Communication is a key component for any successful sales team. And when sales teams work remotely, the need for excellent communication increases even more.
The Rise of Remote Sales Teams
Even before COVID-19 was a word, remote sales teams were on the rise. More teams 89% of people worked from home at least some of the time.
And it’s no wonder that remote teams were on the rise. Remote workers love the increased flexibility. They report higher levels of job satisfaction.
Businesses love the increased productivity that remote workers deliver. Remote sales leaders can help build a great workflow for their remote salesforce which can really drive sky-high productivity.
Remote teams also allow businesses to recruit talent regardless of location. Search all of Linkedin for the right candidate. This is a huge boost for companies in smaller markets.
Finally, remote teams can save on overhead. You may not even need a physical office space!
Enter a global pandemic and suddenly remote teams aren’t just nice-to-have. In 2020 and beyond, it looks like the remote workforce is here to stay.
The Importance of Sales Communication
Although remote teams and flex jobs offer huge benefits, they also have some challenges. And one of the top challenges is communication, especially for sales teams. You need a communication strategy that encompasses the following.
External Communication
Finding and connecting with prospects and leads might be the most important part of a sales reps’ job. So your team needs tools to help them do just that. External communication tools include old-school hardware like phones as well as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. They also use all kinds of technology like email, live chat, knowledge bases, surveys, conferencing tools, and more.
Internal Communication
Just as your team needs to communicate with each other. The very same things you need to communicate with your client, you can use to talk to each other and collaborate.
Without internal communication, your remote sales force is at risk for failure. From duplicating work to getting off task, there are many communications pitfalls.
Types of Sales Communication Tools
Every job is harder without the right tools. So make success easier by choosing the right tech stack to help your sales team and sales numbers soar.
Collaboration Tools
Take your team’s efficiency to the next level with internal team collaboration software. When you set your team up with a unified communication tool, you’re giving them the opportunity to collaborate and share information when they need it most.
Here are some other benefits of using a collaboration tool.
- Save time and increase productivity. Instead of going three floors down to discuss an issue at someone’s desk, communicate via chat.
- Make your team stronger. Working together with an always-open path of communication is one of the best ways to strengthen your team’s bond.
- Improve project management. Working on a project with different team members or across multiple teams can be hard. Use team collaboration to bring everyone together on the same page.
- Organize your team. Make lost documents and missing information a thing of the past. Collaboration software can keep track of your team’s conversations, ideas, and plans.
Unified Communications Tools
The telephone used to be the end-all, be-all of remote communication. Although telephone calls remain important, Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) is coming of age.
Not all communication needs to be a phone call. We’re all up to here with calls anyway. Why not let customers cut to the chase with live chat, messaging, or email?
Unified communications tools bring together communications in one place. And the best solutions are web-based, so you don’t need an expensive, inflexible infrastructure.
Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement platforms and tools give your team access to what they need at every step of the sales process. These tools provide the following resources quickly and easily:
Persona Documents & Customer Insights
These documents provide your sales team with in-depth knowledge of a given customer profile. It spells out their wants, needs, desires, problems, complaints, and motivation. You’ll also use all kinds of customer insights along the way. Who have they talked to? What have they accessed?
Sales & Product Training
If you want to sell something, ya gotta know what it is and how to sell it. Your sales team should thoroughly understand whatever it is they’re selling.
Competitor Research
Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is not only about the competition to be better. It’s more about using that information to demonstrate to your prospects why they should choose your product over the others. Or, even better, why they should switch to your product away from the other guys’.
Customer-facing Marketing Material
More and more, customers are drawn to businesses because of something they’ve seen on social media, in a blog, or elsewhere online. This sort of marketing is crucial in growing your lead list and ultimately, your customer base.
Remote Work Sales Tools, A to Z
There are so many tools to choose from. Here’s a summary of our favorites.
Artesian
There are lots of tools on the market depending on your industry, but a universal tool to consider is Artesian. The platform’s AI helps you harvest and analyze information quickly so that you can prospect and sell more efficiently.
Asana
Asana is a project management and collaboration platform that give your team the power to plan, track and visualize activities, including sales activities.
Asana’s colorful, intuitive interface really shines. The inviting colors make it fun to use. Your team will want to spend time there. That’s a far cry from the boring, sometimes mind-numbing spreadsheets and trackers this tool can replace.
A sales manager can assign tasks and projects and a team member can update their progress.
This type of tool offers great visibility for all stakeholders.
Buzzuka
Just because it’s not safe to talk to people in elevators anymore doesn’t mean you don’t need a quick, compelling way to convey the value of your product. The Buzzuka Pitch Studio helps you craft the perfect elevator pitch.
Buzzuka walks you through the steps needed to create that pitch. From identifying your audience and their pain points to defining what makes your product special, this product targets that all-important quick sales moment.
Remember, the elevator pitch isn’t meant to close a sale. Rather, it’s the bait to lead a prospect into a longer conversation.
Covideo
What’s bigger than an email and smaller than a meeting? Video email.
Video emails help you strike that perfect balance between the personal touch and a fast win. With so many people working remotely, it’s hard to find time to schedule a video call. But video email gets your face in front of the client.
And it helps boost visibility in the inbox. When every email is just something extra to read, then a video becomes a special treat. Plus, a lot of people prefer to learn from video rather than text.
Sure, that sounds great, but I don’t know how to produce videos. The good news is, you don’t need any special skills. You can record in all kinds of ways, including a mobile app, screen capture, or Chrome extension. Or you can upload existing content.
You can use Covideo for internal communications as well, delivering quick lessons and messages to your sales team. They can access them whenever and wherever. Even small businesses can start using this fast.
Go To Meeting & Go To Webinar
2020 might be the golden age of the online meeting. And Logmein’s Go To Meeting and Go To Webinar tools are here to help you communicate both internally and externally.
Both tools give you the ability to plan, schedule, host, and record internal and external meetings. Both have customizable invitations and registration pages. And features like screen-sharing allow you to share exactly what you need to share.
Webinars give you the ability to upload documents and call on people. This can lift your teaching up and allow collaboration with attendees.
You can also enable recording and transcription to share meetings and webinars with your team and prospects. You can also make the recordings and transcripts part of your knowledge. This makes vital content searchable and useful.
Easy setup and free and paid plans make it easy to get started.
Gong
Gong automatically captures your reps’ interactions with buyers across phone, web conferencing, and email. That means you can coach on the right calls, personalize feedback for each team member, and quarterback more deals to a successful close. Even when you and your team are not together in the same bullpen.
Stay on Top of Your Deals
Gong gives you unprecedented visibility into what’s going on in your team’s deals. Feel out of touch because you can’t check in with reps on the sales floor? With Gong, you can check deal health at-a-glance, see recent email and call activity, and quickly understand if there are any blockers so you can strategize with your reps to keep deals moving forward. Pipeline reviews now got a lot more strategic!
Coach from Your Couch
Gong identifies coaching opportunities and helps you develop personalized coaching strategies so you can unlock each rep’s potential. Listen to live calls or review calls after the fact, and leave feedback so your reps know what they need to do to continue to develop their skills while they work remotely.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse of the Market
Gong helps you stay connected to the voice of your customers and the market. Get a handle on what’s impacting your business. Track competitive mentions and understand how your competitors and buyers are responding to the changing business landscape. Test new messaging and see how the market receives it in real-time.
Stay Connected to Your Team
Our team calendar helps you plan each week with your team by showing a calendar view of your team’s upcoming meetings in an easy to read format. Stay in the loop on your team’s activities, identify calls that need your support, and strategize with your reps on how to approach key upcoming meetings.
Google
Ah, Google. Most of our information arrives at our digital doorstep via Google’s uber-popular search engine. But Google also offers a suite of communication tools to help you and your sales team collaborate no matter where they are.
Gmail
Gmail is Google’s email platform. We doubt there are any sales organizations around that don’t use email. It helps your team communicate with each other and with leads and clients. Plus Google’s widespread use means there are countless tools that integrate to supercharge your email.
Google Drive
Create and share documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, and more using Google drive. Drive facilitates internal communications through file-sharing and the ability to collaborate on a single file in real-time. Say good-bye to version control issues!
You can also easily share content with your leads and prospects using Google Drive. And you can even create slide decks for demos and more.
Grow
Ditch the spreadsheets and check out Grow’s fully-customizable robust, intuitive sales dashboard. Dashboard tools like this can be an easy upgrade to help remote team members stay on track.
A dashboard tool can track various metrics like the popularity of a product and per-customer sales. And they can track real-time metrics happening wherever your company is doing work today.
With a view of what’s actually happening with your sales, you can make educated decisions, implement improvements, or change your approach altogether.
You could spend a lot of time gathering the data that Grow puts right on your dashboard, but your time and your team’s time is better spent using the data than tracking it down.
LeadFuze
Lead generation is vital to any sales team. But who has time for lead researching anymore? Not you. You’ve got to meet your quotas and teach your third grader the difference between a simile and a metaphor. Just give me the list.
LeadFuze is lead generation software for sales teams and more. List-building automation means you can spend your valuable time talking to leads rather than hunting them down. It helps you streamline your process.
De-duplicating features mean you and your colleague aren’t wasting time doing the same work. And workflow tools keep things moving.
Plus, it integrates with your existing CRM so you can get things going quickly, building on the tech stack you already have. Right now, leveraging every lead is so important, so a lead generation tool like this might be just the thing for you.
Nextiva
Check out Nextiva’s remote office phone system. Wait. Isn’t this about communication tools for 2020, not 1920? While the telephone continues to be a thing, Nextiva takes business phones to the next level with its award-winning unified communications tools. Their cloud-based UCaaS solution enables companies to focus on growing their business by providing streamlined communications services that are flexible, scalable, and affordable.
A recent survey into business communications reveals that today’s employees use three devices, including their mobile device to communicate with their teams every day. So Nextiva’s remote business phone system connects all of your devices for all of your teams.
With Nextiva, location is no longer a factor. Using a broadband internet connection, your sales team can speak to prospects anywhere, anytime. Even while they’re quarantined in their homes. Nextiva routes call based on your team’s availability. And every call looks like it’s coming from your business.
Nextiva’s easy setup means you can get started today. That’s good news if you’re trying to get a remote sales team up and running fast.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a dynamic, highly-customizable CRM software that has the power to unite sales, market, and service in one place. Its list of capabilities includes its centerpiece CRM with robust phone and email integrations, a knowledge base, and a service platform.
Because everything is in one place, Salesforce is very powerful. You can see who has spoken to what prospect and what steps have already been taken. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Salesforce also offers very robust reports and dashboards to track pretty much anything you want.
With Salesforce, you can manage and optimize the customer journey from prospecting through the sales process and beyond. Of course, that kind of power comes with a high price tag and set up fees. It also comes with a long learning process and onboarding time.
Salesmate
A single source of truth is basically a requirement for dynamic sales teams these days. But what if you don’t have the budget or the time for something like Salesforce?
A Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM, is a faster, more cost-efficient solution. But CRMs are everywhere these days. Which one should you choose?
Salesmate is a CRM tool for small and medium-sized businesses. It gathers all of your data in one place and provides slick, user-friendly dashboards. Its visual pipeline gives you insights at a glance.
Phone and email integrations and sales automation tools help your team work smarter, not harder.
And its intuitive design makes it easy to learn. That’s key these days. With all of the change in the world today, the last thing your team needs to worry about is mastering another piece of software. You can get up and running fast with Salesmate.
Sisense
Dashboard tools can be a lifesaver in the fast-paced world of sales. They put that key information right on top to help you and your team keep their priorities in order.
Sisense offers robust, intuitive sales dashboards that help you analyze and report on sales data, make strategic plans, and share goals and performance across your team. It provides a quick, visual representation of your KPIs. This can be essential for remote sales reps trying to balance work and home.
They offer sales dashboards based on sales calls, brands, and more. And Sisense easy to implement. This is a great advantage if you suddenly find yourself in a whole new situation. Your team gets fast access to just what they need.
Slack
Slack is definitely not a newcomer to internal team communications. Originally tackling the issue of too much email, the collaboration hub now offers one place to gather all of your teams’ conversations, data, and more. It’s an all-in-one solution.
With Slack, you’ll get chat, document sharing, direct messaging, and more. Plus you can divide communications by channel, so each person only sees their relevant information. Divide channels by department, role, project, or whatever makes sense for your organization. Your marketing team only has to see your marketing communication, for example.
You can also share some information with everyone. After all, everyone needs company news, relevant podcasts, and cat memes, right?
And Slack is searchable. Forget about searching your inbox and message threads for that one conversation. Instead, a quick search brings everything you need right to your fingertips.
A full suite of integrations puts everything in one place. And you can even make voice calls inside of Slack.
Free and paid versions make Slack accessible even if your budget is limited right now. You can still get up and running fast.
Survey Monkey
Successful sales teams know what their customers need. And if they don’t, they find out. Conducting customer surveys is one way to communicate with your customers and Survey Monkey is one of the most customer survey tools.
You can get started now and be reviewing your data today, even if this is your first time. That’s part of what makes Survey Monkey so popular. In fact, check out thesequestions to ask on your next customer survey.
Survey Monkey also allows you to use surveys as part of your email marketing. Combine the price and ease of use with a simple, intuitive interface and the ability to customize surveys and you have a recipe for success.
Of course, you never want to overload your customers with questions. They have enough to do already. So it’s best to develop a strategy around collecting insights. And once you collect them, make sure to make use of them, maybe with other sales communications tools!
Zoom
Zoom is having a moment. This web-based conferencing platform allows you to schedule, invite, and host meetings, webinars, classes, and more. And it’s easier to use than Skype. Don’t miss out on the face-to-face just because of social distancing.
Instead, host everything online. Move demos and sales meetings with prospects and leads to the virtual space. You can also deliver other kinds of content like training and classes via Zoom.
Zoom is also great for internal communications. Host one-on-ones with your team to help individuals stay on track. Schedule team meetings to ensure collaboration and camaraderie continue even when you aren’t in the same place.
With features like recordings and screen sharing, Zoom offers a quick way to enter the online meeting game. And with customizable backgrounds, you can host your demo at Dunder Mifflin, the bridge of the Enterprise, or whatever works for your brand. There’s no denying the importance of the right tools for sales communication. Now is the time to customize your tech stack for your team so they can be flexible, mobile, and ready for anything
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Gaetano DiNardi is the Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva and has a track record of success working with brands like Major League Baseball, Pipedrive, Sales Hacker and Outreach.io. Outside of marketing, Gaetano is an accomplished music producer and songwriter - he’s worked with major artists like Fat Joe, Shaggy and loves making music to stay turbocharged. To get in touch, follow him on LinkedIn.
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