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As a sales manager, you need to work with, train, and be a coach for your sales team, including your inside sales reps (ISRs), sales development reps (SDRs), and business development reps (BDRs). Sure, the best scenario would be to work with them in person by sitting in their cube and being on calls with them, but that’s not always doable, especially now with most employees working from home. Read on to learn how you can coach your team from wherever you are, even in real-time, and how to trust your team to work from home.
It’s All About Trust
First, yes, you should TRUST the people you hired to perform at their best whether they’re at the office or at home. But I understand there’s uncertainty throughout the world with Coronavirus (COVID-19), and that includes whether people are going to take working from home as a staycation/slacking off day.
Learn how to train your B2B sales team to have better conversations. Read our blog.
With that said, you should allow your sales team to work from home when they need to, and especially now. How can you figure out who’s doing work and who is spending the day watching TV and not making any dials.
It’s easy. If you have the right sales engagement software, you can track the number of dials made, cold emails sent, and call connects. And, if the software you choose is ConnectLeader for Personal Dialer and Team Dialer, you also have our Remote Coach capability, which means that you can listen to what your sales reps are saying on calls at any time, including live calls.
Once you’ve listened to calls (and see that they’re making dials, sending emails, and having conversations), and reviewed the metrics you’ll know who is working and who has earned your trust. And then you can move on to learning the strengths and weaknesses of your team to help them improve in necessary areas, because that’s your job as a manager – to work with your team and help them be better.
Understand why call center coaching is so important. Read the blog.
Listen and Learn
Remote Coach from ConnectLeader has two top live conversation modes for sales managers:
- Monitoring Mode: Allows sales manager to listen to live conversations.
- Whisper Mode: Allows sales manager to “whisper to” rep with suggestions to improve conversations.
In both modes, you can sit at your dining room table or home office (wherever you’re working from), select a live call, listen, and switch from call to call easily for live monitoring across your sales team.
When you’re in “whisper” mode, you can provide coaching tips to your rep live remotely during the call. The person on the other end that your rep is talking to won’t hear a thing – the suggestion is only heard by the rep, who can then use that information to improve the call and hopefully close the sales deal.
Why Coaching is so Important
Richard Harris of The Harris Consulting Group, which is a company that focuses on providing real-world sales, sales training, leadership, and operational experience with companies who want to grow their revenue with proven, measurable results, provided some thoughts on sales coaching.
Harris said, “Coaching each member of your sales team is important, and becomes even more important now in this current environment. Not being there to coach your team in person isn’t ideal, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Instead, this is the time to focus on coaching from afar.”
Post-Call Feedback
If you’re in a meeting, or otherwise busy while calls are happening, you can still listen to them after the fact with ConnectLeader Team Dialer and Personal Dialer. All calls are recorded (NOTE: in some cases, based on laws, just your sales rep’s part of the conversation is recorded), and the Sales Manager has the ability to go in to any call an ISR, SDR, or BDR has made after the fact and listen to the call.
This provides you with the ability to monitor your sales team’s calls across the board while learning what they’re good at, and what they need your help with to be the best sales rep they can be. Listen to the calls, take notes, and then have a video conference or in-person (once this is behind us) meeting with each sales rep to offer suggestions and constructive feedback on their calls.
Reach out to us here at ConnectLeader today to see how Remote Coach in Team Dialer and Personal Dialer can help you better train your sales team from anywhere. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.
