Managing remote sales reps

Jasn:

 

I was hoping someone else would answer this, instead of me.  I'm kinda of upset that we have hundreds of thousands of page views each month and no one can find the time to post a response?  I'm really sick and tired of the lurkers, and on the same hand want to thank the people that do contribute.  

 

The forums are FREE, and they don't have to be, I could lock everything down and require a Premium Membership.  Please find the time to help share information and knowledge, we're all in this together.

 

Art

I work from home a few days a week.  I'm in the office once a week to meet with sales manager and go over what might close (forecast), other than that I also need to keep my CRM update with x amount of calls, appointments and working on key accounts. 

Hey guys,
Just seeing this now. Out office works with a large geography and it's unreasonable to expect to see our reps in the morning and the end of the day. We have defined a set amount of high value activiers per day/week/month and these are the means by which the end goal is achieved (sales results). Through our CRM system Insightly we are able to keep track of the high value activites, get involved in sales cycles and provides feedback on time and territory management with this real time data. Hope this helps!

Yes that all helps. Thanks for the feedback. With how far he is away from our office he would spend more time driving back and forth than actually working.

I worked 4 years as a true remote, office was 80 miles away.  Even with 27+ years experience before that, I had to exercise some real discipline to keep things on track. 

 

My suggestion as indicators to watch:

Sales

Pipeline

New Adds

New inquiries

CRM activities

and most of all your intuition, if you are getting a full day. 

 

The daily phone call is a good idea. 

Wes spoke about this at work today, one of the ideas was to issue a company cell phone. You can always check the GPS location and if you find that the phone is always off, it would be a good indicator that something is amiss.

Thanks a lot guy's. All of that is a great help.

In my business, having remote sales reps is a commonplace.  We have specific metrics and tracking in place.  We utilize Salesforce as our CRM and have lots of features added on to it.   As a manager, I have instant access to each sales rep's Dashboard (at data behind the Dashboard) showing their activity for the week, month, quarter and year.  We take into account calls, emails, webinars, meetings, # of applications, $ amount of applications, # of prospect accounts they have contacted, number of active accounts they have contacted, deals in the pipeline by each stage.  For me, I spend about a total of 1 hour each day looking at the metrics for each sales rep.  I am a phone call or email away from each rep and they actively use both so that we are both kept up to speed on the latest updates. 

 

In addition to the daily contact and metrics I look at, I spend twice a month with each rep (over the phone - we even do a webcam meeting)going over the plan we put in place and discussing their progress or any changes needed to the plan.

 

If you have never managed remote reps before, all it takes is just a small change in your mindset and some of your habits and you can easily manage them.

Everyone is talking about tracking their reps CRM activity so which CRM is commonplace for the copier world?

We use compass Sherpa. I like it a lot but I think their tracking/reporting could be better. We also looked at sales chain but I heard so many complaints about them and the product that we decided on Sherpa. 

I've worked remotely for last 4 years, and if you feel the need to track via GPS, Sales force,  etc....  then you hired the wrong person:  period.   Also, that's not managing, that's babysitting a salary. 

 

 Having meetings in person is simply a waste of your time and theirs.  Meet over "go to" meeting and conf calls. 

 

I see my boss in person once or twice a year, have been way over plan every year.

 

If you try to manage them like your other office folks, it WILL NOT work.  You cannot micro manage a remote person.  Just because their in shorts and a t-shirt or PJ's,  making phone calls/conf calls/preparing proposals and the rest of the folks in your office are in suits....that doesn't mean anything.

Keep in mind, from the time they wake up, til time they go to bed and all weekend long, "their in the office." and it is sitting there waiting for them.

 

Also, if you have 2 bad hires in a row for this position, it's not their fault, but rather the person who hired them. 

 

I don't want to sound rude, but, I see it too often.  If you have time to babysit reps, then YOU are hiring the wrong the people.     

No I definitely am not going to babysit my reps. I, myself, on top of everything going on with them have about a 600,000 dollar book of business each year to handle on my own as well. I do not like the micromanaging aspect either. This rep is still fairly new to the industry so meeting once a week was brought to me from him to help him with the opportunities he has uncovered. No need for tracking GPS or CRM's either.

 

Thank you for the insight, no offense was taken from it at all.