Leading a remote sales team is easy. Here are some keys .....

Leading a remote sales team is easy. 

Here are some keys .....

Who better to lead a remote team than a sales manager?

Probably no one!

But nothing is business as usual – including managing a sales team remotely in the coronavirus era.

Sales leaders want to rethink their remote management approaches and try new strategies to help salespeople in an environment where they sell virtually more than ever.

Here are nine tactics, tools and strategies sales leaders will want to adopt when managing a team remotely. Even better, they’re all helpful when you’re working together, too.

Create (or revamp) a communication plan

Clear, consistent communication is the key to making remote management work. You may need to increase the degree of interaction you have with salespeople and other colleagues because the quality of interactions almost always drops when done virtually.

Experts at Harvard Business School  a strategy like this:

1. Tally the number of weekly check-ins with salespeople, meetings with colleagues and calls with customers you normally have.
2. Determine the best way to hold those meetings in the remote setting – Zoom, Slack, Skype, video call, phone call. Consider the communication tool preferences of the other person or people involved, too.
3. Use a word document, Google Sheet, calendar, Excel chart to create a comprehensive plan for each type of meeting. Include at least four columns for these priorities: Mode of communication, meeting cadence, agenda, participants.
4.  Use some old and build new best practices. You’ll likely want to revamp size of and time allotted to meetings because virtual meetings are more effective with fewer participants and less time. Perhaps you can turn status meetings into a status report. Maybe you’ll want to stick with the same number of check-ins and agenda for each.
5. Focus on quality. Frequency and length are less important for remote meetings. Meet with a driven purpose, agenda and clarity on what discussed, accomplished and needs to be completed.

Practice the softer side of management

Sales leaders  need to shorten goals or soften expectations when their team transitions into more remote work. But you do want to amp up the human side of management. Nearly two-thirds of employees say they’re OK with their boss asking about their mental health, the HBS researchers found. They want you to ask how they’re dealing with the circumstances that drove them home and the new remote working situation.

Some may not want to share anything, but some will feel and perform better when they know their boss cares about their well-being.

Don’t lose sight of the big picture

It’s easy to feel disconnected from the company and its mission when you don’t walk in the door and work close with colleagues every day. So when managing a remote sales team, you want to help salespeople stay connected to the company and keep sight of the big picture.

From time to time, step away from talking about operations (completed tasks, next steps, metrics, etc.) and meet with your team to talk about strategy – ideas on improving your business model, reevaluating your selling cycle, revamping your value proposition or increasing customer engagement.

Similarly, carve out time to strengthen the company and/or sales team culture. When teams are apart, they still want to feel connected to each other and the company mission. In group virtual meetings, let salespeople talk about wins – sales-focused, professional or personal. Tie bright spots to company’s mission when appropriate. Regularly pull together those triumphs into an email message for the team, a social post or blog.

Scrub your data

The data your salespeople use to make decisions needs to as accurate and up-to-date as ever. In a remote situation, salespeople rely on CRM data more to determine their approach to a sale, how to advise prospects and how to manage their quota expectations. And clean data is essential for leaders to set proper goals, recognize needs for quota relief or redesign/restructure compensation.

Ask salespeople to set aside time every week to review the data they entered, making sure contacts, next steps, identified opportunities and objectives are as they should be. Same goes for leaders: Double check their data and validate information to align funnel reviews.

Get specific

While it’s important to coach and console a bit while managing remotely, sales leaders also need to tell salespeople exactly what they need to do. 

Many salespeople have never sold through a crisis. And even those who have faced a different crisis. 

Recommend specific approaches and actions, sharing more detail than usual when you talk about where to focus efforts. You don’t have to demand, but you want to give guidance through the sales funnel similar to when salespeople were learning. This detailed approach should help them be more productive and see better results, according to researchers at Miller Heiman Group. 

Emphasize quality

Many salespeople realized success when the economy was booming. They reached and surpassed goals based on quantity. That might not be possible going forward, so sales leaders want to spend more remote time coaching salespeople on how to improve the quality of interactions and prospecting.

What can salespeople do remotely to go the extra mile for customers? What can you do to help both salespeople and customers to improve experiences? 

Keep salespeople engaged

Salespeople won’t lose their work ethic and talent just because they aren’t working as close as before. But It’s more difficult to feel connected to colleagues and the meaning in their work when you all aren’t physically together. 

To keep salespeople engaged:

• Maintain a regular cadence. You likely won’t need to micromanage from a distance. But you do want to check in regularly, treating them the same as always.
• Be flexible. Everyone’s demands shift when they have to work remotely – including sales leaders. Schedule meetings well in advance so salespeople can prepare. And allow flexibility for when and how they get their work done.
• Recognize efforts. People working remotely and under stress can start to feel isolated and unrecognized. You want to regularly remind them of the positive impact their work has on your organization and thank them for all they continue to do. 
• Create a virtual water cooler. Either set up group virtual meetings on platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet or let salespeople set up their own just for social purposes. Perhaps they can have lunch or end-of-week happy hour together. Sharing stories, commiserating and passing along best practices helps keep them engaged and motivated.
• Give them a break. Salespeople need a hard break from work when they work remotely (so do you, leaders). Don’t reach out to them or expect them to respond after hours.
• Encourage them to exercise mind and body. You might suggest they walk during their usual commute times. Or give them links to free virtual Yoga classes. Direct them to online professional and personal development classes.
• Build on existing camaraderie through social things such as virtual social hours, book clubs, meditation groups, art sharing clubs, music performances and fitness challenges.

Reevaluate roles

If your sales team has worked remotely exclusively or partially, they might already be successful in their roles. But when people – including managers and leaders – move into a distanced situation, you might need to adjust responsibilities, expectations and even the role itself.

When you have one-on-one discussions with remote sales employees, ask questions like these:

• How are things going for you working in these circumstances?
• What challenges are you running into?
• What else do you need to be successful?
• Do you have successes or new best practices to share with the team?
• How can I, or the team, help you succeed?

Take note of each person’s strengths and weaknesses – those you identify and those each of them admit. Look for areas where you can shift responsibilities and areas where it’d be smart to invest in training. Either way, frame the suggestions or changes as opportunities for growth. You want salespeople to succeed in any environment, so putting them situations where they can do their best remotely should be a welcomed change.

Use the opportunity to improve the future

Sales leaders who were thrust into managing remotely can use the experience to improve operations when things return to the new normal. 

Ask yourself:

• How fluid is our sales process? Were salespeople able to quickly adapt to the new situation? Or were they caught up in formal processes that delayed their responsiveness to customers and prospects?
• How adaptable is our content? Could salespeople pull what they needed when and where they needed content and other sales enablement tools? Did they have value propositions that adjusted for the evolving markets?
• What existing best practices worked in the remote selling and managing situation? What new practices do we need to adopt?

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AI Didn’t Replace Me, It Made Me a Better Sales Rep

When we think of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s a very cool concept, both Siri and Alexa live alongside us, performing Google searches and turning on our lights via voice, just like a human assistant would. Teslas are driving and parking themselves, and all this innovation raises eyebrows while making life easier.

But if AI is removing the human element from life, won’t it eventually replace me and my sales job?

The business world is looking for outlets to leverage AI in order to add a new element of “intelligence” to their arsenal to make more effective business decisions.

By recording and analyzing the sales conversations across my sales process, it surfaces insights like my talk-to-listen ratio, when and how my competitors are mentioned on calls, details into my playbook, and much, much more.

So while I totally understand, and reluctantly accept, that AI may swoop some jobs up in the coming years – I do not see it replacing the role of a B2B account executive. In fact, it’s proven to augment my approach, making me more effective and savvy towards my craft.

Here are three ways AI has made me more effective on my demos:

I Improved My Talk-To-Listen Ratio.

There’s a common misconception among sellers that the more they talk, the more value they are delivering. In reality, it’s the opposite. If I can listen during majority of the call, then I can detect my prospect’s needs, plus get to the true source of their business pain and quantify it. This is a key attribute that separates the true sales pros from the rest.

In practice, it’s easy to latch onto a single pain point the prospect mentions, immediately jumping to a feature and dumping “value.”

But true value needs to be mutual, and that’s only done once your prospect confirms that what you’re showing them aligns perfectly with what they’re attempting to solve. Otherwise, it’s just product.

Few moments have been more interesting in my career than getting smacked in the face with data touting my 72% talk time. This is not to discredit me as a seller, just a crisp wake-up call that there’s room for improvement. Even more-so, using AI in sales pointed me to a very specific area prime for improvement. So with this data, I made a conscious effort to listen more, and the best way to do that is…

I Ask Better Questions.

I found that the number of questions isn’t the differentiator. In fact, it’s the appearance of open-ended questions that makes the difference. Opportunities with more open-ended questions converted at a higher rate. Tracking the use of these questions – typically starting with “Tell me how…” or “What’s the impact of…”  lead to my audience telling me their story in-depth.

Knowing the problem, the source, and the consequences arms me to make my demo unforgettable. I’m not “showing you how,” I’m telling a story, your story with my solution.

By mastering open-ended questions while spreading out questions asked across my demo, I’m ensuring an engaging conversation for the full 45 minutes, leaving an impact on my audience.

Pairing a listen-first approach with open-ended questions is how…

I Fine-Tuned My Playbook.

By analyzing the context of my discussions, it breaks down when I’m talking about features versus value, small talk or business overview, and pricing and nexts steps. With data depicting what I talk about, for how long, and even where in the conversation – I can see my playbook.

I saw that Artificial intelligence is the most common topic I discuss on demos. And it’s usually at the 12-minute mark of my demo. Makes sense, it’s what we do.

But it’s a feature. Value selling isn’t feature selling, so I knew that my conversations were lead by how we do it instead of what we solve. Good to know, and now I can refine my talk track to focus more on business outcomes and storytelling.

The product demo is a pivotal part of every SaaS sales process. Not because show-and-tell is crucial, but because it’s where value is established and validated.

The human element will forever be the art of B2B sales, but adding AI will impact your abilities.

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NINE unveiled elements Of Highly Effective Sales Conversations

Sales conversations are what make your top-performing reps so good at selling. But not everyone is clear on that.

Maybe you assume they’re just naturally talented. That the best salespeople are born, not made — which is great news for them, but not so good for your B and C players (or for you, unless you have a never-ending pipeline of A players to hire.)

Maybe you think every great rep has something different going for him or her. One is fantastic at building rapport, while another is a skilled negotiator.

Both of those theories are popular among sales managers. However, neither are true.

There’s only one thing dividing your rainmakers from their less successful peers: Their sales conversations.

We used A.I. to analyze more than 1 million sales calls, and here’s what we found the best reps doing again and again.

elements of effective sales conversations

1. Dictate The Rhythm Of Your Sales Conversations

It’s common wisdom in the sales world to “mirror” your prospect — in other words, subtly imitate their way of speaking, tone, and body language to make yourself seem similar, and thus, more trustworthy.

Yet it turns out the most persuasive salespeople actually use the opposite approach. Rather than copying their prospects’ talking speed, they get their prospects to copy theirs. Top salespeople get customers to adjust their rate by 13% on average, all within the first three minutes of the call.

Average performers, on the other hand, adjust their speed by 7% to meet the prospect, while the prospect barely changes.

The same trend holds for “sentiment” patterns (i.e., how positive or negative someone’s language is.) Top reps don’t become more or less positive to match their prospect’s sentiment. On the contrary, their prospects become more or less positive to align with them.

2. Dictate The Agenda Of Your Sales Conversation

When reps discuss certain topics, it can have a big impact on their win rates. Especially when it comes to pricing, which is often one of the most loaded parts of the sales call.

It turns out star reps all tend to bring up price at the same time: in the 38-46-minute window.

This makes sense  — waiting until you’ve established the value of your solution usually leads to more favorable terms.

3. Use Powerful Language During Sales Conversations

Not all words are created equal. There are seven words that we’ve found high-performing reps use on call after call.

These words include:

Imagine: This jumpstarts the prospect’s imagination and increases their desire for the product

Successful: Who doesn’t want to succeed at their job or in life? This term is incredibly compelling to potential buyers.

The prospect’s name: Everyone loves the sound of their own name — it makes them feel important and respected.

Decisive language: Words like “definitely,” “certainly,” and “we can do that” demonstrate confidence and make the salesperson seem more authoritative.

Risk-reversal language — or statements that put prospects at ease like “We offer a 30-day no obligation trial — also improve win rates by 32%.

4. Employ Therapist-Grade Listening Skills

The truth is, selling is far more about listening than talking. Top performers boast a 46:54 talk-to-listen ratio, meaning they speak less than 50% of the time.

Average performers, by contrast, talk 68% of the time. And low performers speak even more — a mind-numbing 72% of the conversation.

By letting customers speak up more, and not jumping in as soon as they pause, reps discover valuable information, forge stronger connections, and avoid rambling or talking themselves out of a deal.

5. Make Your Sales Conversations Feel Like You’re In A Coffee Shop

No one likes feeling like a suspect in an FBI investigation. Especially when they’re trying to evaluate a B2B solution.

The data backs this up. Top salespeople engage in back-and-forth conversations rather than throwing question after question at their prospects.

When reps and customers frequently take turns speaking, the chances of a second meeting increase.

6. Set Landmines Early In Your Sales Conversations

This data point might seem counterintuitive. If the competition is discussed early in the sales process (think the first 1-2 stages), the deal is 49% likelier to close than if the competition never came up at all.

This is because you’re winning the competitive war early on — while the prospect is still forming their conclusions.

The opposite effect occurs if the competition comes up in the middle or end of the sales cycle: the odds of closing go down.

That’s why the best salespeople make it a point to ask “Who else are you considering” early on, so they can get ahead of their competitors.

7. Team Selling Improves Sales Conversations

Lone wolves don’t prosper in sales.

Deals that contain just one sales call with multiple participants from the selling organization are 258% more likely to close than deals where the rep flew solo during the entire sales cycle.

In other words, team selling works.

For that reason, top-performing salespeople are in the habit of recruiting their CEO, sales manager, sales engineer, or other relevant stakeholder to join them on their sales calls.

After all, this tells the prospect the rep is “all in” — and also lets them deepen their understanding of the product and vendor.

8. Make Your Sales Conversations About Business, Not Features

The reps at the top of the leaderboard spend more time talking about business- and value-related subjects than average performers. A lot more — to the tune of 52% more time.

Subjects in this category include ROI, the prospect’s pain points and business environment, timeline and objectives, implementation, and benefits (vs. features.)

They also spend 39% less time talking about technical topics and features.

9. Keep Your Sales Demos Focused

If your reps are getting a ton of questions during their demos, that’s a very good signal. Top performers get nearly one-third more questions from buyers during product demos than middle of the pack performers.

And these reps also ask 30% fewer questions of their buyers during demos. Why? They’re giving prospects just enough information to spark their curiosity. Just enough to provoke questions.

Then prospects ask questions about what they’re interested in… which nicely focuses the conversation and guarantees they’re engaged.

This technique lets the best reps keep their demo hyper-focused to the topics each buyer cares about.

 

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Six Entrepreneurship Myths to Leave Behind in 2021

1. Find your niche.

Choose a category and find your niche seems like solid advice for new entrepreneurs. But this strategy won't help you win market share according to Nicolas Cole, the founder of Digital Press.

"The biggest myth in business is that the best path forward is to enter a proven category and then try to 'find your niche.' This is flawed on multiple levels.

For one, data shows that category kings (companies that create or successfully redesign a category for themselves) are rewarded with two-thirds of the economics of the category. And as the category grows, so too will their leadership position. (Think: Tesla, Apple, Amazon, and Shopify).

When you walk into someone else's existing category, you're in the business of chasing market share. So you'll never build a meaningful leadership position in the category—and won't reap the rewards you're after.

Second, you don't 'find your niche.' This is the danger of using words like 'product-market fit' to describe how a company should 'find demand.' In reality, the most successful businesses create their niche (their own category) and as a result, create demand by educating customers on a new and radically different way forward.

Creating something unique and new, instead of competing over something proven and established, is the best business strategy."

2. Strong teams meet in person.

Companies have made major pivots since the pandemic with fully remote teams, budget cuts, and at-home perks. Shireen Jaffer, the founder and CEO of Edvo, recently rebuilt her team and has advice for businesses looking to bring on new people.

"Many entrepreneurs believe that they need to create a tight-knit team, where they interview potential team members in-person and build a team where everyone comes together for in-person retreats and bonding events.

I'm proud to say that I haven't met 80% of my current team in-person, yet we work incredibly well together. After 2020, I no longer think that interviewing and meeting every potential team member in-person is a requirement.

A tight-knit team isn't only a result of in-person time. If you lean into virtual team building and recruiting, you have more options for finding strong and aligned team members."

3. Profits come first.

A company won't last long without money coming in. But the process you use to get that profit matters more than you think, says the founder of ShoppingGives, Ronny Sage.

"Based on our business, what I have seen in discussions with other entrepreneurs is that profits need to be established before purpose. This is not true, especially in 2021.

Every entrepreneur should start with why and what is the outcome their business brings to society. At ShoppingGives, we center this around four key pillars: the team, community, customer, and product.

A business with a built-in purpose is 80% more likely to outperform the market. And when consumers think a brand has a strong purpose, they are 4.5 times more likely to champion the company and recommend it to friends and family."

4. Do whatever it takes to survive.

From distilleries making disinfectant to pharmacies offering delivery services, the pandemic forced many businesses to pivot. Flexibility is crucial as a founder, but some compromises aren't worth the risk.

The founder of Photographers Without Borders, Danielle Khan Da Silva, shared her thoughts. "A myth is that because we're in a pandemic, we can't stay true to our values. This is an opportunity to strengthen our core values, especially as founders and organizations."

Da Silva explained at the start of the pandemic, her team looked to their Code of Ethics in order to make strategic decisions. They paused their overseas assignments and pivoted to new online resources in order to better serve community members. By taking a proactive approach that focuses on strengthening core values, companies can craft strategies that unite teams and customers.

5. Find work/life balance.

Putting all of your energy into your venture seems essential for your company to survive. But recent studies about entrepreneur burnout and mental health issues put pressure on founders to find the perfect work-life balance. Samantha Radocchia, Co-founder of LOVE, shares why every entrepreneur needs to drop this myth.

"Before the events of the past year, I strongly believed in the separation of work and leisure, work and family, work and life. When we look at history, the dichotomy between work and leisure is simply a myth that has arisen from capitalist ideology—it's the idea that there are times where we are productive and times when we are not.

This year, I've seen my accountant sitting in his basement in a sweatshirt, my co-workers' children and significant others, new babies, puppies, locations, and everything in between.

This is life. This is also work. It's real, it's raw, and it's beautiful (though perhaps not always as efficient). Work-life is a spectrum, not a dichotomy. The businesses that learn to work within this new paradigm will continue to thrive, as remote or flex work is here to stay."

6. Stick to your plan.

Every entrepreneur knows the value of a strong business development plan. After spending months laying out your strategy for the product, brand, and go-to-market tactics, any change might feel risky for new business owners.

First-time founder and CEO of Lumiere Sciences Erin McConlogue, had to put aside this entrepreneurship myth when starting her venture.

"Business schools emphasize market research prior to launching a company. It's a myth to think you can create exactly what you plan. Instead, see what people need and create that. I believe creativity and courage are more valuable in today's business landscape."

Every founder needs advice, support, and tenacity to make their company succeed. By doing away with these entrepreneurship myths, you can focus on the information that helps move your business forward.

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