How To Do Remote Sales Successfully
Meta: Vaccine or no vaccine, remote sales is here to stay. Find out how you can make the most out of your remote team to grow your business.
Remote sales positions are here to stay, in fact, business owners have realized that getting good at selling remotely is a real business advantage, both in terms of access to talent and a competitive advantage against their slower moving competitors. In 2020, almost 90% of sales positions went remote. This meant more time on the phone, on Zoom, and email for sales teams.
Even before COVID-19 sent most of the world home to work this trend toward digital interactions had started. 48% of those surveyed by McKinsey felt that their customers placed a higher value on digital engagement over traditional in-person interactions (and as you can see below, digital is now twice as important).
Source: McKinsey & Company
Not only that, but one thing we’ve noticed from our clients is that because of this, there’s been a huge boom in productivity. By eliminating commutes and allowing people to create a better work/life balance companies are realizing that their employees are able to work really well in a WFH setting. It’s likely that things will never quite return to the way they were pre-pandemic.
It’s time to take a moment to remove “fully stocked fridge and snack pantries” out of the benefits listed in your job ads, and read on.
The ins and outs of managing a remote team
Managing a remote sales team doesn’t require as much of a shift in how you do business as you might expect. A lot of what’s required is a little bit of finessing how you already do things to account for the fact that your team is now spread out.
Let’s take a closer look at what this looks like.
Set clear expectations
Like everything in business, the more clear you are upfront, the less confusion there is.
First, if you don’t already have one (and you should), document a clear process for your WFH team. But, don’t just create them and hand them out to the team, it’s best to make sure you include the team in developing the process.
The more input you have from your team, the easier it will be for them to stick to your processes.
You need the right tools - a solid tech stack
The good news here is that you’re probably using a lot of the tools required for remote sales already.
But, in case you’re not sure if you’re missing something, here’s an example of a solid tech stack for remote sales:
Video conferencing software like Zoom.
A digital signature tool such as GetAccept.
Slack to help with internal communication.
A collaboration system like Notion, which also works for creating and outline processes.
A solid CRM like HubSpot.
Depending on your needs, the exact setup you use may be different. But at the very least, you need something to manage video calls (because video calls help you make a better connection with prospects during sales calls), an internal communication system, and a CRM.
Hire good salespeople
Whether they are old school rock stars or digital sales masters, having people on your team who know the basics of how to sell makes all the difference in the world.
Good salespeople know the particulars of selling. They know how to break down objections, how to lead a good demo, and how to really nurture prospects, regardless of whether they’re selling in-person or remotely.
Don’t forget to take the time to assess the skills of your existing sales team and train them up as needed. If you support your current team by providing them with the skills they need to succeed in remote sales, you may not have to hire new people to replace those that failed due to a simple lack of training.
Support your team
Your sales team can’t succeed with a good support network. There are two ways you can do this.
The first is by recording and analyzing sales calls. When you capture these calls, you can find coachable moments within them.
Spend some of your time reviewing calls - make sure your team is following the steps of your sales process by reviewing calls and grading them using a scorecard. This is easy, and productive, as once you get practiced at this you can listen to calls at 1.5x speed, or even faster (we often use over 2x speed and then slow down or skip back to coachable moments).
Once you have listened to calls, you can choose the ones to use to help your team thrive by regularly going over these calls with your team (either in more detail one on one or sharing and discussing snippets as a group) if you do this, you will improve results.
These call analysis meetings can also be used for the rep to share with you, so that you can work on stuck pipeline opportunities together, outside of the standard sales meetings, to help brainstorm ways to move them forward.
Secondly, provide your team with a place and time to chat and mingle. Having a watercooler style Slack channel where people can share memes goes a long way to helping your whole team feel connected to each other. You can take this one step further by organizing virtual happy hours or a team hangout, so they can see each other face-to-face like they would in an office.
Qualify your leads
Just like having people who know how to sell makes your team more efficient, having prospects who are ready to spend money makes selling easier. Be sure to qualify those leads.
A qualified lead is someone who’s ready to buy. There are a few ways to identify who these people are and whether they’re ready to buy. But, before you do that, look at your current client list and identify which clients are your ideal clients.
Once you identify your ideal clients, look at what steps they took prior to becoming clients. A good CRM will track the various touch points they had before engaging with your company, this is things like signing up for a webinar or downloading a whitepaper. These touch points can help figure out whether someone is open to more information from your company (as a marketing qualified lead, or MQL) or is ready to buy (a sales qualified lead, or SQL).
Methodologies like BANT or CHAMP can also help you qualify leads once you’ve got them on the phone, but remember to use them more as a guide than a rigid structure to follow - depending on the stage of your company or the maturity of your process, adjust qualification criteria in favor of momentum while you learn, and when your marketing begins to yield more leads, review the criteria before you add more people - we often find clients can sell more with the same number of people when this is done well..
When all else fails, partner up with someone who can help
Sometimes, even if you could set up a remote sales approach on your own, you just don’t have the time.
Working on shifting aspects of your business can take you away from the business itself. You can get too hung up on making the remote sales team the best it can be and forget to manage everything else, or worse - get distracted by other things in your business and your sales team hits a flat spot or begins to decline.
That’s where partnering with experts can help. At Mindracer, we love to help companies evolve into new ways of doing business and help them grow to the next level. It doesn’t matter if we help you as a Fractional VP Sales, or a sales consulting or training capacity, we can help you with this long-term transition to virtual selling.
If you have at least $500k in revenue, have hired salespeople, and are committing to growing, we may be able to help you, too. If this sounds like you, let’s talk.