Managing a remote sales team used to be a situation faced only by sales leaders at large multinational corporations. All that changed with the availability of high-speed internet, improvements in video conferencing, and the pandemic.
Today, many sales leaders manage geographically dispersed teams. While virtual or hybrid work can offer flexibility and employee satisfaction, managing a distributed team can be difficult.
Some of the challenges of managing remote sales teams include:
- Ramping up new hires
- Maintaining communication
- Establishing strong collaboration
- Holding sales professionals accountable
- Building trust and rapport
- Maintaining seller engagement
But with training, effort, and the right skills, you can handle these challenges, avoid pitfalls, and lead a high-performing team.
How to Manage a Sales Team Remotely
Here’s how to support your virtual or hybrid sales force, keep productivity high, and get results.
Support with Training and Tools
It can be a challenge to get new sales hires up to speed when they’re not working closely with you or other team members. Be sure you prioritize the onboarding process and provide your new sales professionals with the necessary sales training and tools to be effective. Keep in mind that even experienced sellers may need reinforcement of fundamental skills if they’re only selling remotely.
Convey Clear Expectations
Communication between sales managers and their team can suffer when you don’t share an office or coworking space. If you and your team are in different locations, you need to communicate expectations early and often. Focus on the results you expect the team to deliver and on the specific tasks, skills, and behaviors they must perform to achieve those results.
Establish a Communication Rhythm
When working remotely, it can be easy to let too much time slip by without communicating with individual sellers—especially high performers and those who seem self-sufficient. Don’t fall into this bad habit. It limits your team’s growth and can cause you to miss warning signs of discontent, low employee engagement, or declining productivity.
Set Team Meeting Agendas
Establish a regular schedule of sales team meetings, and make sure your sellers know what to expect and what they’re responsible for bringing to the table. If possible, make a point to visit each location for valuable face-to-face meetings with each seller.
Follow a sales meeting agenda to get more done in less time and be sure to schedule meetings that work across multiple time zones. You can assign each seller a subject to research or share best practices on. This helps build a culture of knowledge sharing and can make meetings feel more engaging and less like a lecture.
Coach Salespeople Regularly
Sales coaching can be one of the more difficult things to provide across locations and time zones. In addition to team meetings, establish a regular one-to-one coaching rhythm with individual sellers to stay on top of how they’re doing and help keep them motivated to reach their short- and long-term goals.
Foster a Strong Sales Culture
Virtual teams can often feel less like a group and more like individuals doing their own thing. It’s worth the effort to combat this tendency, as a cohesive team will be more collaborative and productive—working like a well-oiled machine to achieve your sales goals.
Try to host team-building activities with face-to-face interaction at least once or twice a year at a central location. Your annual sales kickoff meeting is a great way to build team spirit and collaboration. It’s also helpful to hold regular video sessions with the entire team.
Break the Routine
A regular rhythm is a good thing for sales leaders to keep in mind when managing a remote team—but so is breaking out of the routine.
Make time every week for low-pressure calls to check in with a few sellers and see how they’re doing. Since you can’t catch up in the break room, this will help you build trusting relationships and keep tabs on how they’re doing.
Try not to be stiff or overly formal with your remote teams. Cracking jokes and being real with your people from time to time will go a long way toward building rapport. But if your sellers are from a variety of cultures, make sure your humor lands across the broader group.
Use Your Analytics
Great sales analytics can be a remote manager’s best friend. Use your analytics tools to review each seller’s performance metrics before calls so you know where to focus your attention. Be sure to review what they’re doing well as well as where they need improvement.
Employ the Right Technology
A good collaboration platform is critical when managing remote sales teams. Email and phone conversations can be an integral part of communication, but make sure you also have tools for casual team conversations such as Slack and Google Hangouts.
Video conferencing is the next best thing when face-to-face meetings aren’t possible. Video allows everyone to tune into each other’s non-verbal communication cues, improving rapport and establishing clearer communication.
Know Each Seller’s Communication Style
Everyone has a communication style that they prefer and respond best to. Get to know your team’s individual preferences and adapt your approach to match.
A comprehensive sales assessment can provide insight into each team member’s behavior, motivators, and communication style. That insight can be a game changer for sales leaders and can be especially helpful when managing remote sales teams.
Find out how the Brooks Talent Index® can reveal your sales professionals’ behavior and communication preferences and help you manage a remote sales team.
