How to hire a remote sales team ?

Several businesses have been forced to reevaluate their processes due to the recent pandemic. The transition to remote work has significantly changed the business world. As a result, sales managers are now faced with a new challenge: how to hire a remote sales team that would be as productive as an in-house team.

Sales are the lifeblood of each organization, yet many companies struggle to find the right salespeople, let alone build an effective remote sales team. Now that virtual selling is gaining more ground, the only way to keep achieving your sales quotas is to hire remote sales reps with top-tier capabilities. When hiring a remote sales team, it is vital to consider time zone differences. Sales professionals in different time zones can be challenging to manage if you are unprepared. Having a project management system in place will help you keep track of your sales team and their progress.

In this article, we will show you how to set clear expectations for a remote sales team and guide you through the hiring process.

Most Important Trait for a Remote Salesperson to Have

There is a critical trait that remote salespeople possess: a desire to strive for excellence. Such individuals can set challenging goals, strive to achieve them, and set the bar even higher.

According to Psychologist David McClelland, there is a connection between a high need for achievement and sales ability. Sales managers that want sales professionals to work remotely should hire self-starters who will perform without supervision in their home office.

Risks of Hiring Just Anyone for a Remote Sales Job

Hiring sales representatives that lack the need for achievement will affect the productivity of your sales team. Working from home is enticing to such people because they think it’s a chance to sit back and relax. They’ll want to engage in the tasks given to them in their leisure time, which is unsuitable for the company.

65% of businesses fail within ten years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the effect of hiring just anyone for a remote sales job. You can avoid this by distinguishing who can sell and who will sell. Hiring managers should concentrate during interviews and look for a “go-getter” and not someone that sounds like one.

How to Build a Virtual Sales Team

Building a virtual sales team from scratch requires time and skill. Sales managers must get in-depth knowledge about the qualities, skills, and experience expected from candidates. Listed below are the six easy steps to take while building a virtual sales team:

Step #1: Define your main requirements for a remote sales team

Before posting your job post, you should state the requirements you want to list in the job post. It is where the hiring process starts. The conditions must align with the success of this particular role. Additionally, hiring managers can ask the current personnel in that role to create the hiring criteria for the position. Lastly, brainstorm about requirements that are tailor-made for remote settings.

Step #2: Hire proactively, not reactively

After defining the main requirements, you should hire proactively and not reactively. The latter is when there’s poor planning and an urgent need to fill a position. When such occurs, there is a high tendency that the sales reps won’t be a good fit for the role.

Sales managers can avoid this by proactively hiring and understanding the company’s current needs. They should also be able to forecast the company’s future needs while making sales plans. It’ll help to check the capacity of the current team and forecast when you must begin to hire more sales representatives.

Step #3: Hire experienced sales professionals

To be successful as a remote sales manager, you must hire people you can trust. It’ll help you measure the work of your remote sales team. All this starts with hiring sales professionals with experience and a strong understanding of the qualities of good sales professionals. It’ll get you personnel that can lead without micromanaging and offer consistency at work. Furthermore, it’ll help to shorten the onboarding process because there is no need for specific sales skills training.

Step #4: Employ culture fit and communication skills

If you’re considering building a remote sales team, you must get the culture fit right. Start by defining the values your organization wants to promote internally and employ a suitable person. The qualified candidate should possess coachable, communication, and accountability qualities. During the hiring process, you should be honest with your sales candidate, and they’ll make it easy for you to assess the skills mentioned above.

Step #5: Define a scoring system for applicants

Hiring can be daunting if you come up with several qualified applicants for the job post. The way out of such a situation is to set up a scoring system to define high-ranking applicants. It should be based on qualities, experience, and values you never consider during the initial hiring process. You can put those that didn’t qualify (candidates with low scores) in the reserve spot for future use.

Step #6: Initiate a more rigorous hiring process

Since you’re not doing a face-to-face interview with the candidate, your remote hiring process should be rigorous. You can create an online form where candidates will answer specific questions and attach their CVs. The following step in the hiring process will be to conduct multiple interviews with the selected applicants. Lastly, they must go through a sales role-play to ascertain whether they can sell the hiring managers a product or service. It’ll help you identify which candidates are suitable for your company and sales team.

If you want to learn about the simple tips that’ll help you build a functional sales team, you should our article on how to build a sales team.

How to Manage Remote Sales Reps

You can use specific strategies to manage your remote sales team and make a slight advantage. These include:

• Sales managers must set clear expectations for their sales team to know their expectations. It’ll help them to deliver the set target. You must explicitly state what the working from home workers must bring to the table regarding parameters, details, and details of each task. The sales leader must set expectations about the sales quotas and processes.
• Another strategy is to promote employee engagement by ensuring virtual sales teams don’t feel disengaged because of distance. Working from home can be challenging because feeling disconnected from your company is easy. Hence, you should set up a chat channel for your sales team. It’ll increase the sales reps’ morale and productivity.
• Part of the most critical strategy is to equip remote sales teams with the right tools. It’ll help remote employees to experience a flexible and stress-free environment. They can use a remote sales-friendly CRM to stay updated about work and connect with other team members. It’s also important to allow team members to familiarize themselves with the tools to become more productive with them. Furthermore, their work will become more transparent and available to other members.
• Lastly, it would help if you excelled at onboarding. It’ll assist in integrating the new hires into your sales team and helping them to do a fantastic job.

If you want to learn more about the ways you can manage a sales team for high productivity, you should read our article on how to manage a sales team.

How to Motivate a Remote Sales Team

The sales manager must create a sense of community and connection within a virtual sales team. It shouldn’t be difficult if there is a mixture of creativity and a friendly environment.

You can start by organizing a friendly virtual competition to inspire your sales representatives. Divide your sales team into small groups and give them a task to promote teamwork.

Consider bringing your remote sales team members together annually for a company retreat. It’s crucial for team bonding. Finally, it would be best if you recognized the achievement of your sales reps during your sales meetings.

Conclusion

The following factors should be considered when hiring a remote sales team: culture fit, skillset, and time zone. Only a remote sales team with the right combination of these three elements can help your business thrive. Hiring a remote sales team can be a great way to build an effective and diverse sales organization. Hiring the best salespeople as a team is the first step towards the success of your sales organization.

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