As a sales leader, there will be times when you need to manage a remote sales team.
If you have the good fortune of leading an established sales organization, you will probably make a smooth transition to working from home. In that case, this article probably isn’t for you. You know your benchmarks, you know your team, and your team knows the playbook. You have tools in place for sales efficiency and tracking. You know what to measure, and you know how to spot trouble and solve it early. You are a well-oiled machine that happens to need to work remotely (for whatever reason, from an office move that temporarily has everyone at home for a week to a global pandemic that forces everyone home indefinitely).
Managing a nascent sales team remotely is different and can feel challenging and murky. If you are building a sales team, you may not have enough benchmarks to measure against. You may have all sorts of ramping reps in various stages of readiness, and you may not yet have playbooks to draw on.
How will you know what’s working and what isn’t? How will you know who is working and who isn’t? How will you know if you have a skill problem, a training problem, a market problem, a lead problem, or any other variety of issues? It’s hard enough to know how you are really doing when you are in the throes of scaling a nascent sales organization, let alone one that’s been sent home to work remotely for the first time.
Hard, but definitely not impossible. Here are a few tips to help you along the way.
A remote sales team should meet each morning for a 15-minute meeting (with video on!). If the team is large enough, you may need several different stand-ups, such as one for SDRs, one for enterprise reps, etc.
The morning stand-up is a great time to run through a quick skill refresher or discuss a tidbit of company news. It’s also important to have each person make a commitment to the group. Commits may range from how many calls an SDR is going to make to which deal a rep is going to move forward in the pipeline. Everyone makes an activity—or outcome-based commitment during morning stand-up.
In the afternoon, the team should come back together for a 15-minute stand-up to discuss their day, recap accomplishments, and report on their commit. This is also a great time to share tips and new talk tracks and collaborate on things that came up throughout the day.
The daily rituals of morning and afternoon standups are important in a nascent sales team because a remote team doesn’t get the benefit of ad hoc coaching, collaboration, and discussion that naturally happens on the sales floor.
A challenge with a remote team can be visibility into key metrics, so it’s important to find a way to keep activity and outcomes visible and top of mind. In an office environment, I love a sales wall, and in a remote environment, you need to find a way to replicate that and reference it often as a team. There are tools that can do this and automatically post data to Slack. Or you can have a sales admin manually do it. Even better, have the team post their results throughout the day and then push out the formal dashboard and metrics in the afternoon.
There is nothing like the excitement and energy of a Slack channel filled with updates from reps on closed-won deals, new opportunities opened, revenue booked, etc.
You can’t manage any sales team—let alone a remote one—without the right tools in place. At a minimum (without naming any brands):