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In this 6-step guide on building a remote sales team, we provide a list of tips and best practices gleaned from recruiting a high volume of sales experts for our clients and sales directors who have built highly successful teams.
Key Takeaways
Your business needs a stellar remote sales force.
The difference to your company between a functional sales team and a stellar one is enormous.
It could be the fine line between surviving or smashing revenue targets out of the park.
No one sets out to build a mediocre team. Sometimes it just happens that way over time.
There are many reasons why you might want to take the time to re-evaluate your current team - or else plan to build a new one from scratch:
From sales managers to company culture, many factors go into finding the best sales personalities and moulding them into a cohesive unit that exceeds targets.
No good team exists without a great leader!
Personal attributes aside, the best managers build the groundwork for a successful sales team by creating an environment in which to thrive.
Transparency is a good starting point, as it will help build trust. In addition, managers should reward staff when they have performed well.
Recognizing accomplishments lends itself to a positive working environment where everyone feels valued.
These can come via small details like acknowledging good work and rewarding staff with incentives when they exceed expectations.
Celebrating success promotes worth. Even the best reps still need to hear they are doing an excellent job from time to time - it helps to relieve pressure.
While you cannot physically organize and manage your remote sales team, here are some ways to create an excellent remote sales environment:
First and foremost, equip your team with the necessary software to collaborate from home.
This includes CRM and other sales enablement tools as well.
Spirits stay high, and staff are motivated to do the best job possible.
Every sales environment operates with some incentive plan, whether in-office, remote, B2B or B2C.
An incentivized sales environment nurtures healthy competition and motivates the sales reps to meet or exceed their sales goals.
It also helps in cultivating a goal-driven environment on your sales floor.
This environment allows your managers to set personal and team-wide goals to focus on each month, quarter, or year.
This motivates your reps to meet their goals and provides a way for the managers to measure progress and growth over time.
Lastly, in a motivated sales environment, you will be able to create positivity and a sense of achievement amongst the sales reps by publicly broadcasting their wins and incentivizing their performance.
Tried and tested ways to craft a good sales environment
The best sales environment motivates and inspires your salespeople and drives organisational success.
Word travels fast regarding the working culture - no matter the industry. A bad professional environment can lead to a poor reputation, making it harder to attract top talent.
A good reputation will do the opposite, however. All staff members want to work in a proactive, positive setting where they feel liberated to thrive.
It will be easier to hire the best staff if the company becomes known as a place where sales reps desire to work.
Perfecting the company culture isn’t one-dimensional. It goes both ways.
Reps under your setup will be able to thrive, while the ones working for other companies are likely to start making eyes in the direction of your business.
Understanding the defined role of your staff is an essential component of building a killer sales team. Once you know the type of roles, the next aspect involves finding a good fit.
Avoid hiring reps from Fortune 500 companies.
Many sales managers are tempted to go for high-level reps from Fortune 500 companies. This isn’t always the best fit for a company, however.
An A-star closer might seem better on paper than reps with less experience.
But if they are coming from a leading brand, there is a chance that they haven’t needed to exert themselves too much to sell a product.
In smaller companies, selling the vision often holds as much weight as the product.
A-star reps will likely be used to having extensive resources at their disposal, which is something they won’t get in smaller setups.
Much of the decision-making process around your hires relates to where your business stands financially and the outlook of its growth forecast.
Unless you’re the VP of Sales at Google, you probably have to make budget concessions when hiring top-level sales managers.
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Scorecard
Despite looking through CVs and interviewing candidates, employers often hire based on their gut feeling.
Those applying for a role might be interviewed by two or three separate people who are impressed enough to trust in their instincts.
Yet they don’t have a clear indication as to whether the candidate will be a success.
To be more thorough in the recruiting process, build a scorecard - a single-page document that contains four sections.
The first is the mission, a short statement of one to five sentences describing the critical role.
Next, define the job target by developing three to five specific outcomes that candidates must accomplish to fit the requirements for the position.
Examples might include:
The expectation should be high yet achievable. Low performers will be automatically disqualified from the process.
However, if goals aren’t unrealistic, candidates will think you are making outlandish expectations.
The knock-on effect will make it impossible to find the best candidate.
The third step involves creating as many role-based competencies as you believe someone should possess to achieve success in the role.
Sales reps are proficient at cold calling and have a willingness to learn.
Try to be objective and ask existing employees to provide words and phrases concerning how they see the company culture.
Finally, show your scorecard to the other people involved in the recruiting process to see if it aligns with the role.
By using a scorecard, everyone involved knows which questions to ask candidates and what aspects to test. As a result, your hiring decision will be based on objective information, not a gut feeling.
Hunger, willingness to learn, and an ability to listen.
Going for salespeople with an edge could be the best route forward if you're a startup or an early-stage business.
That doesn't mean finding personalities that are hard to work with or lone wolves. But it does incorporate finding those who have faced and overcome previous struggles.
You want people to possess two key traits: hunger to succeed and a willingness to master their craft.
Discover candidates who are sponges and ready to absorb information. Not only will it help them learn about the company, but it will also put them in good stead when dealing with leads.
The art of selling comes down to an ability to listen.
While many reps believe they need to talk to sell a product, those who listen to their customer's pain points will prosper.
The most successful sales reps have to be:
Define the main traits that describe your company culture and add those to the scorecard.
A leader within the team.
It’s all well and good having an excellent sales manager, but they can’t do it alone.
The best teams feature staff members that thrive when taking on an extra layer of responsibility. They hold themselves accountable individually and within their broader role in the group.
These reps regularly communicate with their managers, providing updates with an overview of current objectives.
Staff members with these traits add to the overall quality of a sales team and are also likely to make good future managers.
Define and match your company values.
As a manager, it’s essential to recruit people that fit into the company culture and align with the values that you have created.
Everyone needs to pull in the right direction for harmony and cohesion.
Hiring someone that isn’t a good fit for the organization could spell trouble for the team in the long run. Even if the hire is good at selling, there still needs to be an overall fit within the broader structure of the group. So don’t underestimate the importance of a good fit—include it in your scorecard.
Use metrics to see how new hires perform (let go of the low performers).
When you first hire someone, it can be hard to tell whether they are suited to the role if you only measure success by the leads they’ve won and the revenue generated.
Onboard your new salesperson.
Recruiting takes plenty of time and energy. Don’t lose that energy by incorrectly onboarding new hires.
This point will be discussed later in greater detail, but finding a rep is not the end of the road - it’s the beginning.
You need to know someone’s qualities as soon as possible, so you should onboard them properly.
Instead, focus on more minor actions like activity-based metrics and intermediate KPIs. For example, monitor how they behave on calls, how many meetings they acquire, and the number of qualified leads.
Ask to be bcc’d into emails and look at how they progress a lead.
When a company is still in the early stages of taking a product to market, you aren’t necessarily selling your product - you’re conveying the story of your product/service and the problem it solves.
The aim is to convince people to be part of that story. The founder often leads all commercial activities.
They are the best person to tell the brand story.
Once you understand the intricacies and framework of selling your product or service, you want people who can sell it for you.
It’s at this stage where hiring two to three sales reps that can learn from you becomes necessary.
Now that you have a few staff members and are generating revenue, it’s time to scale your sales process.
You understand how to sell your product and have nailed down a process that achieves results - it’s time to see if it works across a team.
There will be some room for diversification as you must adapt to having a team to work with.
The goal is for you and your team to understand the metrics required to succeed and segment roles with staff specialised in areas where their strengths come to the fore.
A straightforward sales process helps onboard new staff and serves as a blueprint for all reps to enjoy success.
Not everyone can be a top salesperson, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be effective. This is where the sales process comes into play.
A handful of specialist sales reps is generally better than a dozen all-rounders.
On paper, it’s easy to think there is power in numbers.
Therefore a team of between 10 and 20 reps might initially seem like a good idea.
However, it could also point to a setup still trying to figure out its best sales process, where no one is specialized.
On the other hand, a team of five to 10 reps might be better positioned to achieve quicker results—especially if each one knows the exact metrics and KPIs to succeed.
You can segment with just two people if you are far enough to understand the makeup of what you are selling.
Once you have the metrics and know your market, you can accelerate at full speed—whether with a team of 2 or 10 salespeople.
Getting to the undercurrent of the team’s personalities is vital so you can determine their strengths and weaknesses.
Find out what makes them tick - managers of teams need time to understand the psyche of their staff and determine who tends to perform at a higher level.
The things you should look out for are:
That’s also why building a scorecard when recruiting is essential, as you want someone to fit a specific role.
If possible, split the team into sections and have some working on the opening stages of a sale, with others working on the final phases.
Managers need to show their strengths to be able to see the traits in their team.
It’s up to the manager to not only identify potential strengths and weaknesses of their staff but also accentuate those strengths while mitigating the weak points.
Building an effective sales machine indicates a rock-solid process that enables you to accurately predict outputs (sales, profits etc.) based on inputs (number of meetings, calls, team members etc.).
This process enables you to rapidly scale, achieve revenue targets and help the team be at its most effective.
We offer a proven way how to build a successful sales operation:
Make your sales process efficient.
There is no process without leads, which come from inquiries. So the first port of call is response time and the contents of that initial conversation.
You should respond to any inquiry as soon as possible - and certainly don’t take longer than 24 hours.
Once you respond, it’s time to qualify their needs and see if there is a good fit. Determine a list of prequalifying questions with your team to enable them to filter the best-qualified prospects.
If you get positive answers, send them a follow-up email (or better - a call!) with a product presentation.
After the follow-up, jump back on the phone and schedule an appointment to do a live demo.
Outline an oral proposal to illustrate the presentation during the meeting. You should build a written plan and send it to the client if all goes well.
Executing the physical steps of a deal is the primary goal, but it helps to visualize selling a product/service.
The sales funnel reps focus on their goals with more clarity and is a way to predict some elements of the process.
Overall, your funnel is the foundation for your process and helps strategize taking leads from the initial prospecting stage to becoming customers.
There will be greater visibility over deals in progress, and you can look deeper into your sales funnel for long-term strategies.
Pipelines also help identify potential roadblocks in deals. For example, managers can step in halfway through a deal if it’s going south and guide it back on track.
It’s also worth analyzing to see if blocking points occur due to the number of pipeline steps you’ve defined. It might be that you have too many or too few steps.
Focus on genuine leads.
Loading prospects into the pipeline and hoping they convert feels good. But that initial joy will soon turn to frustration if you overload the pipeline, especially if they don’t amount to much.
Less is more when it comes to prospects that are likely to convert.
Quality, not quantity, is the name of the game. Focus on the leads that you know have the best chance of converting. Less is more when it comes to prospects that are more likely to convert. Streamline your pipeline so only the best leads remain.
You can sometimes act on your gut feeling - if it’s positive. So follow up on your instincts - even if it doesn’t appear to fit your necessary criteria.
Go with your implicit feeling and refine the analysis afterwards.
What does your perfect customer look like? Identifying critical traits in your prospects is vital so you can better understand which deals fit your product or services and how to close them.
Your best customer is a combination of six different criteria:
Defining your perfect customer is vital to building a road map that helps you find similar ones in the future instead of prospecting random companies.
One of the critical aspects of prospecting is finding potential leads for your reps. An excellent way to start is by making a list of companies that you think are worth reaching out to - ones that first your research of a perfect customer.
Share that list with the cold calling team so they can begin initial contact or use marketing automation software to initiate contact.
This is something all companies should do, no matter the size. Smaller organizations should also adhere to this process because it only takes three people: one marketer, one caller and one closer.
Each call should give you additional information on your prospect when doing cold calling. Even if you don’t get the target person on the phone, you can use the ring to validate some information:
Once you contact the correct person, ask about the solutions they currently use to see if there is a hunger for your product or service.
And if they don’t already have a solution, instead of offering your one straight away, ask why they aren’t using anything.
There are factors like budget and decision-makers to consider, but before you even get to that stage, it’s essential to know if there is a good fit between prospect and product.
It’s all about the leads. But not any old lead will do. So qualifying your prospects through various means is essential to score them and cut through the noise.
There are plenty of ways to score a lead:
You define different red flags and move swiftly onto another lead if one appears.
Some red flags you can pay attention to are:
It is vital to determine whether a lead is low quality or has no chance of closing. Doing so will save you time and help your sales team focus on the right leads.
Companies are constantly striving to get their business into the stage of growth.
Many that may have launched just a few years ago are scrambling to keep their organisations pace with their increasing client bases and revenue goals.
They discover that an owner-led sales team that relied on gut instinct and desire is no longer sufficient if they want to keep up with the competition.
They need to build a foundation to support their growth objectives while making a sales and marketing infrastructure that includes salespeople, processes, and marketing support.
It can be a daunting task. So what should be done first? - New call-to-action.
The sales and marketing component of your business is responsible for the following:
This is what drives cash flow. To be as successful as possible, you must align Marketing and Sales.
Every dollar spent on staff is another investment in the sales infrastructure. Sales reps are only as good as their information, so you must build an infrastructure around them.
Even in smaller companies, where marketing resources aren’t as vast, a plan should be in place. Every company needs a structure that brings inbound leads.
Valuable tips to generate sales leads:
Here are some of the best platforms to help you generate sales:
Your sales team should provide the sales team with the following:
Customers will only invest in a product or service they think is certified. They need to believe it solves a problem they have in the long term.
Using stats and data gives credibility and supports the good things you want to say about a product/service.
Data and statistics act as safety net for customers and are often the difference-maker that helps push a customer over the line when making a purchase decision.
To increase the success and longevity of your business, you need to have a team of experienced sales reps that know how to make a profit remotely.
If you don’t aim towards growth, your business may not be flexible enough to withstand hard times.
Our team at Talentroo will assist you immediately.
Get in touch with us at mail@talentroo.com to set up a call.
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