The Ultimate Guide to Building and Managing a Virtual Sales Team

Since the coronavirus pandemic, companies have been facing the same challenge – how to effectively manage their teams off the office. And although many businesses seem to have already got used to the new reality, for organizations that are only starting their way to growth, building and keeping a virtual sales team on track is hard.

If it resonates with you, read on this small guide to walk through the process and get a portion of tips for building and managing a virtual sales team. But let’s start from the basics.

What is a virtual sales team?

A virtual sales team is a team of salespeople who work virtually, or remotely. That suggests there’s no common office space. As an alternative, every sales rep works from their ideal location. For instance, a few of your sales reps might live in Miami, while others are based in Los Angeles.

Keep in mind that a virtual sales team is very different from a hybrid team – a model where every employee prefers working both remotely or in person in a physical office space.

What are the challenges of managing a virtual sales team?

Let’s look at the main factors that make remote team management difficult. Among the most common challenges are the following:

Collaboration problems. About 17% of employees claim they feel cooperation barriers due to the lack of face to face communication.

Productivity problems. Some employees become disorganized and less productive when they need to work from the relaxed atmosphere of home, which slows down the whole team.

Stress. By contrast, 22% of employees confess it is difficult to unplug after work. As a result, they can’t balance work and rest, feel pressure, get stressed, and end up getting professional burning over time.

How to overcome these challenges? What can you do as a sales manager to make your virtual sales team well-organized, committed, and satisfied with the job?

Constituents of a virtual sales strategy

You can’t manage your remote sales team effectively unless you have a clear virtual sales strategy in front of you. The virtual sales strategy consists of the following elements:

• a sales process
• a sales team
• sales tools
• sales metrics
• sales enablement strategy

Let’s look at these elements in detail.

A sales process

The virtual sales process may be perceived by your sales team as unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and hectic. You are not the only manager who’s facing this problem.

Take time to outline and document your sales process. Think carefully about how you’ll organize it: what communication channels you’ll use, how often you’ll gather with your team for meetings, how the reporting will be done, etc.

Remember to share the remote sales process plan with your team so everyone understands how you’re going to cooperate.

A sales team

Your virtual sales campaign won’t be successful if it doesn’t have the right people behind it. As a manager, you need to evaluate your sales people’s current performance and preferences to get a clear vision whether your team is ready to work remotely.

In addition, you should ensure every sales rep understands the scope of tasks and responsibility, knows how to maintain high productivity and efficiency while working remotely, and has no trouble cooperating with other team members.

Sales tools

Thanks to AI and automation, virtual sales teams are powered by more customer data than ever before. Sales engagement, enablement platforms, data analytics, and CRM tools help your team maintain high productivity and boost their ROI. So, you should forearm your sales reps with the sales platform which will make their virtual performance as comfortable as possible.

Source: salespop.net

For example, with such tools as Snov.io CRM, you can get your virtual sales team on board owing to unlimited teamwork opportunities, prioritize and allocate deals, and use email verification finding and sending tools to optimize the outreach.

Sales metrics

One of the best ways to manage your virtual sales team is through metrics. The amount of time spent on prospecting, the number of calls made or emails sent, the number of deals closed, etc. should be tracked on a regular basis.

Think of the metrics which make sense in your organization and again, inform your sales team how their performance will be monitored. Ensure everyone understands the criteria of their performance evaluation.

Sales enablement strategy

Apart from sales tools, your virtual sales team should be provided with knowledge, content and effective training that will allow them to demonstrate high performance. Think of how you can equip employees with all the resources they need.

Say, you may create a virtual library with necessary sales books, hold regular sales coaching sessions, provide your sales team with email templates for their virtual sales outreach, etc.

How to manage a remote sales team

Now that we’ve discussed the basic elements of a virtual sales strategy, let’s focus on practical ways of managing your remote sales team. Below you’ll find eight actionable tips on how to get your sales rep together, ensure their high productivity and job satisfaction off the office.

1. Set clear goals and expectations

Sales reps are some of the most goal-oriented individuals in any workplace. Your role as a sales manager is to adjust the team goals to the changing virtual environment and communicate expectations to every sales rep in a clear way.

Set measurable goals and KPIs that your sales people will understand. These goals must be motivational enough to make your sales team strive for improving their performance.

2. Build trusting relationships

Trust is built up in a team over time. If you’re not spending eight hours every day in the same physical office, it naturally takes a lot longer.
You should support healthy teamwork among your remote staff by giving the right mix of team versus individual recognition, clarifying roles in the sales process, and encouraging your salespeople to provide you with their regular feedback.

Ensure your team feels you value their opinion and their voice is heard. This will improve engagement and make every sales rep more involved in the process. And remember: the team that trusts their manager has less stress and demonstrates higher results.

3. Listen to salespeople’s needs

To manage your entire virtual sales team, you need to understand the needs of every member. Make it a habit to conduct virtual one-on-one meetings with your staff where you’ll encourage them to share their feelings about the job. Ask them what they like most about it, what challenges they face, and offer ideas on how their working process can be improved.

In some companies, this role may be entrusted to the HR department. The latter will gather information about sales reps and pass it to a sales manager, who’ll further evaluate the climate within the team.

4. Encourage your team to find their individual workflows

Sales is a hard routine. Don’t make it harder for your sales team by too much control. You want to build trust, remember? Start with yourself. Demonstrate you trust your reps and let them choose their own path in achieving goals.

Have private talks with the employees, grasp their personal sales hacks, and encourage them to share the best practices with each other.

5. Invest in resources everyone can use

Guarantee that your remote employees have access to the same virtual selling tools their on-site counterparts have. If that suggests moving applications and resources to the cloud, do it.

Empower your employees with everything they need for effective closing of deals. Ensure information about the sales process is transparent and all new employees get a substantial onboarding experience before they join the rest of the sales team.

6. Encourage social interaction

Low levels of employee engagement will ruin your bottom line. Engaged employees are often much more productive than disengaged ones. When it comes to remote teams, where human contact is minimal, it is easy for social interaction to slip.

That’s why it is essential for you to take steps to encourage people and mitigate factors that frustrate your employees. The ideal way to do this is by holding regular meetings each week — even if only 15 minutes — to keep your team engaged.

7. Use team communication tools

The world has increasingly been using Zoom conferencing for meetings for several years. Apart from this popular tool, find solutions for your sales team to communicate daily. Luckily, there are dozens of effective messaging platforms available nowadays like Slack, Mattermost, or simply Google Chat.

For example, in Slack, you can create group channels where you’ll share sales tips and hacks, communicate with team members via direct messages, create polls for group opinions, what not.

Source: Slack

8. Conduct regular virtual sales training

It’s essential to hold consistent virtual sales training meetings for your entire sales team. And if you think that virtual training is not so effective than in-person sessions, numbers will tell you a different story: while B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, sales reps may retain 80% of information learned during virtual training after 2 months with the spacing effect.

Source: Vengreso

Set up your training program to teach your sales team important sales skills, some of which are:

• Product knowledge. Keep your team updated on any changes to your company product to ensure they know it inside out.
• Ability to handle sales objections. ‘No’ is a usual response sales people get from prospects. Consider all sales objection scenarios and teach your staff how to turn ‘no’s’ into ‘yes’.
• Time management. Train your sales people on how to organize their sales routine so they stay productive – e.g. through automation tools. These technologies will do the monotonous work and help your sales reps stay more focused on such activities as personalized interactions with prospects.

Skills your sales people gain during regular virtual coaching sessions are just like muscle training in the gym – they help them keep their professional confidence in good shape. And if you add a bit of gamification to the process, the training will be fun. interactive, and most engaging for your employees.

Wrapping up

If you want to build and manage a remote sales team, you need to be prepared to adjust your management style to the virtual working environment. Remember that remote work isn’t the same as on-site work.

You need new methods, strategies, and tools for engaging your staff and motivating your team to hit their targets. Whatever you plan to do, make it a part of your routine and business interactions. Your virtual employees will certainly appreciate it and create the kind of culture that people always want to be part of.

Tips to Improve Your Hiring Process

Hiring the right people is essential to the success of any business. Many business owners spend too much time and money on hiring, which can be both difficult and time-consuming.

On the other hand, hiring the wrong people can be even more costly. A bad hire can cost a company up to 30% of that person’s first-year earnings, according to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management. There are a few things you can do to make your hiring process easier and quicker.

Define the requirements for the position

The first step in improving your hiring process is to closely examine the job requirements. Defining the essential skills and qualifications needed will help you identify the most qualified candidates. Furthermore, it will also help to ensure that you are not wasting time interviewing candidates who are not a good fit for the job. When defining the requirements, consult with others familiar with the position, such as current employees or supervisors. Once you have a clear understanding of what is needed, you can move on to the next step in improving your hiring process.

Use a recruitment management software

If you’re looking to improve your hiring process, one tool you may want to consider is recruitment management software. This type of software can help you post job openings to multiple job boards with just a few clicks, and it can also help you keep track of applications and candidates. Additionally, many recruitment management software programs include a career page creator, which can help you create an online presence for your company and attract top talent. By using recruitment management software, you can streamline your hiring process and make it more efficient and effective.

Create a strong job description

Perhaps the most crucial step in improving your hiring process is to create a strong job description. After all, the job description is what will attract qualified candidates to your opening. So, what makes for a strong job description? First, it should clearly state the essential duties and responsibilities of the position. This will help to ensure that candidates have a good understanding of what the job entails. Second, the job description should include information about the skills and qualifications required for the position. This will help to ensure that only candidates are truly qualified applicants for the job.

Finally, the job description should be written in clear, concise language. This will help to ensure that candidates do not get confused or discouraged during the application process. By taking the time to create a strong job description, you can go a long way toward improving your hiring process.

Conduct initial screenings

One way to streamline your hiring process is to conduct initial screenings. By doing phone or video interviews with candidates before inviting them in for an in-person interview, you can get a better sense of who would be a good fit for the role. Not only does this save you time, but it also saves you money by ensuring that you’re only inviting qualified candidates in for interviews.

Additionally, screenings can help you identify red flags early on, such as poor communication skills or lack of relevant experience. So if you’re looking to improve your hiring process, initial screenings are a great place to start.

Do a trial run

Another way to improve your hiring process is to do a trial run. This means that you bring candidates in for a short period, typically a week or two, and have them complete some typical tasks that they would be responsible for if they were hired. This trial period gives you a chance to see how the candidate works under pressure and how they interact with other members of the team. It also allows you to get a better sense of their skills and abilities.

If you’re satisfied with the results of the trial run, then you can move forward with the hiring process. If not, then you can keep looking until you find the right fit for your organization. Doing a trial run is an effective way to improve your hiring process and ensure that you make the best possible decisions for your business.

Final thoughts

When it comes to hiring the right candidate, the process is just as important as the outcome. By following these tips, you can streamline your hiring process and make it more efficient and effective. As a result, you’ll be able to save time and money while also ensuring that you find the best possible candidate for the job. So if you’re looking to improve your hiring process, be sure to keep these tips in mind.

How to Automate Your Ecommerce Business for Fast Growth

When it comes to your ecommerce business, time is one of the most valuable resources you have – but time is limited, and there are many tasks and operations asking for your attention. You have to ensure that your products are listed properly and regularly updated on your site, that orders and payments are fulfilled 24 hours a day, that deliveries are processed and dispatched swiftly, and so on.

At the same time, you’re also striving to maintain control over the online store web design,  marketing strategies, user feedback, and customer service. And your ecommerce processes will become even more demanding as your business grows. If business is going well, you simply won’t be able to do everything manually at some point – and that’s where automation comes in.

Automation is the key to putting your time-consuming operations and menial tasks on auto-pilot. According to Nucleus Research, implementing automated solutions can help boost ROI, enhance lead conversions, and shorten sales cycles, all of which ultimately pave the way to business growth. In addition, HubSpot recently discovered that 61% of overperforming leaders automate elements of their sales process, compared to only 46% of underperforming leaders.

Now that we’ve established how vital automation is for any business, let’s talk about where it’s best to implement automation and which tools are best for each task.

Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing is still an incredibly effective strategy, and it’s especially important in the ecommerce industry.

To increase your chances of success and save time, you can automate it and send targeted, highly relevant emails to your consumers based on how they engage with your online store. This can be accomplished by using email automation triggers to send customers an email after they take a specific action.

Cart abandonment emails, for example, are something any ecommerce business can and should automate first. Online retailers face a significant problem with abandoned carts. The average cart abandonment rate is a little less than 70%. However, Moosend claims that 50% of users who click on cart abandonment emails go on to complete a purchase.

You can also send personalized emails in response to practically every on-site action your visitors take. Set up email drip campaigns to deliver personalized emails based on their purchase preferences. For example, if a consumer shopped for shirts in your online store, you can give them regular updates about new shirts, special offers, and other relevant information.

In-stock notifications or drip campaigns reminding customers when it’s time to restock or replenish a previously purchased item are two more types of emails you can automate to make more room for other tasks.

Tool: Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most effective automation solutions available. It provides email marketing automation tools to assist you in increasing your sales. You can sync client purchase data by connecting your online store to Mailchimp.

Then you can set up email workflows that target customers based on their purchase history and website involvement. These can include recovering abandoned carts, encouraging customers to return to your site, and sending product retargeting emails.

Mailchimp can be used by teams with more complex email marketing skills to create unique triggers that send highly relevant communications to clients based on precise on-site activities. For every customer, the buyer’s journey becomes more personalized as a result of this level of customization.

Inventory Automation

If you want to expand your business, automating your supply chain should be at the top of your priority list. Keeping track of your stock levels, supplier relationships, storage locations, and prices are some major parts of running an ecommerce business that can spiral out of control quickly. It’s tough for a growing ecommerce company to handle all of these operational aspects manually.

Not to mention that your reputation can be badly damaged if you make a consumer wait an extra week or two because you don’t have their desired product in stock. In one survey, 24% of buyers said they had canceled their order due to poor delivery. In another study, 38% of respondents said they would never buy from a merchant again after a bad delivery experience.

As a result, inventory management automation software is becoming a must for most businesses. With the right automation solutions, you’ll always:

• have a complete real-time picture of your inventory
• automatically order the products you need more of
• unpublish out-of-stock items
• put a hold on advertising for items until you replace your supply

Tool: Zoho Inventory

Zoho is one of the best inventory management softwares available. It uses lists, categories, images, and serial numbers to help you arrange your products and stay on top of your costs and inventory. A tool like this will also help alleviate a lot of the tension associated with restocking. From a convenient dashboard, you can quickly keep track of everything.

When it comes to the tool’s features, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Best of all, Zoho integrates with many popular ecommerce platforms (including Shopify and Amazon) as well as Zapier and QuickBooks, ensuring that you get the most out of it.

Bookkeeping Automation

Financial control and regulatory compliance are tiresome and time-consuming tasks, but they are necessary. Unfortunately, a small business is likely to be extremely dependent on a single person to handle bookkeeping – and this person’s time would definitely be better spent on tasks that can’t be automated.

There are a variety of bookkeeping tools available to simplify the process of maintaining profitability while still remaining tax-compliant. Even so, the actual act of entering data takes an awful lot of time. You’ll also be greatly minimizing the possibility of human error, which is usually quite costly.

Tool: QuickBooks

Quickbooks is one of the best tools when it comes to bookkeeping automation. Small business owners may sync their inventory, invoices, orders, employee information, vendor information, customer information, expenses, and more from several sales channels onto one platform utilizing Quickbooks Commerce and other Quickbooks features. They can then compile financial reports and obtain insights into profitability while also preventing out-of-stocks. Furthermore, everything can be completed either online or offline.

Quickbooks Commerce integrates with various marketplaces, websites, and sales systems. Not only does this give small businesses some flexibility and scalability, but it may also streamline the entire bookkeeping process from beginning to end. It’s essentially an all-in-one bookkeeping solution with a variety of functions that will make your life easier while also allowing your business to grow.

Repricing Automation

If you sell on Amazon, you already know how important it is to keep your prices updated. Readjusting your rates to match those of your competitors makes you more competitive and increases your chances of winning the Buy Box, which can significantly boost your sales.

In other words, only the best sellers have a chance to win a spot in the BuyBox, and the Amazon algorithm determines who the best sellers are based on a variety of indicators. Top sellers are, among other factors, expected to deliver:

• dependable and fast shipping
• prompt responses to clients
• consistent inventory levels
• low order-defect rates
• relevant cost

As a result, you need to keep up with price trends among your competitors and regularly adjust your prices. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to keep track of your competitors’ prices and manually adjust your own as necessary.

If you don’t adjust your prices to match those of other vendors, you’ll be forced out of the BuyBox almost immediately. Now, Amazon has its own Amazon Automate Pricing tool, but it has a lot of drawbacks, so most vendors hunt for a suitable alternative.

Tool: Aura

Aura is one of the top repricing automation tools for Amazon sellers. It will follow other chosen stores, register any price changes, and react in accordance with certain values you previously defined. For example, you might aspire to be the cheapest FBA seller or simply target the current BuyBox pricing.

Aura provides a variety of plans and strategy templates, as well as the ability to quickly define your competition. It only updates your prices a minute or two after a meaningful change occurs, allowing you to make the most of your time in the BuyBox.

Order Fulfillment Automation

Order fulfillment is the process that begins when a customer presses the “order” button and ends when the goods they requested arrive at their doorstep. It covers many tasks, including:

• order processing
• sending confirmation emails
• printing labels
• packing
• shipping
• return management

In order to effectively fulfill an order, businesses also have to deal with various challenges prior to the actual order, such as receiving inventory shipments or keeping and maintaining inventory. Obviously, there are a lot of moving parts in this process.

There are numerous parties involved, and manually managing everything can be a nightmare. Instead, you can automate these operations to save time and money while also minimizing human error. It’s critical that all of these processes are connected and managed with a single tool.

Tool: ShipBob

ShipBob is one of the best in order fulfillment automation. It has a straightforward interface for managing orders across its vast network of fulfillment centers. Furthermore, the platform’s two-day shipping promise across continental United States gives you a competitive advantage.

The data and analytics visualization options in this order fulfillment software can help you improve your system’s performance even more. You’ll be able to see spikes or dips in your orders, as well as the rate at which you should be moving or replacing inventory. You’ll even get suggestions for employing promotions to boost sales during busy seasons. All of this is thanks to ShipBob’s extensive data. It’s an excellent tool for growing your inventory management operations and gaining insight into areas where you could make changes.

In Closing

In this post, we focused on automating the most crucial aspects of your ecommerce store. However, especially in marketing, there are always more segments that can be automated. We hope you find our suggestions useful and that you will implement some of them in your online store.