Virtual Team Management

How do you manage a team of sales people who you don't see in person?  

This is all about relationships and building them in a virtual environment even though you may get to see your team once a year or so at the sales kick off. You need to continue to create touch points with your team to keep in touch such as email, phone, IM, text, Skype, and etc.

In the past, I have always done a one hour weekly team call and then a 30 minute individual call each week to allow people to brainstorm and share successes etc on the former and to go over individual opportunities and issues on the latter.

In order to keep the team call focused on adding value and brainstorming about how to find deals or close deals, you need to have a solid system in Salesforce so you don't have to spend a lot of time getting caught up on deal details.

Once your reps commit to this input into the system, however, it is your management responsibility to always be checking in the system when you have questions and not just defaulting to a call or email that will distract your reps.  Learn to use your system. Learn to create reports.  So that you can begin to interact with it naturally throughout the course of your week and keep a finger on the pulse of your business while providing minimum interruption to your reps. 

One of the reasons I started this blog was to be able to more effectively communicate to my team tips about selling virtually without having to tell them.  Now, if they have an interest in a particular post then can read it and if not they don't.

This isn't exactly new news but make sure your meetings also have an agenda so your rep(s) no what to expect and can prepare.  If they are prepared and have thought through things in advance they will be more proactive in the meeting and add more value.  If they no what to expect they will not worry about what they might not be expecting.

Also, make sure to start all of your meetings right on time.  Eventually, your laggards will learn their lesson and start getting their on time. Meanwhile, the team members who do get there on time will feel that you respect their time as much as yours.

During the meeting, make sure you have one scribe taking the action items and distributing them after the meeting so that you can go over them as part of the next meeting.  You need to create a culture of execution so that everything is getting done in a timely manner and so that people expect to be asked about their commitments and are not able to just let them slip.  A great book on this whole subject is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.

Also a great tool to check out for helping you manage your virtual meetings, enforcing an agenda and creating a culture of execution is MeetingSense.  Go check it out and take it for a test drive. I have used it successfully so far at three different companies.