How to manage a sales team remotely
When Tiger Woods was in his prime, he spent 30-60 minutes daily working on putting, playing 9-18 holes a day, a couple of hours driving, 3-4 hours on-course work for the short game, and more.
How much practice do you put into your selling? How much time do you spend making sure you are successful when communicating and collaborating with buyers remotely?
This is where virtual sales training and remote sales coaching come into play.
Remote sales coaching (otherwise referred to as online sales coaching or virtual sales coaching) is a process that provides individualized feedback and support that enables all sellers to achieve their selling goals.
Related to remote sales coaching, remote sales training (otherwise referred to as virtual sales training or online sales training) provides education to sellers on products, skills, methodologies to help sellers succeed under challenging sales situations. It typically occurs in a team-based manner, so that everyone is on the same page.
For a moment, let’s stick with our golf analogy to break these topics down a bit further.
When you are new to golfing, learning the rules, understanding what clubs to use when, how to keep score, and more broad topics, you can spend time in a classroom with a group of other new golfers. You all need the same information, which is nothing specific to you, so a single instructor can efficiently train you. You could also do this on a live meeting technology, such as Zoom, and this person would not be a remote trainer. This remote sales trainer would be providing remote sales training if these were sales tactics, processes, and related high-level topics.
Now, as you begin golfing, you find that you struggle with your three wood, or maybe you can never get into the hole with fewer than a dozen putts. This is when you need a coach, someone who can provide you personalized training and tips to make you, with your specific challenges, successful. If this coaching is done remotely, and for sales improvement, you would be working with a virtual sales coach.
The best golf coaches will record your swing motion and work with you on your mechanics. This video-based approach, referred to as video sales coaching when applied to sales, is precious. With the majority of sales coaching software on the market, sellers receive video coaching assignments where they record themselves practicing various aspects of their jobs (e.g. a sales pitch, handling objections, etc.). Their managers, or virtual sales coaches, then review the video submissions and provide feedback.
Much like golf, sales require a great deal of investment in building your skills, and these are the sorts of approaches that can be the difference between winning and losing.