How Do You Train A Sales Remote Team ?
Every sales organization needs a team of skilled salespeople to achieve business sales goals and record better results. Nevertheless, how well you train your sales team will determine how quickly you achieve those goals and see positive results. A well-trained and managed sales team can pay off substantially. Sales teams of this type can contribute significantly to the performance of their organizations and bring about positive results quickly.
Training and managing a sales team may not be difficult in a physical scenario, but this could be challenging when sales members are working from home. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain communication with the team, build rapport, and support the team’s well-being. When you manage a remote team of salespeople, you must learn what it takes to do it right.
8 Useful Tips To Train Remote Sales Teams
Throughout this article, you’ll find helpful tips to better train remote teams that you can incorporate into your existing sales management and leadership process. The tips include:
#1 Help your remote sales team to set clear expectations
As far as your sales expectations are clear enough to your remote sales team, every employee working away from a physical work environment will remain on the same page as you. They will clearly understand what is expected of them at work to help the organization grow at all times. As a result, your remote team will focus on meeting performance targets, thereby increasing team engagement.
When sales leaders or managers set realistic expectations and make them known to their remote sales teams, they are helping the team to structure their work and prioritize their tasks. That way, they can hold every remote sales team member accountable for their results. In the end, your remote employees can take the initiative and inspire high performance that benefits your sales organization.
#2 Conduct regular meetings with your remote team
Regular communication is key to training and managing the remote sales team of your dream. How would you communicate your expectations and sales priorities to remote employees? Remember, face-to-face communication is no longer an option. This leaves businesses with no better choice than to turn to technology and tools that help simplify communication in the virtual world to maintain team communication.
Sales leaders can invest in video conferencing tools or platforms such as (but not limited to) Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or GoToMeeting. These tools are designed for team collaboration and would allow you to host regular virtual meetings with your remote sales reps where you can keep all members on the same page even while apart.
#3 Focus beyond the results
We know the sales leaders’ responsibility is to help the sales team achieve their goals and bring results. However, sales leaders must understand that their sales reps cannot achieve positive results overnight. Some little things drive results for the organization, and it’s time they pay attention to those things if they want their remote team to keep hitting the sales milestones. These include regular check-ins and informal communication with every team member (top-performing and low-performing remote employees). Doing this can help instill a sense of responsibility in the mind of your remote team and make them understand the importance of working better to bring about results. In the end, you get to achieve results quickly.
#4 Promote Team Collaboration
No one would love to work in an isolated work environment that lacks team collaboration. Sometimes, working remotely can be boring for sales reps, and even worse, it can be toxic. Working in a dull or unhealthy workspace can make a once top-performing sales rep struggle to meet sales quotas. Eventually, the organization would be the one to suffer the most from below-par employee performance.
The ultimate solution to creating a virtual work environment that’s neither boring nor toxic is encouraging positive collaboration in the remote team. When sales leaders promote team collaboration, they are building a culture that allows the sense of sharing information on best practices among team members. Such culture is vital to an organization’s success.
#5 Encourage team building
Making the team building your top priority is crucial to keep every member motivated and in high spirit while working away from the office. Sometimes, you should allow your remote employees to have fun as a team once in a while. See this as a way to build relationships between team members, and it could be a cathartic experience for them after months of non-stop work.
As a sales manager, you should consider virtual team-building games or activities for your team that focus on their needs. These games or activities could come up twice or three times a year, and Zoom could be a perfect space to hold such things. In addition, the team-building activities should be about your remote team and not the company’s objectives. In the end, you recharge your team’s energy and keep everyone in high spirit to work harder than ever before.
#6 Let them feel seen and celebrated
Sales leaders should develop the habit of celebrating and rewarding their remote sales team when a milestone is achieved. Every sales rep wants to be recognized and celebrated for their contributions and successes. When sales leaders constantly overlook employee contributions and efforts to make their companies achieve their goals, they tend to feel discouraged and demoralized. That way, their productivity drops, and the company would start experiencing fewer sales.
As a sales manager, you should learn how to reward success and celebrate your remote sales team for significant accomplishments by giving out gift cards individually. This inspires those members to work harder and encourages healthy competition for success in the team. However, rewarding your team for success doesn’t necessarily have to come in cash at all times. You can give a teamwide or individual shoutout for closing a deal, present them with unique awards, and highlight outstanding contributions in sales meetings for mass recognition.
#7 Establish a firm boundary between work and personal time
Personal life can interfere with your work when working from home. It takes discipline and commitment to focus on the work done when you make your home your office. While there’s an increase in the number of remote workers globally, it’s still a challenge for remote sales reps to remain self-motivated when surrounded by the comforts and distractions of a virtual workspace.
However, you can help your team to achieve work-life balance by setting firm boundaries between work and personal time. That way, you can keep everyone productive and less distracted by family and leisure when it’s time to work.
#8 Let them take a break after long working hours
Your employees will be less productive if they work long hours without a break. This can also affect their mental and physical well-being. Good sales leaders understand that high productivity translates to more revenue for their company and, therefore, would not want anything affecting their employees’ productivity. Allowing your remote sales team to take small breaks throughout the day can help them stay productive all day. Schedule specific periods of working hours for a lunch break and other ‘few-hours’ breaks and impose it on all members.
Following a long-duration project, your remote sales team should also have a few days off. That way, they’ll have the chance to refresh and recharge before another work session. This helps keep their productivity high and also helps improve their mental and physical well-being. Taking breaks can also help prevent employee burnout and maintain employee happiness (two factors that foster productivity in a remote work environment)
Conclusion
You may think your sales reps don’t need sales training because they have top-tier sales capabilities and experiences. It’s important to remember that they’re unfamiliar with the products (or services) you offer, the company mission, the sales strategies, the sales approach, or the sales process. Only through training can these skills be taught to employees in the business landscape.
The tips above could help you deal with the challenges sales leaders usually face when training their remote sales teams, such as maintaining communication, building rapport, and supporting employees. When these challenges are eliminated, training remote sales teams becomes easy and fun for sales leaders and managers.
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