Struggling to manage your dispersed sales team?

Step 1. Provide adequate infrastructure –

Working from home requires basic infrastructure that may not be in place in your employees’ homes. While one employee may have blistering internet speeds due to an in-home gamer, another may have very basic service that struggles to provide reliable videoconference bandwidth. Survey your salespeople on their current internet and phone capabilities and, when necessary, pay to upgrade or add to their service so they can reliably work from home. Sales is hard enough, so why handicap your team for what amounts to a relatively small investment? In addition, ensure that your remote salespeople each have a quiet space to make calls that looks neat and tidy, regardless of whether it’s a kitchen table, bedroom or dedicated workspace.

Step 2. Rewrite your playbook 

The sales playbook you worked so hard to create for in-person operations is irrelevant. Remote management is entirely different and requires new sequencing, operations, support and processes. So don’t just modify your existing playbook: craft a new one from the ground up built for your current conditions.

Step 3. Rethink your value proposition 

A lot has changed in the post-pandemic world, including a very different economy. We are likely leaving behind a world of easy money and go-go deal-making for one of increased caution, austerity and risk-aversion. Does your value proposition reflect this new reality? If not, your salespeople risk looking tone-deaf, at best, and insensitive, at worst. Work through the potential economic and emotional states of prospects (including planning for the possibility that they or a family member is sick) and arm your team with value propositions that resonate for the current environment.

Step 4. Adopt new tools 

Your existing tools were probably chosen for a different work setup. Think about your new requirements as a distributed sales team vis-a-vis your phone system, sales tracking, sales support, paper flow, collateral management/distribution and more. Chances are good that there is an attractive solution for your new setup.

Step 5. Establish new daily routines

Everyone craves routine, and perhaps no one more so than salespeople. Work to quickly establish new routines and norms that match your culture—but that also recognize peoples’ unavoidable meshing of personal and private lives. Everyone understands if a child or pet sometimes decides to “assist” in a sales call, so embrace it and show a bit more latitude—and compassion—to your people.

Step 6. Monitor and correct

Military wisdom says that “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” and that will be true for your remote sales plan. Be flexible and build in a little time with your team each day to discuss process improvement ideas, value proposition tweaking or infrastructure challenges—enable your team to put anything on the table so long as they suggest an improvement. A culture where they see their jobs as not just doing the work, but improving it, will make their careers (and yours) more fulfilling.

As you progress, commit to one or two small changes each day, rather than wholesale, large changes. In fact, aim for a simple 1% improvement each day. This will allow you to exploit what Albert Einstein referred to as the eighth wonder of the world: compounding. The positive transformation over time will be dramatic.