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COVID-19: Tips to Stay Connected With Your Sales Team

The COVID-19 outbreak has not only caused panic and disrupted our personal lives, but it has also affected businesses on a large scale.

In these times, how do you make sure that your sales team remains intact, motivated and connected? Well, here are a few tips to help you.

Establish clear expectations for each remote sales rep

Even though your outside sales reps have clear sales quotas, you should also set clear team-related expectations for the remote workers at the beginning of each quarter. Again, communication is difficult with remote work so you have to make it clear that the remote sales rep has to make an effort to feel connected to the team.

Examples of expectations you could set at the beginning of the quarter:

l Must participate in two weekly video conference calls with the product and management teams.s

l Send detailed customer notes from at least five sales meetings a week

l Get training once every two weeks from the product team on new features which are being rolled out.

                        

Establishing clear expectations is important for your team as a whole.

Emphasize over-communication whenever possible

With faster internet connection and video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Webex, you would think that remote workers would feel connected at all times, right?

Unfortunately, even though you can see a remote colleague over video conference, you may not be communicating as well as you should. This tactic goes back to the interview process when you are onboarding remote sales reps. Interview questions you might ask a potential remote sales rep include:

· What tools have you used in the past to communicate as a remote worker?

· How did you communicate when you are working across different time zones?

· How did you track your status updates and communicate them to your broader team?

Utilize standard meeting agendas and meeting templates

If you have weekly team meetings or all-hands meetings, chances are you have a standard template for keeping track of minutes, agendas, and notes. Remote sales reps may have their own meeting templates for keeping track of their customer meetings and one-on-one meetings with potential customers.

If you don’t have a central place to store and access meeting notes and minutes, it can lead to further miss-communication and mismanagement of time. Sometimes you want to refer back to old sales meeting minutes and you don’t remember exactly where the notes are stored, so you spend an hour searching your shared drive, email, and Google Docs for the notes!

A proper meeting notes template should have areas to write free-form meeting minutes, a space for the meeting agenda, and also a place for remote workers to ask questions. Additionally, the template should be accessible on any device, allow real-time collaboration, and give anyone on your team the ability to filter for right meeting notes. I work remotely at Coda and developed these meeting templates to help teams that need a standard doc to share across time zones and locations.

Creating a proper Sales Process

Yes, creating sales processes is key for your remote sales reps to function at a high level. Having operational processes also ensures outside sales reps feel a part of the team. As I mentioned above, establishing clear expectations comes from having solid processes in place so that your outside sales reps know the right cadence of product feature updates, weekly team meetings, and team all-hands meetings. With the right processes, they will also know how they need to contribute to these meetings.

Going back to having a standardized meeting template, your outside sales reps may not follow your processes if they are not properly documented somewhere. That’s why having a good meeting template will help your remote sales reps know there is one central document to go to when the next team meeting occurs.

When your remote sales team is held accountable to your company’s processes, it builds trust between your remote sales team and the broader team.

Building a successful remote sales team

There are many ways you can build a remote sales team that feels integrated with other functions in your company. Clear expectations, over-communication, standard meeting templates, and scalable processes are just some of the tips that have helped my team.

Sales Mantra is online CRM tool that provides you a authority to manage your people through a single screen and mobile.

It can provide you the best Sales Lead Report. You can easily manage and track your employees productivity, targets, achievement and even the business expenses.

You can use this tool as a best work-from-home tool to manage your complete business process.

The below are the major key features that Sales Mantra provides.

Sales Module
·         Prospect Management	·         Daily Followup Management (DAR)
·         Contact Management	·         Target Vs Achievement Management
·         Order Management	·         Dispatch Order Management
·         Projection Management	·         Market Analysis
·         Business Potential from Existing Customer	·         Expense Management
·         Funnel Management	·         Quotation Management
Service  Module
·         Complaint Management	·         AMC Management
·         Preventive Management	·         Installation Management
Mobile Application
·         Customer Management	·         Followup/Dairy Management
·         Expense Management	·         Compliant Management
·         Installation Management	·         Attendance Management
·         Check In and Check Out	·         Employee Tracking