3 Steps to Effectively Managing a Remote Sales Team

This article was originally published by Sales-Initiative.com.

Workforces are becoming increasingly remote – making it much harder for sales leaders to effectively manage and track the performance of their teams.

Traditionally, managers have gained their field intelligence from monthly reviews, ad hoc check-ins, and possibly inaccurate CRM data. However, with the increase in the number of remote workers, sales leaders are need a system that can accurately measure rep and customer interactions in a widely dispersed working environment.

Here are 3 steps to help sales leaders more effectively manage their remote sales team.

Step 1: Close the visibility gap

Whether you have a centralised or decentralised team, it is very challenging to track sales activities. However, recent technology advances mean sales leadership has historical and/or comparative data at their disposal to better coach, uncover issues, and establish benchmarks that are predicable of success.

To do this, you need to ask yourself: “Are you able to accurately measure your team’s daily call activity?”

Today’s technology has evolved and it’s now possible to easily capture sales rep telephone activity from any phone or carrier.

Once you can take a transparent look inside your team’s activity, it might be a shock to discover what is happening compared to what you thought was happening; what you have been told was happening; or what CRM reported was happening.

Step 2: Set minimum performance standards

If you want to grow your top line systematically, relying on manually generated reports or overly hopeful input from your reps’ CRM entries to measure call activity is no longer adequate (and maybe never was).

With automated, real-time and 100% accurate data, you will have a baseline of minimum performance and the knowledge to set realistic expectations for your team and manage to that expectation.

At Gryphon, we’ve captured phone-based sales activity from some of the largest sales organisations worldwide. and found several key performance indicators that are truly predictive of success:

• The total number of calls a rep makes
• Conversation conversion (contact-to-close)
• Call frequency (persistence) of the reps
• How many times they are reaching out to their leads before they are “exhausted”.

If you focus on (first) understanding and (then) improving these metrics, you will be amazed at how quickly it impacts your sales team’s effectiveness and your revenue – and how sustainable it will be if you keep it up over time.

For example, if you manage a team of 50 agents and each agent is required to make 20 calls per day, for the 22 calling days per month, that’s a total of 440 calls monthly.

By tracking your team’s activity, you know it takes an average of 30 calls to set one appointment, that’s about 15 appointments a single rep is setting per month.

If the rep has a 20% conversion rate, that translates into three closed appointments. If the average deal size is £1,075 ($1,500), than that rep’s average monthly revenue will be £3,155 ($4,400).

Step 3: Coach through analytics

Once you have an accurate standard against which to measure your team’s performance – and set benchmarks to follow – what’s next?

Identify the behaviours of your top and bottom performers, and get an understanding for how they are succeeding – or how they are struggling. Use their behaviours as teaching opportunities for your team.

Train your bottom performers with the techniques your top performers use to win over prospects. Not only are you able to coach to proven standards, but you will decrease on-boarding times for new employees.

Having rich data at your fingertips enables sales leaders to set expectations for incoming reps and sets the bar high for the proven, repeatable calling activities that will lead to success.

By Gryphon Networks, a real-time cloud-based sales and marketing effectiveness SaaS company that helps customers capture and control phone activity to improve sales management and productivity.

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