Tools to Keep Your Sales Team in Sync

Sales teams are increasingly remote and independent. Offsite meetings, chasing sales, and working remotely can be alienating, but time spent in informational sessions, team meetings, and at the office is time away from sales leads. While flexibility is a great work benefit for your employees, and increasingly necessary for your sales team, you still need the ability to keep your team members on the same page with important corporate updates, training, and daily communication.

It’s easy to slip away from accurate brand and product representation when your mobile workforce is removed from the company on a daily basis. How do you keep your crew in sync without reeling them back into the office for a 9-5?

Work Isn’t a Place, It’s a Collaboration

“Our world is evolving so that work is no longer a place, but an amalgamation of digital and physical work happening through independent, team, and cross-functional collaboration.” – Sean O’Brien, VP of Strategy at PGi

Employees should always have what they need to do their jobs, and when your workforce is doing their jobs outside of the traditional 9-5 office, this means placing the tools at their fingertips. The right training tools let your employees tackle challenges with confidence in the knowledge that they’re using the right messaging and the most up-to-date information available. Can old-school, likely outdated, training binders accomplish this? Can an unengaging, static PDF or memo?

Today’s technology and interconnectedness allows for a multitude of ways to stay in sync with your team and keep them engaged with the company, their jobs, and their coworkers. It’s time to give your workforce the tools they need. Here are a few:

Have regular face-time with your team.
Regular face-time is important whether your team sees each other in the office every day or once a year. Not being in the same physical place isn’t a barrier to face-time when you have access to tools such as Google Hangouts and Skype for regular video chats.

Build a rapport with your team by getting to know them as people, which is much easier when you’re able to pick up on body language and facial cues. Face-to-face conference calls can happen daily, weekly, or however often you need. Make time for one-on-one check-ins, too. Five minutes of face time can make all the difference.

Check in with a quick message.
It takes just a second to hop on to your phone or tablet and send a quick message. For sales teams that spend a lot of time on the road, it’s convenient to answer such a message and then continue working without the major interruption of a phone call.

Slack and Yammer are great examples of instant messaging applications that have been designed specifically for today’s remote or on-the-go teams. Both are available as desktop browser applications or mobile apps, providing easy use and integration for your entire team, whether they are on the road or in the office.

Streamline your eLearning experience.
Cloud-based content solutions let you ensure that everyone’s on the same page by keeping field reference materials remotely accessible, no matter where your team is located. Your training materials are instantly available with the speed and accessibility of Google. And while search results can be completely off-base from your business objectives, the materials are corporate-made and approved for company use.

Better yet, you can measure data metrics to see whether your cloud-based content is working. Track what content your sales team uses and maintain a record of what’s working and what’s not. This lets you go back and re-adjust your eLearning materials when there’s evidence that they could perform better.

Regular communication is as important for today’s on-the-go workforce as it is for those around the water cooler. If work is really a collaboration and not a physical place, then the solution is simple. Provide the right tools to keep your employees in sync with each other as a team, and as brand representatives. Use communication and eLearning tools that have the ability to apprise an entire workforce of the most up-to-date information and training.

Now’s the time to take advantage of digital communication tools, such as cloud content software, regular video conferences, one-on-one calls, and daily check-ins via instant message. The workforce has evolved to be more mobile. Make sure the tools you provide them follow suit.