How To Manage Remote Sales Teams and Motivate SDRs

Over the years, we’ve witnessed the rise of popularity of remote work…which culminated during a global pandemic that forced everyone to stay home.

The remote work model has many benefits. It allows companies to surpass geographical restrictions and hire talent from all around the world, as well as to cut costs related to running a business from a physical location.

However, it’s not easy to manage and motivate a sales team from afar. Here are some tips to help you motivate your SDRs, and successfully manage your sales team.

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Hire the Right Candidates

Effective sales team management starts with hiring the right inside sales rep for the job. It is essential to find candidates who are actually interested in working as sales reps, and are not just looking for an opportunity to work from home. If they’re in it just for the perks of remote work, you won’t be able to properly motivate them.

This is your opportunity to find candidates who will have the right skills and motivation to join your team and make it even more efficient and effective. 

Provide proper onboarding

No matter how good the candidate you chose is, you can’t expect them to fit in right away. You need to provide them with proper training and onboarding.

Onboarding is especially important for remote work. For remote employees, it is sometimes difficult to get help and just find someone to talk to if they have a problem. And it’s even harder for new members of a team.

Don’t leave new team members on their own at home, with no one to turn to. Make sure to introduce them to company culture, provide them with an employee handbook, assign mentors, and create a detailed plan for their first couple of weeks.

Clearly define objectives and expectations

Without clear objectives, your sales reps will be much more likely to get distracted and less productive during sales calls. Setting goals will help them be more focused and committed, which will ultimately bring much better results.

It is also important that your sales reps know exactly what the expectations are. Whether you’re hiring new reps or simply switching to a remote model, you should have a one-on-one discussion with each SDR about what the expectations are to avoid any misconceptions.

Provide your SDRs with guidelines and state exactly when they should be available, which meetings they’ll need to attend, how they should be handling calls, and which tools they should be using.

Provide them with the sales right tools

Your SDRs won’t be motivated and productive if they don’t have the right tools to communicate with prospects and manage leads.

With the right sales engagement platform, your SDRs will be able to focus more on building relationships and closing deals instead of wasting time on menial administrative tasks. Features such as automated appointment setting, lead routing, and auto dialing will help your SDRs to be more productive, and a centralized lead database will make remote collaboration much easier.

Additionally, make sure to provide them with tried and tested sales strategies, call scripts, and sales email templates they can use alongside sales tools to be even more efficient. 

Keep in mind that your employees will rarely ask for new tools, so be proactive and ask them what they need in order to improve their performance.

Don’t forget about internal communication

While it’s crucial to have the right tools for communication with leads, you also shouldn’t overlook the importance of internal communication.

Internal communication is vital for keeping your employees motivated and making them feel like they are actually a part of a team. This is especially important for remote teams who don’t have the opportunity to see each other every day.

Make sure to implement tools for internal communication such as Slack and Zoom, and try to hold regular meetings in order to keep everyone connected and on the same page. It will help not only boost productivity but also improve and strengthen relationships between team members.

Show appreciation and reward progress

Digitized rewards and incentives are a great way to motivate your sales team, but you need to make sure to leverage them effectively. 

Many employee recognition programs focus on rewarding only the top-performing employees. However, this can make others feel left behind, especially if they’re making progress and improving their relative performance.

Instead of rewarding only the top players, try to recognize personal improvements and reward effort as well. That way, you’ll be able to show appreciation to every member of your team.

Over to you

Managing remote sales teams can be a challenge. It can be difficult to motivate them and properly track their progress from afar. That’s why it’s essential to work constantly on communicating and building relationships.

Successfully managing a remote team requires careful planning and dedication at every stage. From hiring the right employees and onboarding to setting clear goals and implementing the right solutions to achieve them.

Following these steps will help you keep your remote team motivated, and elevate your organization’s sales success.  

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