Your business now operates in a new reality.
While there was a time when working remotely was the sole domain of field sales representatives, it’s become the new normal for sellers of all types.
And with recent events necessitating remote work around the globe, it’s more important than ever for organizations to help their sales teams succeed when in-office support and in-person customer interactions aren’t viable options.
With that in mind, here are five ways to achieve favorable outcomes for your remote sales team.
1. Support messaging alignment
Your sales team needs to tell a more compelling story than your competitors, but that’s difficult to do if it doesn’t match up with your marketing.
Ensuring sellers stay on-brand has always been a challenge, one made tougher when they’re working outside the office.
Comprehensive training and consistent reinforcement are necessary to prevent remote salespeople from going rogue during customer conversations or creating and sharing content that hasn’t been approved by your marketing team.
Optimize your efforts by creating bite-sized, interactive learning experiences, such as short videos followed by quizzes. This way you can routinely remind sellers of brand positioning and product messaging best practices while gaining visibility into their potential weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
With a dedicated dashboard for sellers to find and access the educational information they need, as well as a hub for managers to maintain oversight, you can ensure your sales team is always getting the right message across.
2. Improve content accessibility
Teaching salespeople when to use the right piece of content at the right time is half the battle.
The other half is making sure they can find and access it when the moment comes.
Ensure your remote team is spending more time selling and less time searching for content by creating one centralized location that allows sellers to discover, present and share the latest on-brand materials from anywhere.
In addition to making all content easily accessible for your salespeople, some content management systems can also help drive deals forward by highlighting different pieces of collateral based on AI-driven search results and recommendations.
Preventing salespeople from using outdated or inaccurate content is difficult enough when they’re in the office – make sure your remote sellers are sharing marketing-approved materials no matter where they are.
3. Prioritize sales coaching
Sales training isn’t a one-and-done affair.
Ongoing coaching not only helps turn mid-performers into top sellers, it demonstrates your organization’s commitment to employee success.
Of course, keeping remote sellers engaged and developing is easier said than done. You and your team may be used to face-to-face meetings and informal one-on-ones, but a remote salesforce means managers must prioritize coaching by leveraging available technology and scheduling regular meetings.
The first step is creating a manager hub where sales leaders can easily visualize how individual reps are progressing and drill down to determine where specific sales coaching may be most valuable.
Next, have remote sellers record practice sessions they can then submit for manager approval. Managers can provide coaching to individual sellers to help them improve, and reps themselves can see how they stack up against their peers (not to mention see firsthand how top performers pitch their sales presentations).
Remember: Face time is important whether your sellers are getting it in person or via video.
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4. Empower sellers to engage buyers
Today’s buyers are overwhelmed with information, and standard cold calls and emails don’t exactly cut through the noise.
If your remote sellers are going to make an impression, they need a way to quickly and easily personalize content for buyers, collaborate during conversations and bring conversations to life with interactive buyer experiences.
Invest in tools your sellers can use to organize and distribute content in visually engaging environments. Today’s technology allows salespeople to replace static email attachments with easy-to-navigate, fully brandable microsites that simplify complex selling scenarios and enable multiple stakeholders to quickly make decisions.
When in-person interactions aren’t an option, remote sellers need every edge they can get to articulate unique value and present themselves as trusted partners.
5. Enable sellers to deliver the best buying experience
Flesh-and-blood information gathering has been replaced by digital data.
And with the right analytics tools at their disposal, your sellers can see which pieces of content resonate with buyers and track their levels of interest.
Email opens, page-by-page content views, downloads and forwards all help your remote sellers personalize follow-up communications and tailor messaging to match buyer priorities, allowing them to shorten sales cycles and deliver a better buying experience that differentiates them from the competition.
SiriusDecisions reported that 82% of B2B buyers make purchases based on experience, ahead of price and product. If you want your remote sellers to provide exceptional experiences, help them optimize with insights.
In 2019, more than half of all employees around the world worked outside their main offices more than one-third of the time, according to the International Workplace Group.
That number is set to continue growing exponentially in 2020.
Whether in the office or working remotely, your sales team needs your support.
Check out some of Showpad’s other resources to set up your remote team for success, including our mobile learning and coaching guide, frontline sales manager report and on-demand sales coaching webinar.
