How to build and manage remote sales team

With the outbreak of COVID-19, the majority of businesses nowadays are required to adopt a remote work setup to continue thriving. However, it can somewhat be a challenge to traditional salespeople who are accustomed to in-person sales because there are multiple online channels, tools, and software involved in remotely pitching an important sale.

Remote selling can be intimidating, but when done right, you can do everything (and more) without ever leaving your desk--fill your sales pipeline, improve the productivity of your team, and upgrade your selling process all within the comforts of your own home.

Read along and we’ll explain how you can build and manage your own remote sales team. You might even be surprised at how remote selling can aid you in improving your internal communication as a team. 

Advantages of a Remote Sales Team

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a new era for remote sales. The struggle of businesses to keep afloat during these uncertain times pushed them to maximize remote work. With that, they optimized platforms and tools to ensure a seamless and easy way to relay messages both to their clients and team members

With remote selling, there’s no need to travel. Moreover, coordination is a bit easier through readily available communication tools where you can easily share your screen with a client for viewing or record calls to refer back to future transactions. And best of all, you can meet as many people as possible without hopping onto a plane. You can cut down on office rental and other non-sales related expenses while increasing your work efficiency and optimizing your current tools.

Tips on How to Hire Remote Sales Representatives

Use these unique challenges brought forth by the current pandemic and remote work to your team’s advantages by keeping these following tips in mind when hiring remote sales representatives:

1. Hire Experienced Sales People

You may want to employ salespeople who are generally more experienced in the field, typically those who have had more than a year in sales. These people have a keen perception of what makes a good sales professional. They are known to be consistent with giving exemplary results and are more mature in handling more delicate sales matters and closing deals.  

Having more experienced sales representatives means that you could cut down your training time. They will still need to be trained on your company’s sales and CRM processes, but having some experience and background knowledge ensures that you can actually trust them to handle different sales situations and commit less mistakes. 

2. Hire People Who Thrive in Remote Environments

Even before the pandemic, many industries are already imposing key competencies that suit a remote work setup. Such competencies include independence, proactivity, and communication.

As a company operating in a remote sales environment, you’d want people who would attempt to fill in the inevitable information gap as much as possible and someone who can work by themselves without much supervision--cutting time spending endless back-and-forths. 

Additionally, it would be wise to hire someone who is proactive in creating initiatives that make work easier and more convenient. People who thrive in remote environments are usually good communicators as well. They can pitch and close a deal in the most concise yet complete manner.

3. Hire for Culture Fit

When hiring new talents for your sales team, it is best to consider those who are culturally fit for your company. As early as possible, try to involve team members in the interview and assessment process of new candidates.

Opt for someone who has their set of virtues in-line with your company’s. While this may be a little more challenging to assess from the get-go, you can use automated culture-fit assessment tests (such as Snaphunt’s SNAPYSCH Psychometric Assessment) that will measure a candidate’s culture preferences empirically.  This is a set of non-biased personality questions to determine if a candidate’s values are aligned with your company’s.

Tips for Managing Remote Sales Team for High Performance

Once you’ve built your powerhouse sales team, here are a few tips to bear in mind in managing it for the long run:

Set Clear Goals and Expectations

A recent article shows that 38% of employees feel more driven to improve their work performance when sales leaders set clear, attainable priorities for their team. This is especially important for a remote team which doesn’t require much supervision.

When you set up metrics and numbers, sales objectives and comprehensible expectations, your team will more likely be encouraged to become more driven to their work--even autonomously. This serves as a way to motivate and empower your sales team to align their individual targets with the company’s goals. Consequently, translate these metrics into easy-to-understand and concise procedures (like cold-calling, lead generation, etc.). By standardizing and streamlining the sales workflow, you can minimize errors. 

Furthermore, optimizing your CRM and communication tools will allow your team to troubleshoot problems and course-correct rapidly.

Invest in Onboarding and Training

Employees who are already experienced in sales are still urged to undergo some form of training so as to familiarize new hires on how you manage your sales process especially since it is even more challenging in remote setups.

Affirming your new hires’ long-term goals and aspirations career-wise, even amidst a remote work basis, becomes the foundation for their trust – which culminates from early-on traineeship.

Building trust can be more challenging in this setup. But keep in mind that encouraging social interactions and building rapport among your new hires and team establishes a level of comfort and ease for communication and rapid exchange of essential information. A successful sales team works together and puts trust at the center of effective collaboration. 

Celebrate Your Wins – Whether it be Big or Small

No matter how small or big your accomplishments may be, your team deserves to be gratified for their effort. Big or small, a win is a win. Let them celebrate it and exchange pleasantries and rewards even autonomously – this positive reinforcement provides encouragement and drives them to work even harder.

Remote sales teams have their fair share of challenges brought by working autonomously, but just like any other problem, these can be easily resolved through tools, implemented systems and logistics. Just bear these tips in mind in creating and managing your new team in the future and you’re good to go!