While working remotely has its fair share of benefits, like saving time and money on commutes and encouraging better work-life balance, it also has some downsides. Because your remote workers are not in the office with their team members and managers, they often feel less engaged and connected to their team and the company. And this in turn could result in lowering their productivity and performance to a great extent.

In order to counter this issue, you need to have a good communication system in place. Effective sales team communication is not just about pushing out product updates and pricing information to salespeople. It is also a way to keep your sales team motivated, engaged, and aligned with your company’s values.

In this blog, we are going to explore various creative approaches through which you can scale communication across your remote sales teams.

Channels you can adopt to carry out virtual communication efficiently

Here are a few channels that you can use to efficiently communicate with your remote sales reps

Email: Email is the age-old way of sending out official communications. A lot of people use emails widely to send out all kinds of formal and informal communications. You can use emails to make big announcements, assign tasks to the employees, give out instructions, etc

Slack: Slack is one of the modern-day best tools available to facilitate effective collaboration and communication between a group of people

Whatsapp: We all use WhatsApp on a daily basis. On average, a person checks new WhatsApp messages in every 3-5 minutes. So, why not use WhatsApp to facilitate formal and informal communication between the members of your sales team?

You can create an official group for all your team members in Whatsapp and use it to,

• Deliver urgent message

• And discuss updates related to work, meetings etc

Text messages: Text messages are a very popular and convenient form of communication. Most texts are read within three minutes of being sent, so it’s perfect for urgent messages such as a change in meeting date or a reminder of an important deadline.

SmartWinnr’s SmartFeeds: Our Smartfeeds help you to deliver your message in a crisp and interesting format. You can share a message in the form of a short video, infographic, image, or a short text summary

Tips to communicate effectively with your sales teams

Tip-1: Be clear, concise and use visuals wherever possible

With high workloads, salespeople usually have a shorter attention span and they typically live in the moment.

As a result,

• They tend to ignore information that is not relevant to their needs at that point in time.

• They typically don’t enjoy slow, laborious marketing presentations (they will probably be checking their email on their mobile device anyway).

• They tend to scan information, not read it in detail.

• They rarely visit the company’s internal intranet just to see what’s new, and they don’t read mass email updates.

So, you need to get creative with your communication to get their attention. Be clear and concise, and use visuals to communicate wherever possible. Consider using short summaries, infographics, or short videos to get the main messages across and embed hyperlinks to further in-depth information. This saves a lot of time for your remote reps as they can quickly check out your messages and get back to what they were doing.

Tip-2: Personalize the communication

In today’s world where there is an overload of information, the last thing that you want to do is to bombard your employees with information that is irrelevant to them. Delivering irrelevant messages results in quickly making your employees disengaged and disinterested in viewing your messages.

Most successful communications are the ones that speak to each individual and address their scenario. For example,

• One of your employees might be closer to achieving her sales target and another might be far from achieving it

• Your team in New York might be facing more harrowing times than your team in Georgia

Create different personas or target audiences and craft personal messages for each one of them. Cater as best as you can to your different sub-groups to make your communications as personal as possible.

Tip-3: Repeat your communication via multiple channels

Most people need to hear things three to five times before those things sink in. For salespeople, this is especially true. To ensure that messages are heard by sales teams, you need to reinforce these communications through multiple channels. Thus, if a salesperson misses a message in one place, he or she will see it in another.

Monitor readership and repeat messages until they are read. Recurrence options for unread messages via desktop/mobile alerts can help ensure that messages are eventually read.

Tip-4: Establish a two-way communication

Two-way communication is always better than one-way. If there is information flow from only one side to the other, then it quickly results in making the other side disinterested and disengaged. Two-way communication creates a more democratic environment, whereby people can share and discuss their thoughts, ideas, and opinions on various subjects. This helps in improving relationships right across the organization.

So, keep yourself open to listening to your audiences’ queries, suggestions, comments, and feedback. In every communication that you send out, encourage your people to respond back if they have anything to say. When they do respond, make sure that you give a reply to them as early as possible. This helps in engaging your audience effectively.

Tip-5: Allow salespeople to collaborate

Another important aspect of virtual communication is peer-to-peer communication. It’s a well-known fact that when team members have good collaboration, understanding, and communication amongst themselves they tend to get the work done quickly and efficiently.

Therefore the need of the hour is to have a platform where sales reps can communicate with each other, discuss ideas and make collective progress as a team. One of the best ways to facilitate this team collaboration is by using SmartWinnr’s QResolve.

SmartWinnr’s QResolve is a platform that allows sales reps to collaborate, communicate and discuss. They can,

• Post a question on the platform

• Answer the questions of other sales reps

• Upvote or downvote a question or an answer

Want to learn how to effectively communicate the sales contest updates to your contest participants?

Sales Contest Communication Template