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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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
What changes can you make to combat the above challenges in virtual sales enablement? Here are some tips and best practices for remote sales:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Since training and coaching are at the core of successful virtual sales enablement., let’s find out more on implementing sales training programs:
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:
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Measuring these top sales team metrics and setting milestones will help you establish realistic expectations for your remote team.
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.
