Transitioning your team to be remote? Whether this is a temporary or permanent change there are things you should do as a manager to ensure you keep or increase your teams’ productivity and engagement. The biggest mistake you can make as a manager is to assume that nothing will change. Working remotely IS different from being in an office, managing remote workers IS different from managing in an office. Read the suggestions below to make sure you are preparing your team to thrive while being remote.
5 ways to be a great sales leader while your team is remote:
Make daily performance expectations incredibly clear. Everyone on your team should not only know their goal(s) but also the daily and weekly activity you expect them to be doing to reach their goal. Hopefully, this is already a part of your sales culture but you may want to think about how to continuously over-communicate those expectations while your team is given more autonomy.
A great way to keep daily performance expectations front and center is to have your team send you a daily goal and recap message. For my team, this message also serves as their sign-on and sign-off notification (two birds with one stone).
First thing each day have your team send you a message that answers the following questions:
1) Will you hit your KPIs?
2) What are you focused on?
3) What can I help you with?
In the evening (as they are signing off for the day) have your team send you a message that answers the following questions:
1) What were your goals vs actuals on your daily KPIs?
2) What accomplishment do you want to share?
3) What can I help you with?
If this feels like overkill, you can also adapt this to a weekly cadence.
You may want to adopt a daily checklist that outlines the daily activities you expect your sales team to perform. What sales activities should they be doing daily and at what time in the day (morning, afternoon, EOD)? Have your team members help you co-create this list so it doesn’t feel micromanaged. You can also ask your team members to use the checklist for a few weeks during the transition or for new and underperformers.
2. Rethinking how to recognize top performance. In the office, do you go over and give your team member a high-five when they close a deal? Whether it’s a high-five or some other small show of appreciation, those mini celebrations are significant to the team. Your salesperson gets afuzzy feeling of appreciation and it lights a small fire under the rest of the team that sees it happen. How will you replicate that feeling when remote?
A few ideas for quick recognition:
Set the expectation that your team ‘reply all’ to any win celebration email or notifications. Ask that everyone on your team participate (if it’s not too large) by sending a quick note to celebrate the win and the sales rep who made the sale.
Record a quick video of yourself congratulating a closed sale and send it to the team.
In virtual team meetings, have each salesperson who closed a deal tell the rest of the team how they did it. Who is the customer? How did you close? What obstacles did you overcome? Leave time for questions and a mini-celebration.
As the leader of your sales team, keep a physical scoreboard on paper or a white board. Send a picture or video of yourself updating it with the new win.
Send your team home with a mini-bell, an ‘easy’ button or a blowout noise maker (like you use on NYE) and have them record their mini celebration.
3. Communicate about communicating. In my experience, when transitioning a team to go remote or really with any big changes at a company, conflict or frustration happens when expectations are not clear. Most people do not want to ‘break the rules’ and unclear ‘rules’ or expectations can lead to your team members not feeling safe which can affect productivity and engagement. To combat this, you should be overly clear on operating expectations. In the above example, having your team reply all to an email notifying a win, tell them clearly WHAT you expect and WHY you expect it — “Team, I expect everyone to reply all to every win notification to congratulate the salesperson who got the sale. This shows me that you are tracking our team progress and shows your support. Think of it as a virtual high-five!”
Consider making a ‘cheat sheet’ that tells your team the appropriate way to communicate (video call, phone call, email, slack message, text…) and, when applicable, the expected response time and structure to the conversation. Below are some communication touch points you may want to think through.
1:1 meetings
Team meetings
Urgent and important questions/approvals
Non-urgent question/approvals
Sign-on and sign-offs for the day
Coaching and feedback
Pipeline movement
Daily KPIs and progress to goals
4. Rethink your tools. You are probably already working with a variety of sales tools. In this new environment you need to think about how you will adapt your current tools and if any additional needs come up that you may want to fill. I suggest starting with the basics when thinking about the tools your team may need when adapting to a remote environment.
Start with three basic needs:
Team communication (Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts, Whatsapp)
Customer relationship management (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho)
Project management (Asana, Trello, Monday.com).
As a manager, run through your daily list of tasks, communication points and the flow of information you and your team needs. Assign the tool you are using in the above situation and decide if the process needs tweaked in your new environment. If you think you need to adopt new tools, there are plenty of online resources to help you choose the right ones for your team. 5. Be open. A seamless transition to running a remote team isn’t going to happen overnight. Talk to your team about the shared goal of being as or more productive and why that is important to them, the team and the company. Ask your team members what they need to be successful and lean on team members who have worked remotely. If your team feels like a co-creater in making remote work work then they will likely be invested in a successful roll out. Create a focus group to meet once a month to assess what’s working and what’s not or send a feedback survey. Don’t assume you got it 100% right off the bat. Being vulnerable and open to feedback as a manager is always a smart move but it is especially important when your team is going through a big transition. — — — — — — — In my experience, running a remote sales team can be incredibly rewarding to both your team members and the company. As a leader, don’t think you need to compromise on anything! You WILL need to adapt but shouldn’t expect any less of your team. In fact, in many ways you can expect more. If your team feels you truly trust them to work remotely incredible results are possible. Good luck!! You got this.
Written by
Stephanie Gogul Blackburn
Certified Public Coach specializing in sales, leadership coaching https://stephaniegogul.wixsite.com/coaching @on.the.gogo