Though traditionally, sales teams have always been remote, Igor Efremov, head of recruitment at Itransition says managers need to take the pre-pandemic learnings to make collaboration more efficient in these unique times to drive sales success. You may have the groundwork in place already, but your team still needs guidance to do the job and stay productive remotely. Check out five best practices to get distributed sales teams in the right mindset for work and learn how not to micromanage.Â
Remote work has been a growing trend for sales teams in recent years, driven by the proliferation of collaboration softwareOpens a new window and the growing recognition from business leaders. Transition to telework allowed managers to hire the best talent on the international market and cut technical expenses while giving their sales reps more ownership of their tasks and achievements. Before 2020, sales departments had the third-highest percentage of remote representation in US enterprises, according to the State of Remote Work 2019 surveyOpens a new window by Owl Labs.Â
The social distancing rule forced millions of sales teams to work from homeOpens a new window . This abrupt transition turned out challenging even for sales departments adept at remote work, proving pre-pandemic telework models insufficient and revealing new pain points for both managers and employees. Our company was no exception. Before the pandemic, our sales department embraced the opportunities of remote work and our adoption level was decent, with sales teams from London, Denver, Warsaw and Minsk offices cooperating successfully. In the wake of the lockdown, we had to reshape and enhance our legacy remote workflows, prioritizing unhindered and productive collaboration between our geographically distributed teams.
Let’s review some best practices we leveraged to avoid the common traps of remote work and set up an efficient collaboration workflow for our distributed sales department.
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1.Set up a Collaboration-Friendly Schedule
Flexibility is no doubt the greatest advantage of working from home, and it’s hard to judge employees who make the most of this freedom. But when your team is geographically dispersed and keeps to individual working hours, their schedules risk to never overlap, which will take its toll on team efficiency.Â
In this regard, it’s recommended to develop a shared team schedule that will facilitate smooth collaboration without forcing members into inconvenient timeframes. Make sure all team members are simultaneously available for at least several hours a day — this will be the time for meetings. Above all, decide collectively on the issues it is appropriate to raise beyond working hours.Â
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2. Introduce Communication Guidelines
 Your team may not have had explicit communication norms and patterns when you all worked together in the office. Yet in the context of remote collaboration, when even video-on conversations don’t properly convey the tone and body language, the clarity and predictability of every interaction is crucial for bridging potential communication gaps.
 In the first place, the guidelines should concern appropriate communication channels for particular subjects. Also, establish something like a digital conversation etiquette that will include requirements, like the preferred response time for casual and urgent matters or muting the microphone on a call after you finished speaking.Â
Last but not least, work out the standards of written conversations. People have different styles — some tend to respond concisely while others use unnecessarily detailed descriptions; some tend to use humor and informal language while others may have a low tolerance to such things. A set of rules will help to ensure your team’s emails and text messages are to the point and leave no room for misinterpretation.
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3. Keep the Tech Stack SimpleÂ
When organizing remote work, one can be tempted to try out all that the collaboration software market offers. However, advanced solutions tend to require lengthy introductory training or additional resources and are likely to overwhelm users.
The advice is to follow the good old KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle and employ basic, easy-to-use tools at least for beginners until you become more aware of your team’s online communication patterns and understand what features they need. A video conferencing tool and a messenger are the essentials of an efficient collaboration stack. Task trackers are also important aids in keeping workflows orderly and daily progress on track, while a calendar will help your team sync up their activities. Â
4. Virtual Meetings Should be Discussions
 Meetings are draining, but long passive online meetings are particularly exhausting. To mitigate what was dubbed as the “Zoom fatigue,†cut out all non-interactive aspects and prioritize conversation.
For this, make sure all background information, from presentations to reports, is sent out to the participants beforehand, allowing the team time to form their opinions to partake in informed discussions. Also, always set up a meeting agenda with all the points to touch upon and questions to resolve.
Another great virtual meeting practice is to assign a facilitator who will guide the conversation, distributing time between the participants and engaging those who haven’t spoken yet. This person can also note down the suggestions and ideas the team members came up with so that nothing falls through the cracks.
Learn More: How to Improve Remote Sales With Virtual Customer Meetings
5. Pro Tip for Managers: Keep Your Distance
Anxious and confused because of their inability to oversee their teams in person, managers can easily get the impression that employees underperform or don’t work at all. To compensate for the diminished personal contact, they risk becoming overbearing, especially in communication with the team. They may set up unnecessary progress review meetings, request overly detailed feedback, or barrage team members with follow-up messages. Such an attitude may annoy and alienate your employees as well as create an unhealthy collaboration culture.
To avoid succumbing to micromanagement, learn to have faith in people you hired and give them the latitude to work and achieve. Stick to the communication guidelines and assess performance with a system of KPIs, stepping up only when the team’s productivity visibly slides.Â
Relying on these fundamental principles, managers can guide their sales team through the stumbling rocks of virtual collaboration and establish a solid remote working culture to last even beyond these trying times. Â
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