Remote selling: How to lead and manage a remote sales team

Managing a remote sales team for the first time? Feeling out of depth and unsure how to begin?
You’re not alone.
In fact, this is something we know a lot about as a remote-first sales team.
Even if you are still firmly team in-office, Gartner’s The Future of Sales report predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. While progress is always good news, having to make transitions that used to take years to plan has caused some companies to flounder.
In this post, we share:
While remote sales teams have an opportunity to hire the best talent from anywhere in the world, it’s meaningless if they don’t make management and retention a priority. That means getting a handle on some of the top challenges that remote sales teams — including ours — face.
From reps doing duplicate work to deals being dropped and unclear KPIs, these are all signs that your communication practices need an upgrade.
In-office reps can pop into someone’s office to get an update or clarify an issue. You can’t do that remotely. Instead, you need to strive to over-communicate. This helps to avoid confusion, build better relationships, and keep everyone on the same page.
There are two things you can do when managing a remote sales team to get better at over-communicating:
Your remote sales team is like an army platoon bypassing enemy frontline strongpoints as they approach their target.
You want to make sure everyone gets to the target even if they are approaching from different angles. If there’s no tactical plan, you don’t just miss your targets; you are also unable to protect yourselves.
Having a structure ensures the team knows the tactical way to keep connecting with prospects and closing deals. It also guarantees you identify problems in the workflow before it impacts the company’s revenue.
Building out and communicating a clear strategy and workflow for your team to follow is a major part of remote sales team management. In reality, this means having a clear sales playbook, scripts/templates, SOPs, and regular 1:1 and group training.
Hinge Health’s survey on remote workers in the US showed that 73% of respondents’ stress, anxiety, and depression have worsened or is a new experience they’re feeling since remote work due to COVID-19.
The pressure of the job plus the lack of in-person meetings is often detrimental to the mental health and well-being of both first-time and experienced remote sales reps. This leads to underperformance and burnout.
Combat isolation in your remote sales team by:
This challenge is two-fold.
First, you might struggle to find the right tech stack that empowers your team to do their best work. Which often means testing many tools until you find the ones that meet your needs.
And second, most remote sales playbooks are CTRL + V of traditional sales playbooks. While you should always be looking to learn from what works for other remote teams, it’s just as important to experiment with new strategies and processes.
Maybe you are already familiar with these challenges and are here to improve or figure out a solution.
We’ve got you.
UserGems has always been a remote-first company. So, we’ve had to build and manage a remote sales team from the start. Here are a few things that set us on the path to success.
Christian Kletzl, UserGems’ CEO and co-founder, believes that hiring the right people is critical to building a successful remote sales team.
This means hiring not only for skillset but also intangibles, like communication skills and attitude.
In fact, if you're a sales manager building your remote sales team for the first time, look for generalists who are great communicators rather than specialists until you have a firmer grasp of what you need.
For example, our first sales hires were account executives (AEs). But we made a point of looking for AEs who were skilled at both hunting and closing.
“To give you an idea, an Account Executive is focused on being the closer, and the Sales Development Rep is focused on being the hunter. But when hiring an AE, I don't think it's okay to only be focused on closing,” says Christian. “I look out for someone who thinks, ‘Yes, I have an SDR helping me, but I'm able to take my destiny in my own hands.’ If I have to choose between a good closer and a closer who can also hunt, I'll take the latter,” he continues.
When your remote sales team is made of people who have the right skill set and love what they do, motivating them becomes easier.
In a remote setting, you can’t always reach out to someone in real-time or have an eye on their activities.
So, it’s essential that everyone is working towards the same goals. As a sales manager, you want your sales team to close. But they might be so focused on the hunting aspect they don’t have enough time to close.
Set clear expectations that nudge the team on to the ultimate goal of every sales prospecting motion - the close.
This means making sure your team has the right remote sales training and tools. For instance, making sure they get notified automatically when a prospect changes jobs, so they can reach out.
This also means that sales should be fully aligned not only with their core team but also with the marketing team. This ensures that sales and marketing are working well together and moving towards the same goal.
From 1:1s to sales team meetings, regular check-ins help you stay on top of the pulse of your remote sales team. They allow you to identify issues early, provide support, and connect with your team.
The best part is that these processes can be standardized.
Here’s how we conduct our sales check-ins and quota review meetings when managing our remote sales team’s efficiency at UserGems.
At the quantitative stage, we track:
In comparison, here’s what our qualitative review process looks like:
Often, we don’t have time for all deals, so our remote sales team focuses on:
In the wake of “the Great Resignation,” it’s important to provide mentorship and support to your remote sales team. The lack of in-office interactions and working across different time zones means you must be proactive about team building.
For every win, we schedule a five-minute call with everyone, and we celebrate both the deal and the rep. We also have virtual team lunches (food on UserGems) every Thursday afternoon. Additional things you can do as a team include regular donut chats on Slack, Zoom show and tell sessions and quarterly or annual in-person retreats.
Here's Ryan Iacoviello, Senior Account Executive, UserGems, on the value of our virtual team-building activities:
"The radical candor of UG fuels me. There are no secrets, and our team-building activities ensure everyone is on the same page about where we are going and what we need to do to get there."
If you want your sales team to do their best work, empower them with remote sales enablement content and tools for every stage of the sales cycle.
Sales enablement tools help align your marketing and sales teams, enabling the sales team to have readily available content that can move the needle on deals. It also keeps the marketing team aware of what content to prepare to help sales teams close deals faster.
Some great sales enablement tools you could consider for remote sales team management include:
Managing a remote sales team is all about communicating your expectations to your team, continuously examining areas where your team can improve, and equipping them with remote sales enablement tools.
UserGems helps remote sales team managers generate more revenue by combining relationship data with trigger events to surface the most relevant buyers for each company. So, you can get a bigger pipeline and win more often. Request a free demo today.