When you’re working as a completely remote sales team, you don’t have the luxury of nudging your teammate to slyly ask them the answer for a question a prospect threw at you in the middle of your sales call. In fact, you can’t even casually grab someone and ask them for a quick tip or two before heading into your next call. You need to shoot someone a Slack note over, or call your manager up directly for advice, and let’s face it, we’ve all found this charade to be cumbersome sometime or the other over the past few weeks.

Granted, products like Google Meet and Zoom have done a great job of helping us communicate effectively with each other from the safe space of our houses. However, to make sure life goes on unaffected, and you need to have strong processes and products in place to help your team improve their sales.

Here are 5 things you can do to improve your remote sales team’s outreach and pitch.

Outreach

#1: Build a strong outreach process

We live in a world where building teams that have multiple people working on specialized tasks is preferred over hiring a team of generalists that do a little bit of everything. The reason? Splitting the work of one Account Manager to two teams: a team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) that exclusively reach out to and qualify prospects before handing them over to the Account Executives (AEs) that work only on closing sales is a great way to divide the labour to improve the efficiency with which your team functions.

In fact, in my experience, I’ve seen bigger companies’ Sales teams being split into even 4 divisions:

• A team of Pre-Sales Specialists that work specifically on getting more relevant prospects into the system and populating the records with company and contact information
• A team of SDRs that work on the outreach and qualification of the outbound leads the PSS team generates
• A team of SDRs that cater exclusively to the outreach of qualification of inbound Marketing leads
• A team of AEs that work on closing deals generated by the rest of the team
  

While doing this might turn out to be slightly more expensive, it’s a great way to ensure that there are always more deals in the pipeline, especially during these times. You can incentivize your PSS team based on the valid leads they create, your SDR team based on the number of qualified leads they deliver, and your AE team based on the number of deals they close.

#2: Narrow down prospects based on intent

Sales outreach in 2020 and beyond is no longer a matter of shooting in the dark. If your PSS/SDR team is still working on scraping lists off of LinkedIn and sending bulk emails, then I got news for you: you’ve got to update your prospecting process.

There are products out there in the market like Slintel that help you determine good-fit customers and high-intent prospects to improve your outreach response rates and deal conversion percentages. These products usually provide a lot more insights as well, like the tech-stack a company uses, comprehensive information around the lead and the company, etc.

Doing this not only saves you time that would otherwise be wasted on reaching out to prospects that have no intention of buying your product; it also helps you understand the prospect’s use case for your product and build custom messaging/pitches that will resonate with them best.

#3: Use an email sequencing software

You’ve probably come across a few of these already, but email sequencing software can be your best friend if you’re an SDR or work actively on prospect outreach. Products like OutplayHQ and Outreach.io help you automate emails and set manual reminders for when you should call/DM your prospects.

As we all know, follow-ups play a big part in improving response rates from prospects, and email sequencing products help you get that responsibility off your chest by automating them, saving you time and manual effort. To further improve the response rates, make sure to verify the email addresses of your prospects before doing the outreach.

Pitch

#4: On-boarding new salespeople in your team

If you want more prospects to be interested in your product and have a steady stream of qualified leads flowing into your system, perfecting your pitch is important. This holds true for both SDRs’ and AEs’ pitches, and while you probably have a sales playbook already in place, it helps to slowly work on improving this over time. After all, perfecting your sales pitch is an iterative process, and any new salesperson that you’re on-boarding onto your team will take some time before they settle in.

A great way to get new teammates to learn more about the product (especially when working remotely) is by listening to recordings of both successful and unsuccessful outreach and sales calls that your team’s made in the past. This will help your new teammate gauge what works and what doesn’t, and start delivering great pitches right from the get go. It can also be extremely useful for understanding the strengths and the weaknesses of the product as well. You can use a software like Wingman to help you do this, and beyond just recording the software, it can display live cue cards while you’re making your pitch as well, and also help you get more insights like time spent listening vs speaking during the call and see your team’s performance stats.

#5: Building an elaborate, well-defined playbook

Building a comprehensive sales playbook for your team over time is a great way to ensure that your sales team’s pitches improve. Products like HubSpot allow you to create, share, and update customizable sales scripts for every use-case.

Beyond just following a sales script, there are a few things that you can ask your team to keep in mind while to improve their pitch:

• WIIFT: Your product might have great features and capabilities, but at the end of your day, all your customer wants to know is what’s in it for them (WIIFT). Focus on the value your product will deliver, the RoI your prospect would get, and how much time, money, or effort they’ll be able to save if they use your product.
  
  
• Know Your Enemy: It’s common for prospects to ask you “why your product is better than X”, and when that question pops up, it helps if you have a ready answer in place. Know your competitor products’ strengths and weaknesses, and why your product is better. Convincing answers to questions like these might make or break your sale.
  
  
• Showcase Your USPs: Every product needs to have a unique selling proposition that will help make customers understand what makes your product better than the rest. If your product doesn’t have one, then you need to create a narrative around that and evangelize it within your company.

Go Get ‘Em!

While these 5 steps can help you improve your sales team’s outreach and pitch right off the bat, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for this need, and you’ll need to figure out what works best for your team as you go. Make sure your teammates are happy, healthy, and motivated while working for long hours in isolation. The below two guides gives you tips on managing your remote teams:

• A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers
• 27 Best Practices to Effectively Manage Remote Teams in 2020

If anyone from your team is working from home, possibly for the first time in their career, this handy guide can help to get to grips with working from home and optimising their productivity.

Despite the global economic slowdown, we really hope your sales team has a good quarter. Stay safe, and all the best!