Manage your remote workforce and drive productivity.

Let’s be honest here. This is a crisis of unprecedented levels.

Business is slow and you may have to revisit your forecasts and projections to take into account this pandemic. These are certainly testing times for all of us. But one thing’s for certain; it will get better.

With the current work-from-home (WFH) mandate implemented across almost all organizations, you need to ensure your teams continue to perform at their highest levels so you are well equipped to nail that pipeline once things return to normalcy. We spoke to a host of our customers to try and understand how they’re handling this sudden change and it all essentially boils down to four lessons :

• Monitor your remote teams
• Ensure right communication within the team and with prospects and customers
• Motivate your sales folks
• Empower them to upsell and cross-sell

Monitoring remote teams  

“One of the biggest challenges we’re seeing with asking our team to work-from-home is the mind shift. Being able to monitor their productivity in terms of – what the performance was last week vs their performance this week is crucial. In a regular setup this is done real-time and handled face-to-face. But to handle this remote situation, what we’re doing is automating productivity reports which are auto-sent to managers every couple of hours. Based on this we are trying to intervene with trainings and help them resolve their queries through collaboration.” 

 – Parth Pande, Co-founder and  Director, Finance Buddha. 

As a manager or a team lead you want to help your team adjust to this new situation as soon as possible.  

Everybody is going to react differently, and you need to be equipped to monitor and identify drops in productivity levels. This is purely a function of building transparency at every level so you can track and monitor all the activities of every member of your team. 

Is your FOS team equipped to deal with the move from face-to-face sales to dial-out model? 

Is your tele sales rep available and handling all the incoming inquiries? 

Is your Rockstar salesman keeping those enterprise leads engaged? 

Is your team onboarding your users as expected? 

Make sure you have your CRM set up to track all activities like calls and emails. You can then identify the slow-adaptors and help get them up to speed. This is when a secret tool most users don’t know about their CRM/LMS comes in handy

Automations to proactively identify red flags and intervene.  

Your sales reps not making in time for that call or meeting?  – Send them a notification/ email.  

Is someone missing too many tasks? – Notify the manager and the user. 

Identify your success metrics and break these down into simple tasks and actions.  Monitor these tasks and intervene when necessary

No matter what business you’re in, your pipeline is your baby. Ensure there is minimum leakage due to negligence and poor hygiene habits by your team. 

Track Communication

With your team working remotely, ensuring the right communication with the right person at the right time is imperative.  

Is the new guy in your inside sales team making the right pitch? 

Are customer queries being handled effectively? 

Is that email follow up your rep sent, costing you a potential deal? 

Ensuring the quality of all interactions remains top-notch is crucial.

Monitor these interactions and intervene again at the right time.

At this point in time, beyond simply customer acquisition, ensuring customer success is paramount. 

A drop in quality of the customer success team or account management can come back to haunt you because right now when new customer acquisition seems dismal, customer retention becomes more important than ever. 

If you cannot service your customers when they need you, you will see those churn rates climb. 

Make sure your mobile CRM is integrated to capture emails, call recordings and logs. You can periodically monitor these to ensure there is no drop in the quality of interactions.  

In business environments with a high sales velocity, a lead can often be passed on to multiple reps/teams depending on the stage of the sales cycle.  

Ensuring a seamless collaboration can help minimize leakage of the sales pipeline.  

Define and automate handoffs of the lead to the right person who can pick it up immediately with his next set of tasks. In cases where multiple teams are engaged at the same time for one lead, they can all track and update activities to stay in the loop. 

Help your team stay motivated 

The novelty of remote working wears off pretty quickly. Working from the confines of one’s home can get boring real fast, and staying motivated to perform at the highest levels is not going to come easy. 

Help your team stay motivated by letting them track their performance and acknowledging and rewarding smaller milestones. 

Halfway through today’s quota? Trigger an automated personalized message to congratulate them. Send them a progress report end-of-the day every day so they know how they’re doing. 

“It’s a difficult time, but we have got to keep going. This is also the time that will differentiate just another manager from a real leader.  A leader will find a solution to motivate the team in whatever small way they can. Not by making 10 calls a day to each rep and micromanaging them, but by coaching them and helping identify and rectify mistakes. The lead inflow is low and will get even lower in the coming time. The only thing you can do is to treat each lead as an opportunity, work on it like your life depends on it, and try and close it whichever way you can.”

– Rajat Arora, VP – Sales & Marketing, LeadSquared
 

Upsell and Cross-sell 

While new customer acquisition can be harder for certain verticals at this time, what you can do is leverage your relationships with existing customers and try to upsell and cross-sell. This can help you balance out a lack of new revenue by increasing revenue from existing customers. 

Identify what additional service or feature you have that can most benefit your customers at this time?  

What about that module or customization your customer wanted but kept putting on the back seat? 

Remember, this is probably not the greatest time for your customers either. Empathize with them and understand what their grievances are currently. Is what you’re pitching, genuinely useful?  

For e.g., with more time on their hands, that extra course and additional tests could help students prepare better for their delayed tests. 

With markets at all-time lows, can you convince your insurance customer to open an SIP account? 

Now, would be a good time to consider how to package your products differently, to suit the needs of the time. 

These are our two cents on how to manage remote teams to drive maximum productivity and reduce leakage as much as possible.  

Connect with us to know how LeadSquared can help you manage your remote workforce.