How to Enable Your Remote Sales Team

The Covid-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the global economy and disrupted the way businesses functioned. As a result, customer behavior underwent significant changes, leaving many businesses struggling to adapt.

Responding to the sudden shift in buying behavior, sales leaders are rapidly adopting a more remote selling model to align with the new normal and improve their selling performance. In fact, according to a recent Global Sales Enablement survey of over 500 sales leaders by HubSpot, 64 percent of surveyed leaders who moved to remote sales met or exceeded their revenue targets this year.

While managing a remote sales team presents several unique challenges for sales leaders, it can, however, help save costs, increase sales, and promote business growth if done right. 

So, if you're a sales leader and are looking to shift to remote selling in 2021, here's how you can enable your remote sales team for optimal results.

1. Work with Marketing to Increase Online Visibility and Leads

While the relationship between sales and marketing teams has long been known to be frayed, having them working together can help get more deals closed and better placed for long-term success.

Your remote sales team needs to tell a more engaging and compelling story to prospects than your competitors. However, this can be challenging if it doesn't align with your marketing strategy and output.

As such, you need to build a sales enablement team that will help create supporting material and train your remote sales team on the right marketing material to utilize. This will also help bridge the gap between your sales team and marketing for increased online visibility and more effective selling to prospects.

A great way to ensure your sales and marketing teams are working in unison is by ensuring they're communicating regularly on key issues that contribute to your business' goals like upcoming content creation, KPIs, CRM organization and pipeline health.

2. Master the Lead Handoff Process

Your remote sales team depends on the marketing team for quality, sales-ready leads. This, however, can leave many leads unattended if marketing isn't aware when to hand off to the sales reps. As such, you must master the lead handoff process and come up with an easy and convenient way to pass off quality leads into the right hands.

One of the best ways you can ensure a streamlined handoff process is by using lead generation and nurturing tools. By combining automation and sales, you can automatically handoff leads to the appropriate remote sales rep. You can even assign new leads based on a round robin rotation or other variables like geography, industry, size of business and more. You should also ensure that marketing also submits the contact data as well as the activity history when delivering a qualified lead.

That said, you should ensure you always stay on top of your opportunities by mastering the lead handoff process and employing proper automation tools to streamline the process.

3. Build Up Your Database and Keep Nurturing Them

Your sales reps require accurate data for them to build confidence and relay value when selling remotely. You can nurture your remote sales team through data-backed training and providing them with remote selling resources they need to become stellar sellers.

This can include content such as competitive one-pagers, educational videos, data sheets, sales playbooks, case studies, and new eBooks that provide your sales team with valuable tips on remote selling.

4. Reduce Friction in the Sales Process

Enabling a remote sales team isn't an easy task. But using smart automation, you can streamline your sales processes and save your remote sales team plenty of time to get more done. That said, you should evaluate available modern technologies that you can leverage to enable your remote sales team close deals faster and reach or exceed their revenue targets.

These automation tools can help you reduce friction in your sales process and speed up tasks whether it's responding to support questions in real-time or pre-qualifying leads. As such, you should consider leveraging automation tools like chatbots, calendar links, live chats, and many more.

For instance, you can use chatbots to maintain real-time communication with your leads or even obtain and qualify leads when you're unavailable. And calendar links allow prospects to book meetings directly with reps, allowing you to avoid the lengthy back-and-forth of finding a time when both people are available.

5. Reporting and Analytics - Get the Right CRM!

It's also crucial that you get extra tools that will help your sales reps capture valuable data to report on their sales enablement efforts. This includes getting the right CRM tools such as CallRail, which helps with tracking of calls plus form attribution reporting.  

When you're remote selling, you often get leads from a vast range of sources making it essential to track best-performing channels. This helps you know what works best for you and incorporate it in your sales enablement plan.

If you'll be tracking data from various systems, you can opt for a reporting tool that's able to pull data from these sources to create a single customized dashboard containing all your key performance indicators (KPIs). There are even Cloud CRM platforms that allow remote access and managing for all connected devices.

The good thing is that there are dozens of great CRM applications on the market, meaning you have a variety of options to explore and ensure you find one that best fits your specific needs.

Final Thoughts: Get Your Remote Sales Team Rolling 

As the world moves to virtual, you should enable your remote sales team with the necessary resources and tools needed to simplify their sales processes and keep them productive. This will also help increase your sales team productivity and improve your business' growth despite the increasing uncertainties brought by the pandemic.

Moreover, there are numerous compelling reasons why you should embrace a remote salesforce including increased flexibility and productivity for your sales rep, better opportunities for business growth and many others.

Looking to enable your remote sales teams with sales enablement tools to sell effectively and successfully and even close more deals faster? Book a free Growth Consultation today and we'll take you through major opportunities for the growth of your business.

We have already worked with a number of B2B companies to leverage the scalability of a remote salesforce and have produced increases in leads and revenue across the board. Talk to us today, and see why our clients always rely on us to scale their business!