5 Tips for Building a Remote Sales Team In today's day and age, companies are tasked with the difficult challenge of building a remote sales team. Learn how to build a remote sales team that'll take your business to the next level.
By Sean Boyle Edited by Micah Zimmerman
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's nearly 2023, and people are working remotely most of the time now, which wasn't the case just a couple of years ago! It's a fascinating time, which brings its own pros and cons to the table, especially for leaders looking to build a remote sales team.
It can be challenging, but it's one of the best ways to create more leads for your business. You're allowing people to work from home, have less stress and grow your company all at the same time!
Related: 5 Expert-Backed Strategies for Hiring Top-Quality Talent for Your Startup
1. Finding the right people
This is a challenge for every employer, but it doesn't have to be for you; you're reading this article! What you should look for in finding the "right" salespeople is:
- Impeccable character. Someone who truly cares about growing the company and its values, not just about them making big money with you.
- Coachable. Someone who can take direction without ego and make the correct decision in the future.
- Quick thinker. Someone who while on a cold call or demo call can think quickly on their feet to handle objections in order to close the deal.
We also recommend posting all of your jobs through LinkedIn, as you're able to see multiple sides of an applicant to make sure that they're even worth having an interview in the first place.
2. Expectations
"You're going to make calls and sell our product." Those aren't expectations. That's a recipe for disaster. To create a sales team worth growing, you need to set clear expectations for your team of what they can expect for a day in the life of a salesperson in your company.
We recommend telling your team, "you'll be required to adhere to your weekly quota. If you do not hit quota for two weeks in a row, you get put on a PIP (performance improvement plan) until you make up the lost ground. If within two weeks of not hitting their PIP, they are officially fired."
You need to give clear expectations to all of our salespeople because we expect a level of excellence from everyone. This is a business and should be treated as such. As corporate as that sounds, it'll save you so much time and money from giving clear expectations upfront to ensure you have the right people understanding the expectations you need them to.
Related: 3 Steps to Help Employees Understand Your Objectives and Expectations
3. Onboarding and training
One of the things that most entrepreneurs don't do enough is train, train and then train some more! As dull and mundane as it sounds, it works! Here is an example onboarding process for an entire week:
- Three daily meetings (30 mins each) discussing procedures, technology, questions, pitching, etc.
- Listen to five successful cold calls and five successful demo calls
- A successful cold call is when a random prospect agrees to have a meeting
- A successful demo call is when the lead agrees to work with your company
After the onboarding week goes by and they're confident they'll succeed, they can make calls for our company at the agreed-upon schedule. Quota is understood as calling a certain number of people a day. Of those calls, they need to set a certain number of demos per day, and of those specific numbers of demos, they need to close a certain number of demos into clients each week.
4. Daily communication
Once your sales rep has been with your company for a period of time, you need to prioritize daily communication between management and your team to ensure maximum efficiency. Once per day, we recommend meeting for an hour to go over:
- Call recordings
- Objection handling
- Scripts
- New ideas
- Current vision + culture
- Standard operating procedure
It's imperative to meet with your team at least once daily to understand what's going on with your company. Left to their own devices, your team will slowly make mistakes and not be nearly as sharp as you need them to be.
Related: 4 Ways Remote Communication Is Making For a Better Workplace
5. Scaling
Last but not least, learning how to scale the team. So, you have a small team, but they're crushing it, and you're looking to onboard more people. How does an entrepreneur do that to the best of their ability? The best answer to this is to ask your people who are doing great already to see who they know in their immediate circle that would be interested in growing with the team. They need to be a great culture fit!
If that doesn't work, I'd recommend starting from what you're currently doing all over again! As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," which is especially true here. Never forget to continue to do the boring work, as the masters never forget to do the basics.
Related: I Created a College Atmosphere At My Company. Here Are 3 Ways It Increased Employee Retention
