How Can Sales Teams Work from Home Successfully? 6 Customer Insights

Here at ConnectLeader, we’re in week seven of working from home to follow the COVID-19 pandemic mandate of non-essential businesses to physically close. In that time, I’ve been talking to our customers to learn how working from home has been going for them and what changes have been made to their processes, if any, to work from home successfully and keep their sales teams effective. Read on to learn how six of our customers are handling working from home and their tips to help you increase the strength of your sales team while you’re working from home.

Field Team Adjustments

Your B2B field sales team can’t exactly be out selling in person with PowerPoint display presentations on a large board anymore with the pandemic at hand. Due to that, one customer has transitioned their field sales team to now work from home as virtual sales people. This change has made their talking points different and their presentations more streamlined as the attention span is less for a virtual meeting by a computer versus an in-person meeting in a conference room.

Learn how ConnectLeader can help you successfully manage your B2B sales team while they're working from home. Read our blog.

Hold Daily Team Meetings

You can’t just pop over to a cube to see how your sales team is doing, but you can still keep abreast of outbound prospecting. One customer has implemented daily stand-up calls through Zoom to talk with their sales team about productivity. These meetings are kept short by purpose -- topping out at 30 minutes at most -- and are held separately for each geographical region: US, EMEA, and APAC to take time zones into consideration.

Fun Competition

With sales teams working from home, they don’t get the competition they’re used to by hearing about wins being made on the sales floor. So how do you, as a sales manager, keep your sales team motivated? One of our customers created a trivia event that’s held every week on their Monday Zoom sales call. For each meeting that’s set the week prior, that sales rep gets a guess at a trivia answer that could result in winning a Plum Gator mobile phone. If they don’t set any meetings that week, they can’t participate in the game.

Change Up Commissions

One way to help your sales team focus on the “wins” is to give them more incentive to set meetings. A sales manager at one of our customers told me they’ve made changes to their commission plan. Instead of the reps just receiving a commission on a signed deal, they now also receive a commission on each meeting that’s set.

More Research and Personalization

With lots of sales teams making more calls, you don’t want to sound like every other sales call. How can you make sure you’re sounding conversational instead of pitchy? One customer shifted their business development reps to an account-based model to further research and target leads. This helps to build more personalization into the sales outreach, including cold emails, cold calls, embedded videos in emails, texts, and social touches.

Pump Up the Gas with ConnectLeader

I, of course, loved hearing from customers that they’re taking this time to use ConnectLeader even more because they know that they want to send out even more sales cadence emails through TruCadence and follow up those emails at scale with our agent-assisted dialing solution, Team Dialer, in addition to managing their team through Remote Coach. Music to my ears, and it should be something any smart B2B sales manager should be considering.

Reach out to us here at ConnectLeader today to learn more about our multi-channel sales engagement solutions, including sales cadence software and phone dialers, can help you increase your sales productivity by up to 800%. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.