How to Manage a Remote Sales Team

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Hello and welcome to episode three of the Sell From Anywhere show presented by HubSpot. This episode's topic is managing a remote sales team. We'll focus on some strategies and tips about remote sales management. I'm Vintus Hankerson, sales manager here at HubSpot and I'm calling from my new hq my din. We have a great episode lined up, starting with an interview from Mark Robertse, founder of Stage 2 Capital and senior HBS lecturer. Then we'll move to the sales forecast segment to take a look at the latest benchmark data. And I'll close the episode off by reviewing a performance review template that you can take back to the team. Sales management is an extreme sport and I don't recommend you try it at home. Just kidding. At this point we've gotten great at.

Doing it at home.

We've needed to figure out to change management styles, enable our teams to sell remotely and just find our new normal. It's led to process changes, changes in communication style and using brand new tools. We'll kick things off with our interview. Let's dive in.

You know me, I've been taking quarantine super seriously. So super excited to have another moment of human contact this morning. Right now we're super, super lucky to have you, Mark.

Thank you Mintus. I appreciate. I need to see your chair there, Mintus.

My gaming chair.

Oh, a gamer. Nice. I love it. That was a less expensive version was the gifts for my sons this year.

Oh it's probably this.

Yeah, we always go to the gaming conference every spring.

That is exciting. I've never been but I've been taking up my share of gaming more than I'd like to.

That's awesome.

During this quarantine, just small little hobbies to keep myself very cool.

Very cool.

Here we are. Well, I wanted to dig in a little bit. I know you have so, so much knowledge on essentially like how to build a sales org, how to keep the sales org moving up into the right direction. So wanted to understand a little bit more about what's the most important KPI or metric that sales managers really should be paying attention to as they're remote. I think know there's about 50,000 we can figure.

Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I can narrow it down to 1 from 50,000 but I can probably narrow it down to 4 or 5 and it's really just the basics of the funnel progress. And I know that sounds basic but I'll tell you the thing that is a little more advanced and extraordinarily effective and rarely used in organizations. And that is to implement the gates on those stages as being buyer driven actions versus seller actions. Okay, so 95% of the basic funnels that I'll see, you know how many meetings were created, how many progressed to a, you know, a discovery call, how many became a demo, how many were sort of like a collision sequence or a contract, and how many close. Okay, well, let's deal with that. So first off, we can imagine a dashboard of like each day, each week, each month for each one of those. So you've got this like, you know, how many meetings were created each day, each week, each month, stack racking the salespeople, how many discovery calls were done, Boom, boom, boom. Okay, so that's, that's kind of a good illustration of like what we want to be seen. And the difference though is it's a slight tweak, but let's, let's re architect those to be buyer actions versus seller. Okay, so I just said like meeting booked, discovery call held, demo completed. These are all seller actions, and it doesn't tell us as much about where the buyer's at. Okay, so if we instead meeting booked becomes meeting accepted, discovery call held becomes needs verified. And what that means is we held the discovery call. We don't do anything different. We go through our same progress. We haul the discovery call, we email the prospect. Hey, Mintus, thank you so much for the 20 minutes today. You basically told me that you're struggling with lead gen in post Covid world. You've largely done trade shows which no longer exist, and you want to lean into some alternative sources that work virtually. And so, you know what I mean? So like, please let me know if this is accurate. And when the buyer writes back and said, yeah, Mark, you got it right. That's the gate. Right? And so similar demo completed, no buyer process verified. You know, Mintus, thanks again for the 30 minutes today. We went through the product, you basically like these particular use cases and saw how they're improved and basically said that at the price we quoted, which is 800amonth, you'll need to do this, to do this, do that, and get this person's approval. Can you just respond and make sure I've got the perception of the product correct and the buyer journey, the buying process correct. And when they respond, that's the gate. When we do it that way, we align the buyer and the seller naturally, because they're more, they're not focused. Oh, let me do the demo. They're focused on. Let me get the response right and the accuracy of the predictability of when that moment happens to a ultimate success, like the close is much higher than if we just base it there. So I think that's again, when you say, oh, just track the basic funnel metrics, you know, of course that. But if you can redefine them as buyer actions, that's far more powerful, especially in this remote context.

Awesome. Yeah, I love that, I love that. I'm taking that to my team as soon as we can. I always talk about how if your buyer hasn't done the actions, if you emailed your prospect eight times, that does not count as showing that they're actually responding to you.

Yeah. And in your context have been part of this multi thousand. You know, you can't get a CRM change but you can hold them accountable. Like listen, you're not going from stage two until stage three until I see the email response. So as a sales manager, even a large organization, you can implement this overnight.

Well, in this day and age, I mean we have stress, anxiety and I mean just craziness coming from all cylinders. It started off with quarantine, now we have social issues and everything else going on. So it's very, very much easy to find ourselves and our reps, especially on our teams to be very, very like shaken at this time. So how do you suggest that sales managers prioritize mental health but also balance keeping the foot on the gas and continuing to be a high performing team during a time like this?

Yeah, I mean, I think that could be an evergreen conversation too. Like, you know, it's like even when we're back in January, right. Like how do you balance like the pressures of hitting numbers with mental stress? Right. And it's almost like you have to like silo the two conversations, you know, I mean there's like during your one on ones there's like, hey Mentis, how you doing? You know, how's your family? How you holding up? What's going on at home? You know, just like we're not really as a manager, I'm not like your friend, but we have, we have, we have a human aspect to our relationship. I want to know what's going on and it's fine for you to vent, etc. And then like, and I've had this happen before, right, where people have disclosed really rough stuff to me, you know, like, father died, going through divorce, child sick. Right. It's like really rough stuff. And that you can have deep conversations in that empathize. But then there's the conversation of there's a job to be done. Okay? And let's have that conversation. And that can feel like inhuman when someone discloses this. Like they're going through the worst part of their life and then all of a sudden you're like grilling me on like my call volume. But there's this transition where it's like, listen, we are very fortunate here in the US that we have especially in a HubSpot, that we have great healthcare. And so like, you tell me this, like, do you need a break, right, because we have short term disability. We have all these amazing programs for you and I'm happy to like be a conduit with you with HR to pursue what that would look like as you work through this. Okay, so let's think about that. If you decide you don't, I just need you to, I just need you to do the job right? So if you make that decision, we have amazing programs. If you need some help, let's get that help. But if you decide you can make it, then we got to talk about the job. You know what I mean? So that's an evergreen situation. In this case, we have to probably double or triple our touch points with our people because you don't have that hallway walkthrough. You don't see that person's expression where like they're clearly stressed. You don't hear the, you know, someone, hey, by the way, you should check in with Mintus. You know, she's going through a tough time. Like, so you have to double and triple down on those touch points and hopefully like replace your, your shower time and your commute time that you used to have to do with like, you know, you know, we still have to shower obviously, but like, you know, we don't have to get all dialed up and all that kind of stuff. And so hopefully we can find some time in our workday to have those, you know, they don't have to be an hour, they don't have to be 30 minutes, right? So I think that's a big deal. The other thing is, as a manager, I've seen a lot of managers have great success with this is recreate the serendipitous exchange of information. Okay. So instead of having say like, you know, if Mint is, you're on an 8, 10 person team, don't have like a weekly 10 person like training film review. Have split them into like groups of three and obviously one would be four and have them twice a week. Right. So it's more intimate and we can do a film review together. Or we can do a like, what's working with prospecting? We're 30 minutes, we're going to brainstorm on what's something new we tried. Right. And that, like recreates. First off, there's like, there's a quick check in for you too, as another data point. And it just recreates like, hey, I'm part of this team. I'm not alone here. You know, these are peers that are around to help me. You know, you probably wouldn't have done that in person, but in remote, you know that intimacy is important to create.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I know for myself and my own team, I probably worked from home five times in my whole life before this. So we definitely had to pilot what we do. We started off with daily meetings and they're like, okay, I think we're seeing a little too much of each other. So we're going to dial those back now. We found a great balance. So definitely having those touch points throughout the week. Absolutely successful. And my team has finally hit a stride. So thank you so much for your insight. Mark. If you work at HubSpot, you may see a couple of these pointers on my team in the next week or if you're my team, you may see this. But I want to say thank you so much for your time today. Just as a reminder, sales manager is an extreme sport, so I don't recommend that you try it at home, even though we are all trying it at home. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for your time and we look forward to talking a little bit more about the sales forecast next.

Hey, everyone. My name is Kyle Jepsen. I create sales training for HubSpot Academy and I'm here to walk you through this week's sales forecast. So let's hop into the benchmark data. If we look here at the deal pipelines, we can see deals created and closed, and this has been pretty flat compared to last week. Closed deals is at 3% and created deals is at 4%. Since this is remaining pretty flat, we'll want to dig into some industry information here. And we can see that construction is way out ahead of everyone else, perhaps from people building new homes as the COVID pandemic moves people from urban to more suburban areas. Also, a lot of home improvement projects going on down at the bottom. No surprises here. Travel and entertainment. I don't know about you, but it's been a long time since I've been on an airplane or in a movie theater looking over at outreach. If we want to dig into sales emails. We're continuing to see that salespeople are sending a lot of emails and and not getting great response rates. So if you are in sales and you are sending emails, lean heavily into personalization. Make sure you're relevant. Focus on quality over quantity. That's the only way you're going to see a return here. Sales calls, on the other hand, we're starting to see the trend is back up towards nearly the benchmark and it looks like that is continuing to improve. A call can be a great way to to have a personal interaction with one of your contacts. So definitely recommend considering that we're seeing reps are picking up the phones again, they're less reluctant than they have been in recent weeks and hopefully your results are improving as well. That's all from me. I'm going to hand it back over to Mintus for some hands on resources you can take home with you.

This is the last segment of the episode, the Resource rundown. We have provided a sales performance review template. I know that as a sales manager at HubSpot, coaching and reflecting on our performance is a huge place. We spend lots of time looking back at what worked as well as what we could have done better. Helps us consistently achieve and not only kill it in H1 but make sure that we take all of the learnings into H2. So what we have here is a document that has three main parts. The first a tab for metric based reflection and goal setting for the rest of the year. Second is a soft skills assessment from the rep and manager to understand what we can improve on more of a qualitative basis. And then third, we all know that every good coaching plan needs consistency and we've built a place in for both rep and manager to get on the same page about what success looks like and what action items are needed. The link to access this resource and all resources mentioned in the episode are all in the description. Thank you again for your time today and tune in next time where we will cover the tools needed for remote selling. Yeah hey.

Wow.