Zach Selch runs a global sales team across 50 countries while traveling 160 days a year. He ties every activity to a sales-funnel stage, uses standardized Salesforce reports for visibility, and maintains a Dropbox library of 60 meeting types with decks, videos, and checklists he shares instantly from his phone. This system lets him coach remotely and drive four-digit sales growth per manager.
Chapters
Sometimes you got to keep working even though you're in the middle of nowhere, and that happens to me a lot. I'm about 160 days a year on the road. Last year, about 50 countries. Most of those were really in the developing part of the world, and I have guys spread out all over the world that I have to supervise. I have to communicate with. I have to lead through the sales process. That's my job. So how do I lead my sales team when I'm out in the middle of nowhere? So let's take a look at some of the elements of sales leadership. I have to do strategy, put together processes, and recruit people. Let's put those aside because I can actually delegate a specific number of days a month to those. I can focus on those when I am actually at headquarters. Or I can be working on a computer in an airplane thinking strategy and writing that up. But the day-to-day communication with my team, I can't wait. I might be out in the middle of nowhere. I might be who God knows where, and I have to support my team. I have to supervise them. I have to be there for them. I have to mentor, coach, and train them. Those are the big things: supervision, mentoring, coaching and training. So how do I do that? In terms of supervision, everything I do, everything my team does is related to a funnel, to stages on a funnel. So they're gonna look at this and put it in Salesforce, and they're gonna do a series of reports that are structured around a report form that I wrote. So all the reports are uniform, and I know Every opportunity, what they're working on, when they're working on something a specific day, I know how that relates to the opportunity in the funnel, moving it through the funnel. Okay? And then we're going to communicate with things like WhatsApp, email, the cell phone, Skype, and WebEx. So we actually do have that communication. They send me a report. If I have questions, I might shoot them out some questions. Through WhatsApp, or we might actually talk depending on the time of day or the time zone, etc. Now what about the other part? The coaching, the mentoring, the training. So again, I have ways of communicating with them with WhatsApp, with email, etc. But the other part of that is I put together— if you think about all the different types of meetings that your people might have, right? If you have 12 or 14 14 different stages in the funnel and you have maybe 3 or 5 or 6 different types of customers, there's a finite number of different meetings people are having. Let's say it's about 60. And then you can build a Dropbox file for each type of meeting that your people might have. And you can put together that file, you can take that file, you can put in maybe the deck you want them to use. So if you have 100 slides, but for every specific meeting you might be using 25 slides for that particular meeting. So you can put the tailored deck for that meeting in that Dropbox. You can put a couple of videos that you might have them show for that, for that meeting. I like to show 1 and 2 minute videos on my iPad, and I like my people to do it. It helps out with the sales process. I use a checklist for my meetings, and I like to give my guys a checklist before they go to their meetings, and it tells them step by step which questions to make sure they ask, which phrases or statements to make sure that they're giving the right information to the customer. I might put in that Dropbox the support documentation that they need to have, because for every statement we're making, making on our deck, we might want to be able to say, and by the way, I have support documentation right here. I have a white paper. I have an article from The Lancet, or that kind of thing. And then typically I'll put a couple of short training videos that I made, which are basically, they're not for the end user. They're for the regional manager or the sales guy to look at, and it says, remember, this is what we're trying to achieve. This is why we're saying this. These are the types of of questions you might want to ask because this is the information at this stage of the funnel that's going to be very helpful for us. So I can put all this coaching into a Dropbox link and then I can basically cut and paste that Dropbox link from my phone and send it off to the regional manager and he gets it. When he's done with that meeting, he's going to send me a report which Which goes into Salesforce, and now the whole loop is complete, right? We have— he's— I'm supervising him, I know what's going on, I'm then coaching him and helping him to improve his sales, and this is how we get that growth and that incremental growth that really drives, you know, 4-digit sales in an international sales team. Thanks. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
