This year has been challenging for many business owners. Some to close shop, while others were forced to adopt a remote work setup.
Nonetheless, consider yourself lucky if you are one of the latter.
But we understand how challenging it is to manage a remote team, especially if you are responsible for generating sales for your company.
In this post, we will share with you seven powerful strategies to successfully manage your remote sales team:
Set Clear Expectations and Goals
You can’t expect your remote sales team to succeed in their work if you don’t set clear expectations and goals for them from the get-go.
You have to make it clear to your team what it is they’re working towards. After all, they also have expectations that they have on themselves that they want to fulfill.
That’s why you have to meet your sales team for goal-setting and remind them of your expectations. Sometimes, their work’s hustle and bustle can get to them, and they might forget what exactly their goals are.
When you have clear goals, it’s a lot easier to remind them what they should focus on more.
Manage Sales and Activities
It’s not a good idea to micromanage every step that your sales team members take because it slows down the entire process. You have to trust in your team enough to know that they’ll be able to do an excellent job in their work.
If you don’t trust them, that might indicate that you didn’t train them well enough.
Although self-reliance is something to expect from your sales team, it doesn’t mean that you have to leave them by themselves too. You still need to manage the sales and activities to ensure that everything is right on track.
Your remote sales team must learn to manage your sales and activities since you won’t have an easier time connecting to them.
Encourage Engagement and Build Trust
Since your remote sales team isn’t going to be in the office, you need to rely on them to ensure that you get the results you want. That’s why you must build a sense of trust and engage with your sales team often.
However, do not overdo it. That’s because employee engagement also carves out precious time, which they could have spent on getting things done.
Weekly catch-ups are a happy in-between of calling often enough to have an accurate idea of how they’re doing without being too needy.
You can also do catch-ups that aren’t calls or meetings by having a messaging app that you and your team use to update one another.
Equip Them With the Right Software
Gone are the days when your salespeople have to endure more manual work to fulfill their sales jobs. Even the sales industry has adopted technology into its arsenal to create better results in a more optimized method.
If you still haven’t done so, it’s time to get your sales team the right software to make their work easier.
You shouldn’t get just any old software that you see out there. You have to do your research on your team’s needs and which features are most important to you.
There are many choices available out there that could help you. One great example would be a sales enablement tool, which can help improve how your sales team works, even when they’re outside of the office. It will help your sales team manage every facet of customer relationship management.
If you want your sales team to get the best chances of success, equip them with the right software.
Encourage Set Hours To Reduce Burnout
It’s much harder to set a rigid boundary between your work time and your time for yourself when you’re remote working.
The flexibility that comes with remote work applies to both sides in that it can lead to longer working hours. You don’t want that for your sales team, so make sure that you tell your team to disconnect after work hours.
That way, they’ll make the time they have connected to work count more, and they won’t get burnt out from work.
Implement a Clear and Simple Process
Since you can’t directly observe what your remote sales team is doing, you have to create clear and simple processes that you expect of them. It’s a part of setting goals and expectations.
Having clear and straightforward processes makes it easy for your team to do their tasks. This means that managing them would be light and breezy.
It can take a while to nail down the process and simplify it, but once you do, you’ll find work going a lot smoother after that.
Build a Healthy Team Relationship
When you have a healthy relationship with your sales team, it becomes a lot easier to trust them to do a good job. At the same time, they’ll be more transparent with you regarding their concerns over their work. It’s a win-win situation.
As a manager, you shouldn’t think of yourself above your team. That’s when you lose the chance to build a mutually positive relationship. When you have that healthy team relationship, you’ll find that even the most challenging hurdles become a lot easier to tackle.
Managing a remote sales team is not an easy feat. But it does not have to be complicated, either. All you need is to have ingenuity and coordination with the help of the strategies listed above. That way, your sales team can function like a well-oiled machine even while working from home.
