After the Covid-19 vaccine, many businesses have transitioned to remote working to save costs on offices and also to provide staff members with a better work-life balance. Squaretalk shares that before Covid-19, only 5.4% of people worked remotely from home, whereas after Covid-19 in 2022, 56% of companies offer either fully remote working or hybrid working. This article will explore what you need to consider when managing a remote sales team, helping you win more sales and grow your business.
A remote sales team will be carrying out all of their sales activities at home. This means that your team will work from their homes, possibly saving your business costs such as renting an office for your staff to work at. A statistic shared by Sloovi shows that 46% of selling will be done virtually in the future, suggesting that the shift to remote working will continue.
If you have or are considering getting a home-working sales team, it is important to know all the benefits that your business will experience through this. The benefits are:
Improved productivity - View Sonic shares that with remote working, the productivity of staff increases through benefits such as more sleep, higher morale and a better work-life balance.
No rent costs – One of the biggest benefits of a remote working sales team is that a business will not have to pay rent for an office for its sales team. This will significantly reduce the operating costs of your business.
Reduced equipment costs – Equipment like work desks, ergonomic chairs, printers and more will not be necessary for a business that has a remote sales team. This helps a business save a lot of costs.
Access a wide talent pool – One of the biggest benefits of a remote working sales team is that you are able to hire people from different areas. The geographical location of your staff will no longer be a big factor when hiring a team member. Instead, purely the qualifications of the potential representative will be considered, and if he is the right fit for the business.
Fewer staff absences – With remote working, the number of staff absences will decrease as if someone is mildly sick, they will be much more likely to still work from home rather than have to commute to work. This helps a business stay at its best productivity level.
Despite the benefits of managing a remote sales team, a business can experience some challenges with management. These challenges include:
Lack of face-to-face supervision – Despite studies showing an increase in productivity with remote working, not every worker will have this improvement. Some workers may not work as hard due to a lack of face-to-face supervision.
Lack of communication – With remote sales teams, there is a risk that communication may be poor. If there is no structure in place, team members may not talk with each other often, leading to a poor disjointed work environment.
Social isolation – Working from home every day may cause some people to feel lonely because of social isolation. By not going into an office to see people in person and communicate with them, some people could experience low morale making it more difficult to manage the team from home.
The benefits that a remote sales team will bring your business will only occur if the sales team is managed effectively. This section will go through multiple steps you must take to effectively manage your sales team.
It is important for you to set up a structure for your remote team to work under. This structure should include what a team’s working hours are and whom to report to for updates and assistance. The working hours and work structure should be based on how you can best achieve your organisational goals. A study by Gartner shows that when employees are given more flexible working hours, there is an increase in productivity.
You must set clear expectations with your sales team of what they need to achieve when remotely working. Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team will have big benefits on their productivity. McKinsey & Company share that through the use of KPIs, employee engagement and satisfaction will both increase. This will also give your sales representatives a feeling of more responsibility to meet organisational goals, encouraging them to perform to their highest efficiency.
To make sure your remote sales team is all on the same page, and working towards your organisational goals, emphasis must be put on communication between team members and management. This will firstly keep the morale of your sales team high, as they will feel a part of a work family and feel added support and guidance with their tasks. Furthermore, any queries that team members may have can get solved quickly, helping keep your sales team complete tasks at a very efficient and productive pace.
Regular meetings either with the entire team or one-to-ones with sales representatives will them stay on track with their workflow and give them the support they need with any queries. Different communication software can help improve the connection your team members have with each other, such as Microsoft teams. This software makes communicating between team members streamlined and easy.
Finally, to keep your remote sales team performing at their highest productivity and efficiency, providing training is key. With a remote sales team, providing training through video webinars will be very beneficial, simultaneously training multiple people to get improved results with their productivity and efficiency.
Through these steps, your remote sales team will be able to perform at a very high level, creating a productive, efficient, and high-morale work environment. However, a business can also adopt software to help manage and streamline its remote sales team.
To keep your team’s morale and mood in a good place, you will want to schedule work-social events for everybody. These invents should be inclusive for all of your team members to take part in. You must base the socials on what best suits your team’s characteristics and personality traits. As a result, your team will have a chance to meet each other in person to increase their bond and keep the morale in your business high.
With adopting a sales automating CRM software, management of your remote sales team will be much easier, and your sales team will get a lot of benefits to increase their efficiency and productivity. This section will look at the benefits that CRM software will bring your remote sales team and management.
Firstly, sales automation CRM software will allow your business to automatically assign leads to team members based on the type of lead generated. This completely streamlines a task that would be usually done manually, helping organise your remote sales team’s workload without spending a lot of time and resources on it. Moreover, your sales team will experience big efficiency increases by getting leads automatically assigned as they are allowed to respond to the leads faster. This is very important for sales teams as the Harvard Business Review highlights that contacting a lead within the first hour means you are 7 times more likely to convert that lead.
CRM software improves data visibility across your entire business and allows management to easily monitor team members’ performance. You will be able to view how many deals each team member has won and lost, using filters to view the individual performance of each sales representative. This helps management see who is underperforming, and also rewards any representatives that are performing very well to increase the incentive for your sales representatives to win deals.
With some sales automation CRM software, you are able to assign team members tasks and approve any queries that team members may have through the software. This helps communication stay fast and consistent while the team is still remote, as this method of approvals and assigning tasks is much faster than doing it through email or in person.
It can be difficult to track communication in some cases with a remote sales team. However, CRM software solves this issue by being able to track team interactions of phone calls, tasks, and notes on clients. With this feature, remote sales teams’ activities and interactions can be monitored by management, helping the business stay organised and sales representatives to stay on track.
A cloud-based CRM will hold all of your data on the CRM provider’s servers rather than holding data on the traditional servers within an organisation. This means that your team can access the CRM data when needed from working at home or on the road, keeping your sales representatives always up to date on the latest customer information.
TEB is a sales automating CRM software that can help your business manage its remote sales team to perform at its highest efficiency. There are multiple unique features that TEB provides businesses to help them manage their sales team and perform at their most efficient and productive level. These features include:
If you would like to know more about how TEB can help your remote sales team become an unstoppable force, get in contact with us for a call.
