Powerful Strategies to Boost your Remote Sales Team’s Performance
The events of the earlier months of 2020 have significantly impacted the way companies function. The economy has taken a hard hit and most organizations have adopted remote working practices at a rapid speed to keep themselves from suffering major losses at the hands of the pandemic.
According to a report by Forrester, in the US, sales are expected to drop by $321 billion this year due to the economic downturn, that’s a 9.1% drop from 2019. To stay competitive and ahead of the race, every organization needs to figure out how to keep remote working employees engaged and focused toward their end goal at all times.
Here are powerful strategies on how you can boost the performance of your remote sales team.
1) Leverage Tools and Automation wherever possible
With so much time being spent on the administrative side, there’s a striking need for tools that can help automate some of these repetitive, unproductive tasks. This can help your reps concentrate on the more important tasks. Afterall, ameliorating sales productivity becomes more effortless when you can put things on the “auto-pilot” mode.
An efficient CRM can considerably boost your remote sales team’s performance.
Tools that provide you an overview of all sales activities at a glance help you stay on top of everything. Take note of important features such as automatically organized and embedded calls, emails, voicemails, tasks, and reminders. It allows your team to keep track of what’s going on and what they should be doing next. Every member on your team has complete access to everything that is going on in the sales process. This allows better coordination and increased productivity especially with a distributed workforce.
According to recent sales statistics, around 71% sales reps said that most of their productive time gets wasted while doing manual data entry.
Automation can greatly help your remote sales team by freeing up their additional effort and time that they would have otherwise spent feeding the data manually into the system. This, in turn, helps you scale your sales team effectively and decide upon where the effort needs to be diverted for better results.
For instance, automated phone sales software can drop prerecorded messages when appropriate, dial phone numbers, and keep track of every little detail of your company’s phone activity. Reducing manual dialing can significantly increase your reps’ productivity.
Both your remote sales team and customers automatically get exposed to enhanced follow-ups and communication with sales automation tools. You can get rid of wasted time spent on trial and error and make sure your customers see what they need to see when they need to see it with automation.
2) Streamline information sharing within your remote sales team
Overcommunicating is better in a remote work setting. Touch-base calls during the day, or atleast week, are important when setting up workweek priorities with your remotely working team. Nothing can match a virtual face-to-face meet or a good old fashioned phone call when it comes to setting up a week of productivity.
Scheduling regular communication at frequent intervals sets expectations and gives your remote workers tangible deadlines and goals. It also gives you a clear idea of the problems they might be facing and decide deadlines accordingly. An atmosphere of trust and check-ins through means of an employee monitoring software can boost the effectiveness of teams working remotely.
If your clients and employees are in different time zones, you might have to be creative with the meeting timings, but the results are going to be completely worth the effort you put in when it comes to staying connected.
3) Simplify your processes by making use of templates
Sales teams must present a unique sales experience before the customer that leaves them feeling appreciated and valued during every interaction. Templates make this task easier and much more scalable.
By making use of a prefabricated template, you will have saved ample valuable time for your team that can be utilized elsewhere to boost their performance. Today, you can easily create templates for absolutely any sales-related task. You can create templates for business strategies or something as easy as drafting emails. Certain templates even come with features that enable them to pop-up during video calls and other modes of client interactions for specialized sales pitching.
These templates don’t necessarily have to be fancy. They must, however, contain all the considerations that need to be taken care of by your sales team while carrying out different processes. Legal templates also include necessary terms of agreement when sealing deals with clients.
4) Let your team explore what makes them most productive while working remotely
Spending some time thinking about what your remote working employees truly need during these extremely testing times can take your business a really long way. It isn’t always a good idea to get your team working from a fixed 9a-5p EST, Monday through Friday. You can be creative with your employees’ productivity in more than one way.
Allowing flexible work hours and letting your team decide on their shift timings can be an exceptional incentive for employees who like to let their creative juices flow during uncommon hours. Allowing your employees to work when they are the most effective is one of the best productivity hacks, especially when we’re talking about remote work strategies.
Remote workplaces are in a unique position to allow employees to get work done at random hours; practicing the same for your team can have a large impact on efficiency, productivity, and overall remote workplace happiness.
5) Conduct Team-Building Activities for your Remote Sales Team
Lastly, you need to strengthen your remotely working sales team by investing in exciting and fun-filled activities. Encourage camaraderie and friendly competition. You can easily do this in a number of ways, one being using a newsletter to ask weekly questions and assign quizzes.
Also, team-wide adventures like an online storytelling workshop for remote teams, are sure-fire ways to strengthen all aspects of your sales team. Through these methods, your team will get to learn new techniques and tips for telling engaging stories that appeal to your target audience.
Sales leaderboards are one of the most efficient ways to get your sales team members aligned and keep them motivated. They encourage healthy competition and improve engagement.
Sales leaders must at all times remember that their true strength lies within their remote sales team’s overall performance. To achieve maximum productivity out of each of your team members, you constantly need to innovate and create strategies that will keep them motivated and from killing time.
Closing words
The world of sales is witnessing an unprecedented transformation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With sales teams being forced to work remotely, sales managers have to keep up with the changing times in order to keep the morale high and the sales soaring. Technology and innovation need to work together to ensure that your remote sales team stay productive and keep your sales graph growing even during these challenging times.
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