7 Strategies to Boost Remote Sales Productivity in 2022

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Your business growth is directly related to your remote sales team’s productivity. If your sales team is productive, you will sell more products and services in less time. As a result, customer acquisition cost will be lower, and profit will be higher. Now, a question comes – how will you improve sales productivity?

First of all, you should know where your team stands productivity-wise in your demographic area. A tool like timedoctor’s productivity benchmarking tool can help you do that. Once you get the numbers, you can make a plan to boost sales productivity. 

In this article, we will explore why your sales team performs poorly and tips and strategies you can employ to improve your remote team’s performance. 

What Kills Remote Sales Productivity?

The following are among the significant factors that affect remote sales teams’ productivity:

1- Complex Workflow

A complex sales workflow creates many problems in lead tracking, data management and other essential processes. While technology can help address some concerns, a broken workflow ultimately affects team effort and sales targets.

2- Repetitive Tasks

Repetitive and manual tasks wear salespeople down. Those can lead to miscommunication, errors and unwanted delays. Manual processes also slow the overall pipeline, thus affecting sales reps’ efficiency.

3- Lack of Communication

Remote teams often have fewer message interchanges than their office counterparts. They also are less connected with other departments in the company. This lack of communication can lead to unnecessary confusion and interruption.

4- Inefficient Collaboration

Remote team members have different devices at their disposal. They have other favorites regarding productivity and collaboration tools. Such varied setups increase the complexity, resulting in an inefficient collaboration.

5- Stringent Working Hours

Employees working remotely need some flexibility in order to perform optimally. If you have stringent working hours without any touch of flexibility, it can affect your team’s productivity. 

Seven Strategies to Boost Your remote Sales Teams’ Productivity

The following seven strategies can make your sales people more productive:

1- Create the Ideal Customer Persona

The ideal persona helps salespeople understand who to target. It answers why a prospect should be your prospect. What’s more, it helps in qualifying the prospects early.

Having a customer persona reduces the amount of futile chasing. It also enables your team to personalize calls and messages and close more deals.

Your goal is to know what your customers have in common. The process starts with gathering essential information and insights around demographics. Then, you dive deep into their industry, interests and traits, which can influence their buying behavior.

2- Build an Effective Sales Playbook

Often sales reps get busy prospecting without pausing and pondering over the process. A disorderly to-do list can be a giant productivity killer in such a scenario. Your remote sales employees can lose prospects in the absence of appropriate steps to close the deal.

So you must provide them with a roadmap with clear guidelines and strategies. Create easy-to-read flowcharts and CRM templates to straighten the entire sales process.

A detailed sales playbook can help. It outlines the sales processes and provides the workflow to navigate the sales cycle. It ensures sales reps make the right moves at the correct times. It is also a good idea to provide team members with short manual guides on how to fix minor hardware or software issues (i.e. clean up computer when it works slow).

3- Set Clear and Realistic Metrics

Remote sales members don’t get to interact as often as they would in an office. So it’s good to focus on smooth communication and collaboration among the sales team.

Whether someone needs to focus on closing more deals or repeat sales, they should have clarity. Without distinct KPIs, they may struggle to align with your expectations. You must assign them individual tasks and responsibilities.

Assigning appropriate and accurate measurable KPIs is essential. Setting realistic goals and tracking them is the key to reaching your sales goals faster and increasing productivity. It also helps them follow your company’s vision.

4- Automate Sales Processes

Sales executives have numerous administrative tasks to handle within tight schedules. So automation can help them close deals faster and avoid burnout. An automated workflow can take some stress off their shoulders. As a result, they will have more time to concentrate on essential tasks.

With a tool like CRM, your sales team can automate and manage critical tasks within one central dashboard and have access to essential information they need and coordinate from wherever they’re. It saves them time, money, and effort and gives them better insights into the sales cycle.

You can even integrate your sales pipeline with other processes. Automation, if used strategically, can streamline the entire lead generation and sales conversion process right from the beginning.

5- Train Remote Team for Collaboration

Remote collaboration is different from an office-based work environment (of course, if you don’t use the virtual office services). It runs on digital tools, such as time clock softwares, task planners, project trackers and communication applications. A seamless collaboration also needs the efficient use of calendars, crm and sales prospecting tools.

The complexity grows when the employees have to work across time zones. So, training is essential to facilitate real-time collaboration.

Training can have a substantial impact on overall team efficiency and productivity. With proper training, remote collaboration tools can help remote sales teams communicate better. Consequently, they can share data faster and drive more sales.

6- Show Appreciation on Reaching Targets

Remote sales reps work alone. Thus, a word or two of appreciation keeps them motivated and can boost sales productivity of the entire team. What’s more, doing so can make your remote sales team members feel valued.  

Appreciating your team often cultivates a sense of being connected and inspires loyalty. Even compliments for showing up for the conferencing amidst the chaos is effective.

Incentives to reach targets, company-wide recognition, and constructive feedback are many ways to show your appreciation. 

Giving them a break for the day is another way to go. You can also invest in their upskilling and learning. Your small gesture of appreciation can go a long way in boosting remote sales productivity. 

7- Promote Healthy Work-life Balance

Remote sales team members feel difficulty separating personal life from work life. So providing them with opportunities to manage their work- life can be a game changer. 

One of the best things you can do is to let them enjoy flexible working if your business can allow it. As long as they maintain performance and meet their goals, it should be fine to let them work the way they want to.

Encouraging your remote sales team members to take breaks and engage in healthy habits are other ways to help them maintain their work-life balance.

A team with a healthy work-life balance is happy and ready to go the extra mile.

­­­­Conclusion

Your remote sales team is the growth engine of your business. So you should make it a priority to remove hurdles your team members face in their day-to-day work. The above-mentioned strategies, if you implement them smartly, can certainly improve your team’s performance and accelerate your business growth. If you have a multigenerational sales team, these seven tips can increase sales of your multigenerational team.