More and more businesses now operate remotely, thanks to technological and tool advancements. With remote work being the new norm, sales teams quickly adopted virtual selling.
However, a remote environment is not every salesperson’s cup of tea. But with the right sales enablement strategies, an effective and productive remote sales team is not far from reality.
In this article, we’ll explain the key challenges of virtual sales enablement and cover tips for implementing one to boost remote sales performance.
Introduction to Virtual Sales Enablement
Before we understand virtual sales enablement, let’s define what sales enablement involves.
Sales enablement involves providing salespeople the right resources, training, tools, and support so they are knowledgeable, confident, and informed.
Meanwhile, virtual sales enablement involves remote sales strategies, so sales people overcome common sales challenges via proper tools and content delivered at the right time.
For example, you could make the sales rep aware of an upcoming product feature through a virtual coaching session to understand how it might help fix prospects’ pain points.
Key Challenges in Virtual Sales Enablement
Managing a remote team is not the same as managing an in-office team, especially in sales, where team dynamics and direct interactions play a crucial role in achieving sales quotas.
Let’s look at some key challenges that may arise in virtual sales enablement:
1. Maintaining team communication
A Buffer study shows that team collaboration and communication are the biggest challenges of working from home. Sales is no exception.
Implementing virtual sales enablement for a remote sales team may seem challenging for sales managers. You have lesser visibility and control over the processes and workflows salespeople use.
Additionally, you and your team may miss out on identifying body language cues crucial to maintaining team cohesion.
For smooth remote sales communication, teams must rely more heavily on technology to keep the communication lines open than in-office teams.
2. Ensuring consistent training
The selling process takes a 180-degree shift in a virtual landscape. So it can be challenging for you to consistently provide unique and customized training material for your sales team.
Enabling a sales team in a remote setting forces you to refurbish your onboarding and training programs, emphasizing virtual sales.
3. Building a genuine connection
One of the biggest virtual sales challenges is building a real connection with your team as well as the team building healthy connections with the prospects and customers.
Team bonding can be difficult to replicate in a virtual setting initially. While in-person connections cannot be replicated, rapport-building, collaboration, and employee engagement can still be achieved via media like phone calls, live chat, and video conferencing.
Best Practices for Enabling Your Remote Sales Team
What changes can you make to combat the above challenges in virtual sales enablement? Here are some tips and best practices for remote sales:
1. Utilizing the right tools
A remote sales team without the right tools to guide their communications and project tasks can easily become disconnected.
Remote-friendly sales enablement and virtual sales tools for collaboration, CRM, assistance, and project management make teams more productive, irrespective of their work locations.
For example, virtual AI sales assistants like Docket can champion productivity and increase sales team efficiency by answering tough sales rep queries in seconds.
Using Docket is like having a co-worker by your sales reps’ side 24/7 to assist them with multiple prospect and customer questions and needs across the sales funnel stages. This way, they hit their sales quota faster and shorten the deal cycle despite working remotely.
2. Regular training and coaching
Training sales reps when not face-to-face can pose a challenge, but sales managers can rise up to the occasion by optimizing their training processes.
Some ways to do so are:
Running webinars: The biggest plus point of webinars is the ability to train multiple sales reps simultaneously. For example, virtual meeting tools like GoToMeeting can help you set up a webinar in minutes.
Introducing virtual ride-along: Sales reps learn best from their senior colleagues. So, instead of exclusive one-on-one coaching, you can introduce a virtual ride-along where junior sales reps can join in on virtual client meetings, product demos, and sales presentations for first-hand learning.
Coaching is at the heart of virtual sales enablement. Therefore, maintaining a strong coaching program is critical to helping sellers refine their skills and keep pace with change.
3. Tailored digital content
As remote sales reps are required to engage digitally more frequently with prospects and customers, they must be equipped with up-to-date and relevant content to make every engagement fruitful.
Sales enablement should tailor such content to meet every unique and revolving need of both sellers and customers.
4. Develop a culture of accountability and mutual trust
Mutual trust and accountability ensure your remote sales team thrives and hits targets.
For example, give them the freedom to set their own targets or be fully responsible for their KPIs. This lets them know you trust their actions. A Harvard study shows how high-truth companies reported 50% higher employee productivity.
Also, ensuring sales reps have autonomy in setting deadlines makes way for better accountability of their actions in getting work done on time.
Implementing Effective Sales Training Programs
Since training and coaching are at the core of successful virtual sales enablement., let’s find out more on implementing sales training programs:
1. Onboarding new reps virtually
New hires need all the essential information to start on the right note. And yes, giving them access to up-to-date information is possible even without meeting them in person.
Here are some things you can do for quicker remote onboarding:
Reduce manual work by creating a self-service portal where they have access to your sales processes. You could also use digital sales assistants like Docket to cut sales onboarding time by 20% by providing instant access to product and company-wise knowledge.
Allow them to shadow an experienced rep for first-hand experience with your product and tools.
Document meetings right from the starting point of onboarding so they never lose track of specifics.
2. Continuous skill development
Buyer behavior is constantly evolving. Most modern buyers are more likely to control when and how they consume information and would want to navigate the sales process themselves.
The only way sellers can keep up with this trend is by upgrading their skills and adapting to fresh thinking to plan the sales process for the buyer. For sales managers, this means focusing more on sales training programs revolving around virtual selling success.
3. Access to sales training in the flow of work
Although most sales reps undergo formal training before jumping into action, this process is slowly changing.
From onboarding to attending sales calls, reps can have multiple learning and training opportunities. Much of what sellers need to learn can also happen in the flow of work.
To make this on-the-go, virtual sales training feasible, sales leaders must provide instant content that sales reps can easily access when needed. For example, product-related technical information, customer testimonials, case studies, etc.
Via Docket
Strategies for Maintaining High Engagement
Remote work involves a lot of engagement via online conversations, meetings, and more.
So here are a few strategies to maintain high engagement for keeping remote sales teams running smoothly:
1. Virtual team-building activities
Organize weekly online team-building activities to eliminate potential feelings of isolation among remote sales team members. Activities such as virtual icebreakers or team challenges are great examples of maintaining high engagement.
2. Make onboarding memorable and interesting
Introduce virtual tours and send personalized welcome messages to set the tone for new sales rep hires. You can also schedule virtual meet-and-greets so new and old employees can build relationships immediately.
3. Encourage frequent cross and internal team collaboration
A Buffer study says that nearly 20% of remote workers feel disconnected from their peers.
A massive part of remote team management is encouraging communication via a single digital communication tool. It could be Slack, Zoom, or Google Meet, amongst other tools.
Using a single channel ensures team communication is not spread out and confusing. It promotes a virtual team culture and doesn’t overwhelm remote workers. Instead, it lets them instantly reach out to their internal or cross-team members.
Measuring Success and Adapting Strategies
Gearing your remote sales team towards success is quicker when efforts are measured. Measuring sales team success can be easy when you clearly define your sales team metrics or KPIs.
Key metrics for virtual sales teams
Closed-won deals: What percentage of the opportunities you created turned into closed deals?
Leads added to the pipeline: What percentage of leads are added to the pipeline in a specific time frame?
Sales cycle length: How long did it take you or your team to move prospects from one stage to another?
Sales tools used per rep: How many tools or software do you use on a typical working day?
Call volume: How many calls did you handle during a specific time frame?
Measuring these top sales team metrics and setting milestones will help you establish realistic expectations for your remote team.
Wrapping up
Efficient team communication and engagement are the ultimate binding forces behind sales enablement success. Remote teams cannot stay afloat and motivated if they are left behind on crucial product updates, business goals, and customer trends.
That’s when AI tools like Docket come to your rescue by streamlining your sales processes 100% remotely.
Docket is your virtual sales engineer who helps tie remote teams together through on-the-spot, sales-ready, and SME-verified responses.
