TOP TIPS FOR MANAGING REMOTE SALES TEAMS

With data from YouGov suggesting that approximately 50% of workers are now working from home at least some of the time, ensuring you are managing hybrid or fully remote workers effectively is crucial to the success of your business.

With this in mind, Aaron Wallis Sales Recruitment has collated some essential tips for managing a remote sales team:

Be available:

Your sales team won’t be able to quickly reach out to you in your office when they need help – so make sure you’re available on your company’s communication platforms such as Teams or Slack. More importantly, ensure that you are actually approachable and don’t put down your staff for something you might deem as trivial or forgetful – many remote workers feel isolated so by simply being available you can solve some of these problems.

Reward remote achievements:

Pre-pandemic, you would have seen sales teams throughout the country rewarding achievements in face-to-face environments on a Friday afternoon. In this new age of working from home, this has become less prevalent, so it’s important to keep a recognition culture either digitally or when your team actually does get together.

Make use of cloud-based CRM software:

Team communication is often harder with staff working from home and this can disrupt your sales processes if vital information is not passed over correctly. A cloud-based CRM system can mitigate this by providing a ‘single customer view’ or even document your workflows or sales pipelines for everyone to see.

Employee feedback:

It can be harder to pick up on your team’s thoughts and feelings without seeing them face-to-face. This might create an issue where you as management might not recognise the needs of your workforce. To help with this, making your feedback culture even more prominent will help you resolve issues proactively and support your sales staff.

Advertise your roles as ‘remote roles’

If your business truly supports fully remote working you have the advantage of a national or global talent pool to choose from. At Aaron Wallis Sales Recruitment we have seen the number of applicants for remote roles be on average 120% higher than office-based positions which can give you an excellent field of candidates to choose from.

Robert Scott, Managing Director at Aaron Wallis Sales Recruitment said: “There’s no escaping it – after the pandemic working-from-home is here to stay and many of the organisations we recruit for have embraced more flexible ways of working. Managing these teams can come with challenges, so it’s important to make sure your communication between teams remains consistent and that you’re asking for staff feedback on all of your processes.”