With the COVID 19 taking the world by storm, many companies are faced with the tough task of managing a fully remote sales team and having to come up with new ways of working literally overnight. With our CEOs 15+ years as a software entrepreneur and our teams’ thousands of discussions with sales directors and CEOs, we put together a list of top 5 things to do to stay on top of sales during these exceptional times.
Companies are now facing an unprecedented period as the pandemic is impacting almost all business across the globe. Each and every business is going through a change of some sort - for others, sales are plummeting at unprecedented speed and for others, the demand is going through the roof.
At the same time as companies are witnessing a massive shift in customer behavior, the ways of working are also changing. Most companies are now faced with the tough task of managing a fully remote sales team and having to come up with new ways of working literally overnight.
Team leaders are looking for ways to understand what's going on in sales, how to coach their teams remotely and how to keep the sales forecast up to date to provide crucial decision-making data to the entire company.
We put together the top five (+1) things to do now as a sales lead to ensure you are doing all you can:
Know what’s happening and identify failures and opportunities quickly
Focus on getting your sales forecast right
Try to retain (or even increase) activity levels
Be smart and fast in decision making
Communicate openly and often what’s working and what’s not
And finally, remember to
Take care of your people as everything starts with them
1 Know what’s happening and identify failures and opportunities
For us, the number one thing is knowing where you are. And to back it up with data.
Measure your sales results, offer base, hit rate, and the number of open new cases. These are all crucial metrics that create your success on a daily or even hourly basis.
Make sure to understand your key numbers on all possible levels: company, per country/region, per product or service area, new and existing businesses and per team member.
You also want to carefully follow-up on all won and lost cases: what type of cases are we winning and what type of cases are we losing. This helps you identify what might work in the new situation, and where not to invest efforts at the moment.
A robust understanding builds a foundation for quickly and effectively identifying both failures and opportunities.
2 Focus on getting your sales forecast right
A real-time sales forecast is your friend at times like this as decisions need to be based on a solid view of the future.
If you have been previously relying on manually collected sales forecasts that are based on opinions rather than facts, now it’s the time to change that. Make sure you are basing decisions on facts (not only opinions) and, for sales, the data in your CRM is the best place to start.
So make sure your team keeps the CRM pipeline carefully up to date. Be sure to have deals in the right stages and be precise on the expected close dates.
An important note about hot leads: Put all effort into closing all the hot leads you can identify. Many times sales teams take hot leads for granted and before you know it, several hot leads have become lukewarm as the team is busy chasing new leads to put into the pipeline.
If you are in an industry where deals are being postponed or disappear altogether - be realistic and monitor the real-time sales forecasts regularly so you know where you stand. Odds are that hit rates will decrease, so you need to take steps to significantly increase activity volumes and the number of new deals in the pipeline.
3 Try to retain (or even increase) activity levels
Sales is a combination of math and art and some argue, the former is way more important than the latter. Knowing your numbers and your “winning formula” is crucial for success and so is monitoring your key numbers.
Many argue that the number one reason why sales organizations fail is that they don’t have enough activities. With your team working remotely, this is more true now than ever so make sure you know what’s going on on a daily basis. Even a slight decrease in daily activity levels per person will accumulate to big losses during days, weeks and months.
Many businesses are likely to see a drop in hit rates or customers postponing decision making, so if anything, you would ideally need more activities than before to even stay at the current sales volumes.
4 Be smart and fast in decision making
Use all the data you have to back up your decisions, and be decisive and fast in making them.
Be sure to keep a crystal clear focus: where do we focus our sales and marketing efforts and equally importantly, what do we give up doing for now.
5 Communicate openly and often what’s working and what’s not
When times are good, you mostly have fun and exciting things to decide and communicate: where to invest, which new countries to open, where do we recruit more, where do we gain great customer references, etc.
During bad times, the decisions you and your team are making are much harder and might hurt many.
The key is to stay honest and open about what’s working and what’s not, and communicate that regularly in the team: Provide your team with enough information to fully understand the situation themselves.
Sharing and communicating openly allows your team to participate and engage as they understand the underlying dynamics of the situation. More often than not, the team members come up with brilliant innovations to solve the situation.
And if the worst comes to the worst, the tough decisions are a lot easier to understand if the team has been kept up to date on where things stand.
Last but not least, take care of your people
As always under exceptional circumstances, remember to take special care of your team. Everybody is going through a lot right now and you want to make sure you give your team enough of your time and support to go through these times.
Harvard Business Review had an excellent article 15 questions about remote work answered that we recommend to all remote teams.
Our partners have also published great content to provide advice for sales leads at this time.
Pipedrive’s latest blog post “Coronavirus - how to manage your sales team through a health crisis” has some good pointers about dealing with the current circumstances.
HubSpot published a recent article on How to Be Successful At Remote Sales, According to HubSpot’s Remote Salesforce outlining some of the lessons they have learned managing their own remote sales team.
Stay safe and stay calm. This too shall pass.
Let us help you!
If you would like to get a free sales forecast for your team, sign-up to our free trial. Dear Lucy will automatically display a forecast for your team.
As always, if you would like to get help in setting up your sales reporting, do reach out to have a call with us.