How to Manage Your Work from Home Sales Team

If you’re a B2B sales manager who’s used to seeing your sales team in the office every day, moving to work from home sales team can be quite an adjustment. Throw in training someone new and it could seem like chaos. So, what can you do to feel like you’re succeeding as a sales manager and keeping your team on track? Read on to learn top tips on how to effectively manage, coach, and train your work from home sales team.

Destination Anywhere

First, you should know this. You do not have to be working in the same virtual office in order to manage your team. Hopefully, that realization is something we’ve all learned in the past months when we’ve been working from home; holding video meetings instead of in-person meetings; and still managing to stay productive and on top of everything we need to do.

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Managing Your Remote Sales Team

When your sales team is working from home, your concern may be that they’re not going to be as productive. It’s your job to keep your team motivated and invested in their job. Here’s how you can be the best remote sales manager:

• Keep your regular group and 1:1 meetings. Your group meeting should be a Zoom video call if at all possible so you can all see each other and remember you’re part of a team even when you’re working remotely. But for the 1:1 meetings, ask each member of your team what they prefer—a video call or a phone call. Zoom fatigue is a real thing, and your sales reps could be thrilled to have the option for a phone call over another video meeting.
• The network connection. If your sales reps have been having issues with their WiFi during Zoom meetings or on presentations to clients, there are some tips they can follow to improve their WiFi connections while they’re working from home, including connecting directly to the router; assigning the lower 2.4 ghz wireless band to other devices in the home and taking the 5 ghz band for their laptop during work hours; and closing all other windows they might have open.
• Keep track of sales activity. I’m not suggesting that you should micro-manage your sales team and have them email you with everything they do. Instead, you should choose multi-channel sales engagement software that provides sales managers with a real-time dashboard into each rep’s activities—down to the number of dials made, connects made, and emails sent each day, along with the number of meetings set.
• Keep motivation strong. You don’t need a physical board at the office displaying each rep’s sales to foster healthy competition. You can show the real-time dashboard mentioned above at your weekly sales meeting. Or, consider what one of our customers is doing. They now give a ticket to reps for each meeting set, and those tickets are used to place guesses in a weekly trivia contest. If the rep doesn’t set any meetings in the prior week, they don’t get to place a guess for a chance to win a prize.

Training a New Hire

As a sales manager, you know that your team can change at any time with people leaving for new jobs or simply not working out, leaving you to hire and train a new sales rep. No, you can’t sit down with your new rep at their desk to train them when you’re both working from home, but that doesn’t mean you should skimp on training.

• Create a training playbook. If you don’t already have documents, training videos, and a plan for when you train someone new, it’s time to do so. Make sure that this playbook includes videos about your products that your new rep can learn from, or schedule virtual product demos.
• Make connections. Besides introducing your new rep at your weekly sales meeting, ask each of your current sales reps to schedule a 1:1 call (make this one a video call) with the newbie so they can get to know each other.

Coaching Your Remote Sales Team

When it comes to coaching your team, you’ll be a success no matter your location with the right technology and tools.

• The right technology. David Dulany, Founder & CEO of Tenbound says, “Leverage available technology such as agent assisted dialing and call recordings to ensure your reps are talking to enough people each day, and you can evaluate those calls to ensure they are tracking toward a goal of improvement. Keep track of the results over time to ensure each rep is trending in the right direction. Spend time coaching your top performers to learn what they're doing right and be able to share that data with the rest of the team.”
• The right tools. Consider Remote Coach, which is included in ConnectLeader’s suite of sales dialers. This tool offers sales managers the ability to listen to live conversations and switch from call to call across reps; or whisper coaching suggestions to sales reps (the prospective customer won’t hear a thing) during live conversations.

Reach out to us here at ConnectLeader today to learn how you can successfully manage your working from home sales team with our multi-channel sales engagement suite of TruCadence, Team Dialer, and Remote Coach. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.