Earlier this year, everything about our lives got turned upside down. Kids were home from school, movie theaters and parks were shut down, and we all moved our office into our homes. If you manage a sales team, you’ve likely spent the last two months figuring out how to keep things running on a remote footing.
Managing a remote sales team takes a new skill set that many of us are working to master. Below are some tips for how to keep your sales team humming along smoothly and generating revenue even when the world is in lockdown.
1. Set Up Defined Procedures
When you’re working in the office, there are a thousand daily routines that hold your business together. People have their individual routines, your team has regular meetings, and everything hums along on its usual track. When everyone transitioned to working from home, those routines vanished.
Implementing company processes is an important way to reestablish some of those routines. You can set up task lists and accountability checks, as well as designated procedures for how to handle normal business operations from a home office platform. These guidelines will serve as the framework for your company operations when everyone is operating on their own grounds.
2. Focus on Building Trust
Building trust is important with any team. Your team members need to be able to rely on each other to complete projects and on your leaders to manage things effectively.
Building that trust can be more challenging than ever when no one is working face to face. Combined with the stress of a pandemic, a lack of trust among your team could seriously hurt your efficiency.
Focus on finding creative ways to build trust and cooperation among your team. Try to hit the right balance of individual vs. team recognition. Make sure everyone has plenty of opportunities to give and receive feedback on team performance.
Also make sure everyone also has an abundance of communication options. It’s harder for resentments and mistrust to build if everyone is constantly connected.
3. Keep Employees Engaged
Keeping employees engaged in their work can be difficult during normal times. When everyone is working from home, it might seem all but impossible.
Nonetheless, keeping your employees engaged and motivated is crucial to your success. Organizations with a high level of engagement report a 22 percent boost in productivity.
A good first step to increasing your employee engagement is doing everything you can to make it easy for employees to do their jobs. Provide your employees with support where they need it, and share their accomplishments with the whole company. Also set up communication networks like Slack where employees can chat more casually than email allows for.
4. Keep Up with Your Sales Team
Before the pandemic, likely used to have regular meetings to check in on your sales team. Salespeople would deliver reports, discuss successes and challenges, and get the latest information about your products. Now, with everyone working remotely, you’ll need to find new ways to manage those sales activities.
If you have an outside sales team, basix.ai is a great tool that allows your salespeople to check in and let you know about their progress remotely. It can help them manage their time usage so they are focusing on the high-paying customers, rather than the lower sources of revenue.
5. Set Clear Expectations
Working from home is new territory for your employees as well as you, and many of them may not be clear on what’s expected of them. Their new role may look very different from their previous work life, and many company policies have likely changed as a result of this. If employees aren’t sure what their new expectations are, they may start to lose motivation and drift rather than staying focused and productive.
Provide strong management by setting clear expectations for your sales team. Send out an overall company policy handbook that employees can refer back to, and discuss individual expectations with each employee. Set up systems that give your employees opportunities to ask any questions they may have, and check in with them on a regular basis.
6. Invest in Helpful Resources
One of the great boons of this pandemic has been that it is occurring in the golden age of technology. We live in a world that is more well-connected than ever, with more tools at our disposal than we’ve ever had before. Make sure your team is taking advantage of those tools.
Invest in systems that will put tools for project management, accountability, communication, customer management, and task automation at their fingertips. Get cloud software that keeps everyone connected and eliminates data silos. Make sure that, now that everyone is working from home, your team has the hardware they need to continue performing their jobs.
7. Stay Flexible
Most of all, stay flexible in your approach when you’re figuring out your new work from home system. We’re living in unprecedented times, and none of us has ever had to manage so large and rapid a shift to working from home. It’s going to take some experimentation to figure out a system that works well for everyone.
Request and listen to feedback from your team on what’s working, what’s not, and what they think you ought to be doing instead. Give different approaches a fair chance, but don’t become locked into them if they aren’t functioning well. Staying flexible will help you find the solution that works best for you and your team.
Set Up Success for Your Sales Team
Trying to manage a sales team in the middle of a global pandemic is a challenge to say the least. But if you keep lines of communication strong and give everyone the resources they need, you can find new innovative ways to be successful in our post-quarantine world. Listen to your employees, stay flexible, and be ready to adapt as we all find our way in our new reality.
If you’d like to turn your sales organization into a repeatable revenue machine, check out the rest of our site at basix.ai. On average, our clients see their pipelines double, their conversions triple, and their revenue quadruple. Learn more today and start setting your sales team up for success.