“You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins.” – Jim Stovall
In order to achieve the goals described in the quote above, you need to manage your remote sales team incredibly effectively. Everyone on the team needs to be working to their full potential. Although doing this remotely, instead of having all of your virtual sales team members in the same office, can be tricky, managing them and keeping them on track to meet their goals is completely doable.
Strategies to Manage Your Remote Sales Team
Communication is the key to keeping everyone on the same page. In order to ensure that everyone communicates effectively, you’ll need to use a number of strategies. The following strategies can help you keep your virtual sales team in the loop with your office team:
Make Them Aware of Their Team Responsibilities
Each member of your remote sales team needs to know exactly what their responsibilities are. After all, how can they fulfill their responsibilities if they aren’t aware of them? It’s important to work with your sales team members so that they know exactly what’s expected of them, from the paperwork and reports that they need to submit to the number of sales calls and client meetings that they need to be attending or setting up every day.
Tell Them Your Expectations
Do the members of your remote ales team know what’s expected of them? They might be aware of their overall responsibilities, but are they aware of your expectations, such as sales quotas, the number of minutes spent daily doing outreach and potential client research, and so on? You need to be very clear about your expectations if you want your team to meet them.
Build Trust
It can be tricky for a remote sales team to trust both you and each other. Since you aren’t in the same office, none of them really have the chance to get to know one another. It’s your job to facilitate those virtual interactions, as well as build trust amongst the team. If they can’t trust you, then you’ll have a very hard time getting them to meet your expectations.
Provide Resources to the Sales Team Members
In addition to doing what you can to build trust and to make your sales team aware of their responsibilities and your expectations, you also need to provide a number of resources for them. After all, they need to know as much as possible about the medical devices, medications, or tools that they’re selling, as well as have access to the sales literature that they need to give to their clients.
Examples of these resources include:
- Cloud Storage – Not only can you store all of the company literature and fliers in a cloud storage account, like Dropbox, but you can place copies of their forms and other information in there so that everyone on your remote sales team can access them.
- Office Software – You’ll need a subscription for Microsoft Office software (or whichever similar program suite that you use) that you can share with your sales team. They’ll need these programs in order to do their jobs properly.
- Tools and Samples – Depending on the type of medical supply that your company is selling, you’ll also need to share everything from tools to product samples with your sales team. These things must be provided in person, which gives them a good reason for coming into the office for a meeting.
Schedule Meetings
One of the best ways to connect with your remote sales team is by scheduling meetings. You can hold these meetings in person in your office, for anyone close enough to attend, or host them online using Google Meet, Skype, or even Zoom. In some cases, you plan the meeting both ways, so that everyone on your team discusses everything at once, with some of them attending virtually and others in person.
Use a Task Management Application
Nothing works quite as well as a task management application when you need to track tasks and note when certain things are done. Some of these applications include:
- Monday.com
- Asana
- Zoho Projects
- ClickUp
- Backlog
- Quire
These are just a few examples; there are plenty of others. Every one of these tools is priced based on the number of employees that you have and are allowing to access the programs. When it comes to picking the best one for your needs, examine the options and see which you think will best fit your specifications.
Employee Engagement Activities
Using employee engagement activities, such as celebrating birthdays and work anniversaries, is one good method of bonding with your remote sales team. You can send around an email on those days, encouraging everyone to join in and send a message to their co-workers. Other good engagement activities include having your workers choose to put together personal projects (even in groups), as well as encouraging them to discuss things with each other.
Ask for Feedback
How often do you ask your team for feedback? It’s important that they feel as though they can tell you when they think that you’re doing something wrong, or when they have an idea that they think will be good for the team. Making it clear that you expect this feedback is always a good idea because then they’ll feel comfortable enough to come forward. It also plays a role in helping you build trust amongst your team.
Conclusion
As you can see, making sure that everyone on your remote sales team is excelling is easy, as long as you know the correct steps to take. You simply have to make sure that they know very clearly what their responsibilities are, and what you expect of them. In addition, you also need to get them to trust you, as well as have them communicate with each other so that they can bond and work together as a team.
