How To Manage A Remote Sales Team
Having remote sales teams can help attract new talent and enter new markets. However, successfully managing a remote sales team means taking a slightly different approach vs. an in-office team.
Use this guide to understand the challenges of managing a remote sales team and how to overcome them.
Challenges Of Managing A Remote Sales Team
Firstly, let’s start with the challenges of managing a remote sales team.
Communication
Of course, one of the main challenges of managing any remote team, including sales, is communication.
For managers, this means ensuring that everyone is kept in the loop regarding what’s going on and regularly connecting with team members individually.
Building team cohesion
Despite the competitive nature of sales, it still requires a lot of teamwork. Establishing an autonomous, collaborative, results-driven remote culture requires work.
Motivation and engagement
Money is the primary motivator for salespeople, but sales teams thrive on energy and healthy competition, and keeping remote team members motivated and engaged requires new tactics.
Time zone differences
Coordinating meetings, training, or customer interactions becomes more complex when team members are spread across different time zones.
Training and development
Ensuring consistent and engaging sales training and skill development can be tricky, particularly when balancing schedules and using virtual tools.
Technology issues
Reliable access to the right tools, CRM systems, and technology support is crucial. Any downtime or technical problems can hinder productivity.
11 Tips To Help Manage Your Remote Sales Team
Now onto the good stuff. What can remote sales managers do to overcome the above challenges and benefit from remote teams?
1. Ensure strong technology infrastructure
Ensure that each team member has access to high-quality communication tools, CRM systems, and stable internet connectivity. If necessary, provide stipends for technology or home office setup.
Implement strong security protocols to ensure that sensitive sales data is protected, especially when working with remote employees across different regions.
2. Create well-documented procedures
One thing your remote team members can't do is walk over to another team member’s desk, or around your office, and ask how they should do something like log a sale.
Therefore it pays dividends to ensure that there are well-documented procedures in place for damn-near everything (at PMP we use Slite and Loom for this).
Give team members the responsibility of creating the standard operating procedures (SOPs) for their roles and continuously update them as things change.
3. Develop team norms
Team norms help to foster high performance by providing the shared understanding needed for teams to operate efficiently and collaborate effectively.
Examples include:
- When and how to communicate
- How decisions are made on the team
- How to resolve disagreements
- Collaboration within the team and with cross-functional partners.
Being intentional about creating these is especially useful in remote environments where it’s harder for them to form naturally and collaboration is more complicated.
4. Check in regularly
When you’re co-located, it’s easier for you to see that an employee is overloaded. For example, you may notice that someone isn’t taking their lunch or is leaving late every day.
You don’t always have this insight with remote workers. If proper care is not taken, people may end up burning out.
Therefore, it’s important to establish regular (once a week or fortnightly) one-one-one check-ins with your reports individually to see how they’re faring with their workloads.
As Zack McGill, Program Manager, Lead Generation at Revstacks highlights:
"I have frequent check-ins with the whole team, individually (1 on 1’s, call coaching, ad-hoc huddles, etc). We also try to do a monthly online get-together for fun."
Ensure they feel comfortable being honest if they’re feeling overwhelmed, and be on the lookout for any additional resources that will make it easier for them to complete their work more efficiently.
You may discover common themes, or that there’s a particular task that may be best suited to delegate to another team member or even outsource.
Perhaps there are particular tasks that are taking much longer than you thought to complete, and thus your capacity expectations are out of whack.
These things are easy to overlook/go unseen in a remote environment.
It’s also good practice to ask your team to be clear about what their typical working hours are and to provide updates and set away messages as needed.
You don’t want them to feel like they’re being “monitored”, though. Instead, you want to reinforce the importance of driving impact and performance over clocking in and out of their standard workday.
This provides them with a level of autonomy and independence that’s really powerful and motivating.
5. Provide ownership and accountability
Related to the above, the check-ins shouldn’t just be about telling.
As McGill points out:
“It’s not just about telling, it’s about involving team members in the decision-making to drive engagement.
While revenue is important, only focusing on extrinsic motivators won’t get the employee’s buy-in or engagement to the same degree.
Giving people responsibility to decide on new metrics and initiatives, ownership of new projects, and freedom to explore new ideas and ways to support the department and company will give them a stronger feeling of purpose and impact and lead to higher engagement.”
6. Create a culture of recognition
Of course, high performance normally results in monetary rewards for salespeople, and this is highly motivating for them.
But money isn’t the only form of recognition people appreciate. To help keep people motivated and create camaraderie and a little competitiveness in your team, you should make the effort to recognize high performance and those who demonstrate your company values.
Because you will not see people around the office and be able to recognize them, be deliberate about mentioning this during team meetings and in your one-to-ones.
We have a Slack channel dedicated to employee recognition and encourage team members to recognize each other. The channel transmits achievements to the wider org, including senior management, ensuring people are praised for their work and creating a culture of recognition.
For more, check out our article on employee recognition ideas.
7. Elicit feedback
There's no dispute that you have to establish procedures and expectations for your remote team members.
But each individual circumstance is different, and they're the ones who know how they work best and get the job done.
As such, it makes sense to get their input into how to go about creating this way of working.
Examples of areas where you may want to involve employees are the method of communication they'd prefer and setting core hours for working and collaborating.
An important aspect of this is creating a psychologically safe environment where your team feels comfortable and encouraged to share their ideas and questions.
Cyndi Weninghoff’s article on employee listening strategies is a useful resource here.
8. Set aside time for team building
While you’re somewhat limited with options, it’s still important to set aside time for team-building activities such as weekly check-ins, collaborative side projects, and monthly socials.
McGill has some ideas here: “I’ve seen success with things like ordering food, getting drinks, playing online board games, and other more out-of-the-box ideas like team members hosting their own “cribs” episodes.
While financially challenging, gathering people somewhere 2-4x per year for bi-annual/quarterly on-sites keeps them feeling a part of their teams and developing relationships.
Also, while financially challenging, bringing people the whole company together once or twice for company/personal development goes a long way.”
9. In–person onboarding
While it can be financially restrictive, McGill recommends trying to arrange some in-person time during onboarding.
“Having new employees spend 2 weeks in person with the entire team helps get things off to the best possible start. During this time they should:
- Do larger group training sessions where they are paired with different employees for activities and exercises
- Have meet and greets over coffee outside of the office
- Do “social outings” with fun activities like sports, VR, paintball (etc)
- Be given a per diem that allows drinks (giving team members money to go out with one another quickly builds friendships).”
10. Be flexible
One of the things that people like about working remotely is the flexibility.
For instance, someone may want to pick up their kid from school and then work an extra hour or two in the evening. This calls on you, the manager, to be flexible.
At BWZ we don't care where work is done, or where, as long as it meets our standards and customers and other team members are not being inconvenienced by lack of action.
11. Adapt compensation
Compensation is one of the trickier aspects of global HRM.
The compensation structure for salespeople can vary depending on where they live, often reflecting differences in cost of living, local labor markets, and cultural differences.
In cultures that value job stability and security (e.g., Japan or Germany), there may be a preference for higher base salaries with lower commission percentages.
In countries where individual achievement is highly valued (e.g., the U.S. and UK), commission-heavy structures may be more common to motivate employees through financial rewards tied to their performance.
In contrast, in collectivist cultures (e.g., China, India), performance-based compensation might include more team-based incentives or bonuses.
As Tracey Copeman, Customer Success and Marketing Manager at BWZ, highlights:
“Large or more mature markets might have significantly higher targets than smaller ones. If you’re entering a new market, perhaps those KPIs are set strategically for launching e.g. the initial focus is on the volume of lead outreach and booked meetings vs. closed deals.”
Benefits Of A Remote Sales Team
So we’ve focused a lot on challenges and overcoming them. What are the benefits of a remote sales team?
Reduce costs
With a remote sales team, businesses can save on office space, utilities, and other overhead costs associated with maintaining a physical office. This is especially beneficial for startups and growing companies looking to scale efficiently.
Depending on the location of the remote sales team, businesses may find that compensation expectations vary by region, which can lead to cost savings without sacrificing talent quality.
Wider talent pool
A remote sales team allows businesses to hire top talent from anywhere in the world, not just from within a specific geographic region. This means you can build a more diverse and specialized team by tapping into different markets and skill sets.
Employer of record services or PEO companies can help with the process of finding and hiring remote salespeople including sourcing, interviewing, onboarding, and payroll.
Local knowledge
Remote teams can be strategically positioned in key regions, allowing you to have local sales reps who understand the specific needs, cultures, and regulations of different markets. This can lead to more effective client interactions and higher sales success rates.
Growing Your Remote Sales Team
Here’s how to tweak your processes to focus on growing your remote sales team:
- Tailor job descriptions for remote work: Ensure that your job descriptions emphasize the remote nature of the role, highlighting the importance of self-motivation, independence, and digital communication skills.
- Ask remote-specific interview questions: In addition to evaluating sales skills, prepare interview questions that assess the candidate’s ability to work independently, manage their time effectively, and stay motivated without direct supervision.
- Onboarding: Create a structured onboarding process for new remote sales reps. This should include a mix of live and self-paced training on the company’s products, sales tools, processes, and culture.
- Remote training programs: Use digital platforms like learning management systems to help design and disseminate team-wide and personalized learning and programs and keep team members engaged in their growth.
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