How to Manage Sales Team Remotely and Effectively

Best Team Management Software
With working remotely becoming the new norm, businesses all over the globe have been experiencing difficulty achieving their targets. People, particularly sales managers, have had trouble adjusting to the new circumstances. Managing sales team and exceeding targets seems to be more difficult when your entire team is working remotely. It is difficult to create the same adrenaline-pumped office environment as the one in the office. But remote work is here to stay, and people have to adjust to it. There are several things that business owners need to keep in mind while managing a team of employees working remotely. Although difficult, good productivity can be ensured with the help of the right strategy. The effective implementation of these strategies is a challenge in itself. It can, however, be made easy with the help of the right tools and solutions. In the end, it is the target that matters. With the help of the right software solutions, you can get your employees to be productive and work as a close-knit team, irrespective of their location.

The Pros and Cons of Remote Work for Sales Teams

While remote work may have more cons than pros, that is not the case. Building a virtual sales team can be beneficial for businesses, as it opens several opportunities for them. Since the location of their employees no longer matters, businesses can work with the best of talents, irrespective of where they are located. Maintaining an office space can be expensive. This has caused many businesses to avoid building offices altogether since working remotely works in their favor and allows them to save money. This makes working from home a cost-effective solution. Furthermore, many people prefer working remotely from the comfort of their own homes because it saves time on commutes. This allows them to be more productive. On the other hand, the majority of sales operations revolve around teamwork. It is easier to work as a team when people are able to communicate with each other face-to-face. Managing the team efficiently is another challenge that businesses face. Sales require people to be highly driven and motivated. Ensuring this is easier in an office environment, but difficult when your team members are working in isolation. Managers need to employ new techniques and foster a spirit of teamwork to ensure the same energy in their employees.  

Challenges faced by sales teams working from home 

Working from home is not the same as working in an office. The biggest disadvantage of remote work for companies is that when people work in a competitive environment, they tend to be more productive. They are also more likely to put more effort into teamwork in an office environment. These things are difficult to achieve with work-from-home employees. While some of these challenges can be overcome with a good strategy, others require businesses to invest in the right solutions. While working from home, sales teams encounter many challenges that hamper their productivity. Some of these are:  

-       Distractions

Working from home is not the same as working in a proper office environment. Distractions are more likely to occur at home, and attending to them means that productivity is bound to suffer. One effective way of ensuring that distractions do not hamper the productivity of employees is to check in with them regularly. Moreover, provide your employees with all the necessary equipment and encourage them to create a dedicated workstation in their house.  

-       Poor teamwork

Working efficiently as a team becomes challenging in the absence of a healthy office environment. This is more likely to happen in the absence of strong communication channels. However, you can ensure teamwork by establishing strong communication channels and regularly conducting team-building exercises.  

-       Pressure

While pressure is inevitable for people working in sales, too much pressure is detrimental to productivity. Managers should ensure that their employees are not burdened with unrealistic targets, as that only worsens the pressure. Avoid micromanaging your employees, as it will only add to the pressure.  

-       Poor lead management

Many a time, businesses experience insufficient sales due to poor handling and management of leads. It is not uncommon for companies to lose business simply because they are inadequately prepared to manage the large number of qualified leads. This can be due to anything – lack of manpower, lack of skills, or lack of the right tools. Automation is one of the most reliable tools when it comes to handling customers in large volumes. It can prove to be instrumental in driving sales, especially when combined with the right strategies and planning.  

 

-       Lack of the right tools

In the absence of the right tools for remote work, being productive becomes increasingly difficult. Therefore, companies should invest in the right software solutions that can help them manage their sales teams more effectively. By investing in the right sales team management software solution, you will be able to help your employees be more productive.    

How to Manage Sales Team Effectively and Remotely?

Although challenging, it is possible to effectively manage the sales team while working remotely and help them become more productive. With the right strategy, you can get your employees to be productive and ensure growth in sales. However, there are certain things that need to be kept in mind. Such as:  

●        Building Trust

While adapting to remote work can be difficult for your business in the beginning, it is important for you to have faith in your employees. The idea of not being in direct control of things can be unsettling for some people, and it causes them to micromanage all of their employees’ activities. While it may seem to be helpful to them, it actually does more harm than good. Working in sales is already very demanding and pressurizing for your employees, and micromanagement does not work in their favor. This is why you should avoid micromanaging and allow them the freedom they need to work efficiently. Instead, be readily available to help them when required. This goes a long way towards establishing trust and helps your employees perform better.  

   

●        Communication

When working remotely, communication tends to suffer the most. Lack of communication and miscommunication leaves room for confusion and have a negative impact on productivity. It is important for businesses to ensure healthy communication among their employees, as it helps foster team spirit. The biggest challenge companies face in establishing communication is the lack of the right tools. Communication needs to happen in a planned manner. It is better to schedule meetings and set an agenda in order to ensure that both you and your team can come to the meeting prepared and avoid wasting time.  

●        Accountability

The only way to get the maximum productivity out of your sales team working from home is to foster a sense of accountability. Working remotely can cause some people to develop a lackadaisical attitude towards their work. Even though remote work allows your team members to work from the comfort of their homes, they are still answerable to you about their progress. It is important that they inculcate a sense of responsibility and stay on schedule. By investing in the right sales team management software solution that provides features like centralized reporting, you can keep up with your team’s activities and progress.  

●        Ensure Employee Well-Being

The current remote work trend has emerged largely due to the pandemic and has been difficult on people’s mental health. People are more prone to feeling lonely and isolated than ever before. As an employer, seeing to the mental wellness of your employees is your moral duty. There are several measures that you can take, such as regularly scheduling team building activities, connecting with employees individually, and offering help to those struggling. Your employees will be able to work with greater efficiency when they are not feeling stressed. This will help you increase productivity and profitability.  

●        Invest in the right tools.

Managing a virtual team is far more difficult, especially in the absence of the right tools. It is important for businesses to invest in the right sales team management software solution in order to streamline sales operations, keep track of leads, and be more productive. Moreover, the success of your sales team depends on how you handle leads. It is important to generate, manage, nurture, and qualify leads before passing them off to sales. In addition, your sales team working from home needs to be provided with all the information about the lead’s activities, as this helps them come up with a personalized approach. This process tends to get complicated when all teams are not in the same office building. This requires you to ensure that the exchange of information among different departments is carried out seamlessly and accurately. This can only be ensured with the right software solution, which is capable of handling multiple processes.    

Need for Sales Team Management Software Solution

The way a company manages its sales team to get the most out of them determines its success. Management accounts for a significant portion of a company's operating costs and has a direct impact on profits. Apart from sales, businesses need to pay equal attention to lead management in order to get more sales. For businesses with large amounts of incoming leads, managing leads and guiding the sales team working from home to get conversions can be challenging. It's critical to develop a management system that can efficiently manage and track your business operations as per your requirements. Unless the right management tools are integrated into a company's broader data and management systems, it will be difficult to achieve operational efficiency. Businesses are slowly turning towards comprehensive solutions that tackle several issues at once. Enterprise management software handles way more than sales team management. VedaERP, developed by SAN Softwares, is a reliable enterprise resource planning software solution. It is an ideal solution for managing sales, inventory, leads, accounting, taxes, teams, projects, and much more. These solutions are more preferred as they replace the need for individual software solutions for each of these. Investing in the right software solutions is necessary to get the maximum productivity out of your sales team. The right software solution will help your business realize its full potential.    

How to manage a work-from-home sales team with VedaERP? 

  VedaERP is the best software solution for lead tracking, lead scoring, and lead management. It can help you simplify and streamline your business operations and management. It is an ideal enterprise management software solution that can handle more than lead management. It is an ideal solution for accounting, sales, e-invoices, GST return filing, purchase management, project management, inventory, and team management. VedaERP is a simple lead tracking software that makes lead tracking and scoring easy. It is a smart lead management solution that can register new leads, update databases, track progress, and give you greater control. The lead dashboard gives you easy access to all leads and provides the necessary information. You can assign new leads and score leads to identify quality leads. Other useful features offered by VedaERP include lead scheduling, team tracking, lead creation, dynamic field, and call log.   VedaERP can be easily integrated with your existing CRM. When it comes to managing sales and sales teams, it is useful in several ways. Some of these are:  

●        Lead Management

VedaERP is an effective lead management software which makes lead tracking and scoring easy. It is a smart lead management solution that can register new leads, update databases, track progress, and give you greater control. The lead dashboard gives you easy access to all leads and provides the necessary information. You can assign new leads and score leads to identify quality leads. Other useful features offered by VedaERP include lead scheduling, team tracking, lead creation, dynamic field, and call log. By ensuring efficient lead management, you increase your chances of maximizing sales.  

 

●        Target Management

Using the target management feature, you can easily assign and manage targets. Once you have assigned a new target to an agent, you can track their progress and get access to agent-wise target reports. You can also calculate the item-wise margin of agents. This proves to be immensely helpful in achieving targets and managing them effectively.  

●        Project Management

VeaERP makes it easy for you to create and manage projects. You can create multiple projects, assign tasks to different team members, and monitor progress. You can also update tasks and make changes once they have been created. You can also check the time spent by each team member on a particular task. This proves to be helpful as you can keep track of your team members’ efficiency and productivity. All of this is possible due to a dedicated dashboard for projects, which enables you to monitor and manage multiple projects at once.  

●        Sales Management

You can manage sales and all other activities related to sales. The VedaERP makes it easy to manage sales orders and invoices. You can also create credit notes and generate e-bills. With the dynamic field feature, it is easy to send personalized messages to customers. You can also export invoices to other apps.  

●        Sales Team Management

The sales team management feature allows you to follow up with leads, check client balances, check ongoing and expired contracts, and more. It provides you with details about the targets achieved by your agents. It can also be used to calculate the incentives earned by each agent.     Apart from these, the VedaERP can help you manage your entire team. The leave management feature enables you to manage your week-off rosters. Your employees get the facility of making leave applications using the mobile apps. With VedaERP, you manage your finances, leads, projects, sales, and inventory through a single software. It can provide you with real-time reports and accurate analytics. It is an integrated inventory process system that helps communicate easily with all departments and supply chain partners.  

   

About SAN Softwares

SAN Softwares, a leading software development company in India, has been providing the best software solutions to several industries. We provide customizable software solutions that are reliable and make achieving sales an easy task for businesses. We provide customizable software solutions depending on the nature of your business and its requirements. VedaERP is a flexible, adaptable, and cost-effective solution that is easy to install and use, and can be integrated with the existing setup via the CTI integration. It is a one-time investment that helps businesses organize their resources, gain profits, and exceed customer expectations. These are only some of the benefits of managing sales and other business operations with VedaERP. Our multi-featured solutions are efficient, cost-effective, and streamline business operations, thereby allowing businesses to be more productive and profitable.  

Frequently Asked Questions

Establish regular team meetings, encourage open channels for feedback, utilize collaboration tools for seamless communication, and ensure all team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas. 

Implement regular check-ins, set clear goals and KPIs, offer recognition and rewards for achievements, and create a supportive team culture that encourages collaboration. 

Be transparent in your communication, show appreciation for their efforts, encourage autonomy by empowering team members to make decisions, and regularly solicit their input on strategies and improvements. 

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