The world of sales has changed a lot over the past year. It’s true that many of us were already accustomed to using virtual collaboration tools before a global pandemic suddenly thrust these ways of doing business to the fore of our consciousness. But as sales organizations have had to pivot in response to a socially distanced, virtual-first world, many of us now find ourselves working on or managing remote sales teams full-time. And it’s a whole new ballgame.
Successful virtual teams function a little differently than their in-person or hybrid in-person/virtual counterparts. In this post, we’ll take a look at three basic strategies for getting our remote teams off on the right foot.
First, eliminate barriers to digital collaboration.
We shouldn’t assume that the same principles and practices that have traditionally guided our team interactions in the offline work environment will translate seamlessly to the online work environment. Video-conferences have a different vibe than boardroom meetings. It’s difficult to “read the room” over the phone, and body language doesn’t always communicate well on a tiny phone screen. So naturally, many people who perform well in person find it difficult to perform well in a virtual-first world – and vice-versa. And when team interactions are more technologically mediated than ever, we do well to anticipate and eliminate as many barriers to collaboration as possible.
Here are some tips for doing just that:
- Decide in advance which collaboration platforms you’ll use and ensure that all team members have the necessary skills to use them effectively. Whether we’re using Zoom, Google Suite, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Slack, or any of a dozen other popular remote collaboration software solutions, these platforms represent the “new office” of today’s digital workspace. So just as we might expect to show new recruits the lay of the land in the physical world, we ought to be prepared to devote some time on the front end to platform-specific training for people who might or might not have the same level of technical proficiency with our preferred software tools. And since our teams are only as strong as our weakest members in this area, it might help to develop internal training resources and usage guidelines to help digital stragglers get up to speed quickly.
- Establish and enforce a code of digital etiquette. Social cues in the physical realm are different from those of the virtual work environment. Consider the person who might normally raise their hand to ask a question during a team huddle but finds it difficult to know when and how to get a speaker’s attention on a teleconference. Unless clear protocols are established for when and how to ask such questions, they might simply go unaddressed – at the cost of under-performance later. We do well to anticipate and address such things on the front end rather than wait for problems to arise later. We might also need to clarify whether and how to apply certain rules from the physical realm – such as office dress code or prohibitions on personal activities during company time – to the digital workspace, where the boundaries between work and personal activities are less easily distinguished.
- Pool all sales content resources in one universally accessible place. Instead of assuming that team members will consistently share resources among themselves, consider establishing a centralized hub where these resources can be found quickly and edited collaboratively. Then, instead of emailing one another a bunch of attachments, we can simply share a single hyperlink to, say, a folder on Google Drive. Things like sales literature, customer case studies, spreadsheets, white papers, and training documents can all be stored in this virtual “sales closet.”
Keep in mind that good digital collaboration skills translate to the sales process, too. By investing in our team’s ability to leverage platform-specific skills internally, we’re also investing in members’ ability to collaborate with external client stakeholders in an environment where first approaches will frequently involve virtual meetings or shared-screen demonstrations with others who may or may not share their level of platform competence. So members of virtual teams that collaborate well frequently sell better in the virtual environment, too.
Second, establish a clear work structure.
Whether we realize it or not, most of us depend on certain clearly defined work structures to operate at peak efficiency. For many of us, those structures loosen considerably – or disappear altogether – in the virtual workplace. And that can lead to chaos, even for employees who might otherwise rank among our top performers.
Managers can help create a sense of office structure, even in the digital workplace, by taking a few extra steps on the front end:
- Establish regular office hours. While it’s true that a certain degree of flexibility is needed when our team members are primarily working their own hours from home, it’s also important for managers to establish reasonable, regular, and mandatory collaborative hours during which all team members will be expected to be present – just as in the brick and mortar office. Perhaps we have a morning team huddle every Monday, for instance, followed by a Wednesday afternoon skills presentation and a Friday morning round-up session. Such regular events encourage sales personnel to structure their work days responsibly while providing regular intervals for checking in with teammates and getting on top of problems sooner rather than later.
- Visualize work processes and member role assignments. When there are fewer touch-points for direct, personal contact with the other members of our team, it’s more important than ever for us to be on the same page about our reporting relationships and how our work feeds in to the work of others on the team. Lack of role clarity or poorly defined work processes can be doubly frustrating in the online environment, so managers can help by creating specific, visual resources depicting the progress of routine work tasks and assigning “owners” for particular facets of the team’s daily operations. In this way, the team can jointly own progress toward particular sales campaign milestones or project implementation phases while still holding the right individuals accountable for their assigned roles. Such resources could also be used to help team members better understand how non-team organizational stakeholders (i.e., developers, technical support personnel, customer support specialists, etc.) can best be reached for support throughout the sales process.
- Offer team members regular, one-on-one access to managers. Just as most good managers keep regular office hours when salespeople and other organizational representatives can drop in for questions or to address private concerns, managers in the remote workplace should plan to set aside dedicated time for meeting one-on-one with members of their teams. Most of us probably already adopt a “call me anytime” policy, but since phone calls can feel considerably more invasive than casually stopping by the boss’ office in person, we might not hear from our people as routinely as we ought. For this reason, we might establish a weekly rotation of brief, direct check-in calls with each salesperson on our team – both to build rapport and to offer personalized support for challenges that might not be easily addressed in a group setting.
There are plenty of other things we can do to lend our remote collaborations a sense of workplace structure, too. But these can form the basis of a weekly routine that managers use to keep digital “flexibility” from descending into organizational chaos.
- Pursue boundaries and balance.
It would be foolish for us to assume that the shift to working remotely has only impacted the mechanics of the jobs we do. The truth is that it has impacted the very nature of how we work in the first place. Everything from how we form and maintain relationships in the workplace to the question of when the work day begins and ends are being reinvented for many of us as it becomes increasingly clear that remote collaboration is the way of the future. So managers need to give due consideration to certain things that tend to organically take care of themselves in person:
- Communicate, communicate, communicate. In the virtual work environment, it’s typically better to over-communicate than to risk under-communicating something important. Even when we’re using video-conferencing platforms that enable us to see one another, there will always be certain facial expressions or gestures that won’t communicate as well online as they would in person. So that means that things that might not need to be stated explicitly in the office probably do need to be stated explicitly in the remote environment. And managers must learn to be direct and succinct with instructions – and to encourage members to share their concerns sooner rather than later whenever something seems unclear. We can help facilitate this sort of transparent exchange by fostering a culture where there are no “dumb questions” or “unspoken rules.”
- Discourage around-the-clock work. Virtual collaboration gives team members access to clients and their peers in a flexible, asynchronous work environment that many experience as liberating. But it also tends to inadvertently make “the office” an omnipresent factor in employees’ daily lives. The difference between being “in the office” and “off the clock” can get pretty fuzzy, particularly for salaried or commission-only salespeople who may rely more than they previously realized on the traditional structure of a work commute to signal the boundary between their professional and private time. So managers should communicate clear daily work time expectations. If flexible scheduling is allowed, we should encourage salespeople to establish and communicate equally clearly about when they shouldn’t be expected to be available for work-related matters – and hold them accountable for keeping that schedule. Employees who know their managers respect work-life balance tend to work more efficiently “on the clock” and are less likely to burn out.
- Program team-building fellowship activities. All work and no play makes for poor team camaraderie. Most of us engage in impromptu workplace conversations that have nothing to do with work when we’re about the office, and we might even participate in periodic “just for the fun of it” office happy hours or other gatherings. So just because we’re working remotely, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find creative ways to promote this same kind of informal fellowship from time to time. How about a Netflix watch party? Zoom karaoke? Trivia night? Particularly in a time when remote work can make even the best sales teams feel more like an assembly of lone rangers looking out for their own needs more than those of their peers, such morale-building efforts offer a much-needed sense of connection to the sales organization itself – and to a sense of purpose larger than meeting weekly quotas.
It remains to be seen, of course, what our sales organizations will look like once the tide of safety has shifted toward pre-pandemic normalcy. But it seems that the landscape of remote selling and remote sales collaboration is here to stay. So the sooner we incorporate these digital collaboration principles into our way of doing business, the better.
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