to Manage a Sales Team Remotely the Right Way

As a senior manager, you will need to oversee what everyone on your sales team is doing and check how leads in your pipelines perform. You can still achieve these objectives when managing your team from home, but you will need to set some general rules for day-to-day operations:

Set Realistic Expectations

When implementing a work-from-home model, your sales team might not perform their best at first. That's because they might need to learn new technologies and adapt their selling strategies to accommodate this new way of working. Set realistic expectations for team members that increase performance and fulfill sales objectives. You can change your expectations as team members become more confident working from home.

Also, create ground rules and processes that help employees excel when working remotely. For example, develop best practices for finding leads, managing call prospects, following up on calls, closing deals, and other day-to-day tasks. Also, take time to create detailed performance reports for every employee to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Encourage Communication

Just because everyone isn't working next to each other at the office doesn't mean sales reps can't communicate with each other. Create a schedule that allows remote sales representatives to communicate regularly via video conferencing technologies such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. That helps workers collaborate on projects, share selling strategies, and identify any pain points that exist in your work-from-home model.

Minimize Overlapping and Non-Sales Responsibilities

Delegate tasks in a way so there is minimum overlapping of work, meaning reps don't waste time by completing the same tasks as each other. Repetitive manual chores are another way reps waste time when working remotely, so invest in technologies that automate processes.

Use Collaborative Resources

Free cloud-based storage services such as Google Drive improve collaboration between team members and allow everyone to access and edit shared documents. Also, invest in online tools that make it easier for workers to send and receive important business files.

3. How to Manage a Sales Team Remotely: Training Team Members

Training is the only way to expand your sales operations and drive more revenue. Here is how to do it remotely:

Virtual Training

Add sales reps to your virtual meetings with important prospects and business associates and allow them to view sales presentations firsthand. Just as you would take a junior sales rep to a physical meeting, this virtual ride-along lets co-workers learn new skills in real-time, even though they aren't at the office.

Use Digital Leaderboards

Digital leaderboards can motivate fully remote workers to do better. These technologies can compile rankings of the highest-performing sales reps or the most lucrative deals, helping you identify employees that excel in your remote work environment. With team-wide metrics, you can measure each rep's performance and set goals for sales outcomes.

Webinars and eBooks

Remote employees can access webinars and eBooks regardless of location and develop new sales skills that benefit your organization. These resources educate multiple reps at the same time, saving you time and money. You can create a webinar or eBook about sales techniques, new product features, phone etiquette, and other topics.

4. Managing Customers Remotely

Staying in touch with your customers is critical for building long and trusting relationships. Whether you are nurturing a lead or following up with a customer post-purchase, you can continue to improve engagement and increase profits. Here are a couple of tips for managing customers from your remote location:

Decide How to Reach Out to Customers

Create a standardized process for communicating with customers. For example, you might want to reach out by email and follow up with a phone call. If you don't have a process and keep sending messages through multiple channels, the receiver will stop taking you seriously and eventually ignore your messages.

Organize All Communications in One Place

Make sure you have all your communications stored in one place. That helps you search for conversations with customers via email, social media, and text messages. Centralizing communications helps reps find information about customers without moving back and forth between different applications.

How FiveCRM Helps When Learning How to Manage a Sales Rep Remotely

As mentioned above, the right technologies help a salesperson work remotely. For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) system will allow you to manage customers, close sales deals, and move leads through pipelines. This software provides a holistic view of your sales, centralizes work projects, reduces manual tasks, and improves communication and collaboration wherever you are in the world.

FiveCRM is a CRM for remote teams that:

Improves sales efficiency for outbound efforts by managing callbacks, automating dialing sets, reducing call transition times, and streamlining workflows.
Lets you manage up to 99 separate databases with the possibility of unlimited data storage, helping you scale your business.
Generates more leads with specialized performance and marketing tools that track operational performance and capture more sales leads.
Manages leads with customizable lead scoring optimization tools, helping you focus on high-value leads in your sales cycles.
Collects and tracks real-time data about departmental performance. FiveCRM utilizes key metrics to boost sales growth.

Learn more about how to manage a sales team remotely with a FiveCRM demo. Contact hello@fivecrm.com! Or get FiveCRM now!

Michael King says...

"I can’t think of a time where a client has requested something that we weren’t able to do with FiveCRM. Unlike most systems, it has a lot of flexibility."

Managing Director, Senior Response

JANE HUSBANDS SAYS...

“Each client, and each of their campaigns, has its own unique specifications. We essentially needed to set up mini CRMs on one platform to meet those requirements.”