3 Keys to Keep Your Virtual Sales Team Connected
The pandemic and social distancing have forced lots of business teams – the vast majority of them – to go remote. Teams are now only virtually working together and this is setting a whole new challenge: any businessman or woman knows how important teamwork is to enhance productivity and increase sales, but when team members can’t work in the same office or building and are forced to only have virtual interaction, teamwork just becomes harder. It has been noted by a Gallup study that there is a 25% increase in productivity when employees feel more connected.
Acknowledging the importance of teamwork – especially in sales departments – in this article, we are going to discuss how to enhance teamwork during social distancing providing three keys to keep your virtual sales team connected.
Share information
It’s always essential for the business success that you share the company/campaign goals with your team, but this is even more important when the team is working from miles away and only communicating through phone/ video calls or email.
Shared spreadsheets that all the team members can visualize, edit, comment on and take notes on are the best solution. In a virtual setting, digitally sharing becomes a focus and an intentional action the leader has to think of all the time. Making sure the information is flowing, even in a virtual sales team environment becomes an additional responsibility.
Furthermore, since the challenge put by social distancing isn’t just technological but also emotional, setting milestones and making the team targets to meet, or goals to accomplish, can help keep the sales team motivated.
Make meeting remarkable
Without the possibility of face-to-face meetings, you want to make sure the team virtual meetings have the same energy, efficiency, and value as the good old face-to-face ones. Team meetings are also important to create and maintain team spirit, the synergy between team members, enhance motivation and creativity.
You want to make sure this happens during team virtual meetings as well. How? Think at those face-to-face meeting you and your team used to have:
- When meeting in person, you usually have some small talk before beginning with the work/sales issues. Dedicate the first minutes of your team video calls to greetings, ask how everybody’s doing during these peculiar days, then ask for confirmation that everybody can hear well, everyone’s mic is working, and make sure that the team is ready to begin.
- Virtual meetings usually feel more tiring than meeting in person limit the length of the video calls. Also, promote interaction from all the members so that it’ll feel more like a real meeting.
- At the end of the meeting, take the time to show gratitude and leave space for more small talks to simply chat with your team before closing the communication.
Create the right energy
The final key to keep your virtual sales team connected is creating energy. The tone that you give to the meeting is contagious therefore be sure that you come to the virtual sales team meeting with the right level of energy. The right energy motivates team members to go above and beyond; it’s what pushes them to make the best job they are capable of, even when the manager is not watching. Set goals for the sales team and share the company ones, evaluate the teamwork but also highlight individuals that did exceptional work.
Conclusion
Working in a virtual environment puts many challenges in front of us. In a virtual setting, as we showed above, more awareness and empathy are needed. Furthermore to enhance the connectivity of virtual sales teams we recommend to
- Put more emphasis on sharing information and communication
- Think about making the meetings memorable
- Come in with a contagious level of energy that will instill performance