Keeping Your Sales Team Connected

The way we do business has changed for the time being with many organisations altering their everyday work processes – encouraging teams to work from home. This change of environment comes brings a mixture of benefits and disadvantages to businesses. Recent events have meant our day to day interactions are limited in every sphere, not just sales/business. Therefore, remaining connected with colleagues, clients and prospects requires some additional consideration and effort. Protecting and growing your pipeline relies on preparing your sales and business development team. Setting and maintaining standards of productivity in the current context is key, and our steps below outline how to effectively implement remote working and keep your sales team connected.

Organise and Prepare

For many, working from home is a new experience, thus businesses must ensure employees are fully prepared. Enabling your employees to work from home requires providing them with equipment and processes to guarantee they can fulfil their role to the same standard they would in the office.

Moving your workforce from your office to their home will present challenges such as system functionality. With significant change across society at the moment, employees may encounter new hurdles which they lack experience in dealing with, it is essential your company create troubleshooting processes and advice networks.

Provide Assistance

In your position as a leader, this new context presents you with the opportunity to offer increased support to your sales team. Ensure you are more readily available through virtual networks – on hand to answer any queries (this availability is also important in keeping connections strong with your B2B clients and prospects). Be understanding – these are unusual times, therefore, employees may need flexibility to produce their best work. How your management team responds to current affairs will be remembered by your staff and will influence their stability right now, and their certainty in the future, this translates into confidence and loyalty to your company. You’re in this together.

In order to successfully implement working from home practices follow a lessons-learned approach and organise sessions for yourself and other experienced team members to share their advice and tips on how to remain focused and motivated while limiting distractions, for example, have a separate workspace.

Communication

As market leaders in the B2B Telemarketing field, The Lead Generation Company maintain that communication is vital when working remotely. Face-to-face interactions are restricted, making the use of video conferencing imperative. To prevent miscommunication, encourage your team to keep these meetings specific and objective led.

Ensure your sales team are equipped with the relevant information and agenda beforehand. This will limit the opportunities for misinterpretation and running over schedule.
Begin by highlighting why the meeting is happening
Discuss what the meeting aims to achieve
Follow a schedule to ensure all points are covered. Leave time for discussion and questions.
Afterwards, provide a detailed summary of the meeting, the outcome and future tasks. This will keep the topic fresh for attendees and will inform those who were absent.

Whilst your sales team are working from home it is important to schedule regular check-in meetings to ensure everyone is on track and allow opportunities for queries to be resolved. This will prevent any loss of momentum.

Allocate time for team meetings and virtual get-togethers. Working in B2B sales and business development is demanding, even more so in the current situation. Keeping your employees connected will influence team spirit and encourage a positive attitude. This will ensure your team members don’t feel alone and isolated, keeping morale high. At The Lead Generation Company, we have 3 virtual meetings per day with our B2B telemarketing team. Come Friday, it’s time for a virtual get-together, catching-up how successful the week has been, announce top performers etc. This helps our teams remain connected.

By being organised and prepared you will give your sales team a solid foundation on which to operate. Crucially, you must remain connected, avoiding miscommunication, and retaining focus.

If your business has capacity or resourcing issues as a result of the current restrictions on travel, B2B telemarketing could be the ideal solution for helping you remain connected.