7 tried and tested hacks for ensuring remote sales productivity
65% of B2B companies admit that sales productivity is the number one challenge they face on a regular basis.
With sales teams compelled to work remotely, streamlining your team’s workflow, and boosting the productivity of your working remotely is more important than ever.
If you’re looking to increase your sales productivity while minimizing your expended resources like cost, time, and effort, here are a few ways you can do just that!
1. Embrace the productivity toolkit
Trying to achieve maximum productivity can be a highly testing experience for sales leaders. You need up-to-the-minute measurable metrics so you can track each of your employee’s sales processes at a single glance. Tools can easily rescue you while ensuring efficiency on the team’s end.
Some of the features these tools embed include:
- Snapshots of your deals - new, won, lost
- Activities
- Emails
- Revenue forecasts
A CRM software like Close is the ultimate toolkit to measure your sales team’s productivity and make sure their tasks are completed efficiently. It is simple to set up and easy to use, with a built-in workflow that can accelerate your revenue.
Close gives you an overview of all your sales activities. Emails, calls, voicemails, tasks and reminders are automatically organized so that you always know what’s going on and what you should do next. With this CRM, your team has full access to everything that’s going on in the sales process.
Absolutely everyone on the sales team knows what their fellow colleague is working on and how to communicate apart while working remotely for better productivity.
2. Skip the manual data entry
According to recent sales statistics, around 71% sales reps revealed that most of their productive hours get wasted while doing manual data entry.
Sales teams working remotely can easily lose sight of their real goal once they get occupied feeding the data manually into the system. The waste of time is only an added issue amidst many others.
Data automation can greatly help your remote sales team by saving up their extra effort and time. This, in turn, helps you scale your sales team effectively and decide upon where the effort needs to be diverted for better results.
By leveraging various automation tools available in the market today, manual data entry can be completely terminated from the business processes. Space is made for relevant data to enter the system automatically, granting a better timeline to the manpower for completing other high-priority tasks.
3. Communicate the “old-fashioned” way
Weekly or daily touch-base calls are essential when setting up workweek priorities. While your employees may be working remotely, a good old fashioned phone call or a virtual face-to-face meet is an excellent way to set up a week of productivity.
Scheduling regular check-ins at frequent intervals sets expectations and gives your remote workers tangible deadlines and goals. An atmosphere of trust and check-ins through employee monitoring software can boost the effectiveness of teams working remotely.
If your employees and clients are in different time zones, you might have to be creative with the meeting timings, but the results are going to be completely worth the effort.
4. Templatize whenever possible
The very first rule to successfully closing a deal is that sales teams must formulate a unique sales experience that leaves the customer feeling appreciated and valued during every interaction. Templates make this task easier and scalable.
By utilizing a prefabricated template, you will save valuable time for your team that can be delegated elsewhere on high priority tasks. Today, you can easily create templates for absolutely any sales-related task, right from sending emails to crafting business strategies. There can be templates that pop-up during video calls and other modes of client interactions and specialized sales pitching and cold-calling templates.
These templates don’t necessarily need to be fancy, but they should contain all the considerations that need to be taken care of by your sales team while carrying out different processes. Legal templates also include necessary terms of agreement when sealing deals with clients.
5. Automate tedious processes
While we spoke about data automation in one of the previous points, there are many other tedious processes within a sales cycle that can be taken care of entirely with the help of automation.
There are some important benefits that come alongside automating sales processes when trying to achieve optimal sales productivity. For one, to achieve peak productivity, sales and marketing should run together smoothly like a newly-oiled machine.
For instance, you can easily improve your sales forecasts if you know how many calls your top performers need to close a sale, or put better thought into how to address a prospect if you know whether he/ she has opened your latest promotional email. Sales automation can provide you with reports that will answer all of these questions and many more.
Automated phone sales software can drop prerecorded messages when appropriate, dial phone numbers, and keep track of every little detail of your company’s phone activity. Reducing manual dialing can significantly increase your reps’ productivity.
Both your remote sales team and customers automatically get exposed to enhanced follow-ups and communication with sales automation tools. You can get rid of wasted time spent on trial and error and make sure your customers see what they need to see when they need to see it with automation.
6. Encourage flexibility
Spend some time thinking about what your remote working employees truly require. Does your team need to work from a fixed 9a-5p EST, Monday through Friday?
If not, then allowing flexible work time and hours can be an exceptional incentive for employees who like to let their creative juices flow at weird hours. Letting your employees work when they are the most effective is one of the best productivity hacks, especially when we’re talking about remote work hacks.
Remote workplaces are in a unique position to allow employees to get work done at random hours; practicing the same for your team can have a large impact on efficiency, productivity, and overall remote workplace happiness.
7. #SquadGoals
Lastly, strengthen your remote teams by investing in exciting and fun filled activities to encourage friendly competition and camaraderie. You can easily do this in a number of ways, one being using a newsletter or group to ask weekly icebreaker questions, and start every virtual meeting with an icebreaker, too.
Also, team-wide adventures, for example an online storytelling workshop for remote teams, are sure-fire ways to strengthen all aspects of your sales team. Through these methods, your team will get to learn new techniques and tips for telling engaging stories that appeal to your target audience.
Sales leaderboards are one of the most efficient ways to get your sales team members aligned and keep them motivated. They encourage healthy competition and improve engagement.
Whether it’s their ability to sell to demanding clients or the number of follow-ups, each of your employees has unique strengths. There are a number of software applications and tools in the market that come with customizable dashboard features that give you tailored visibility of your sales pipeline so you can declutter your dashboard and track only the most useful metrics for your company.
If you choose leaderboards like the ones offered by Close, you can track a variety of metrics across different goals. This both allows you to understand how an employee’s performance changes, and they can understand their progress, as well. It’s a win-win.
A Snapshot of Close’s Inbuilt Leaderboard
Now you might think - “Is team building even an option when working remotely?” The answer to this question is a resounding yes! The trust that blooms from activities like remote team building not only brings teams closer, but shows employees how to look at their coworkers as each others’ “cheerleaders” who are all in this working remotely thing together. Plus, you might pick up some awesome productivity hacks for remote workers along the way!
Looking for a CRM to boost your sales productivity? Take Close for a spin for 14 days free — no credit card required!
Rahul Varshneya is the co-founder and President of CurveBreak. Rahul has been featured as a technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc, among others.
