The Sales Manager’s Guide to Managing a Team During COVID-19
Managing your sales team during COVID-19 can feel a bit like managing your team in the Twilight Zone. If you’re like many workplaces, your team is freshly remote and completely disoriented by it.
The problem is that you’re managing a sales team. And if your sales team drops the ball, your whole company will stumble.
Here’s what you need to know to make sure that your team stays on track, no matter how far apart you are.
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, almost any team is a remote team. The problem is that you’re a sales team, and you can’t afford to let details fall by the wayside, no matter how dispersed your team may be. Here’s how you can keep your team on track even during these strange and difficult times.
Overcommunication is Key
When your team isn’t able to meet in person and pop over to each other’s desks, overcommunication is key. Especially when you’re a sales team dealing with a lot of small details— in other words, a sales team on any given day.
When teams are distributed, it’s easy for communication to fall by the wayside. After all, we’re all accustomed to walking down the hall, stepping into a meeting, sending a quick note. Working remotely eliminates the glaring majority of our regular communication methods.
This is why overcommunication is important— it feels like overcommunication, but really, it’s the best way to make up the gap. Setting this standard early will make it easier for everyone to stay abreast of relevant details.
Maintain Transparency
When your sales team is responsible for handling so many disparate details in the course of a day, maintaining transparency is critical to ensuring nothing gets lost. The problem is that most of the time, transparency is maintained by keeping in touch with each other throughout the day by stopping by each other’s desks or hopping into meetings.
Because communication is curtailed by necessary distances during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to lose transparency too. Your team is responsible for too many details to let things slip through the cracks.
The best way to maintain transparency is to equip your team with tools to ease the transition. You should all have access to a toolkit that allows you to share all the relevant details in no time at all.
Provide Tools to Ease Adaptation
And that leads into our last point: provide tools to ease the adaptation process.
Working from home is harder than working in an office. It’s not a natural skill most people possess, simply because they don’t associate home with the workplace and don’t apply the same type of discipline. Most teams also aren’t used to working as a dispersed group, which means communication is that much harder.
This is why tools are critical— they make it that much easier to reintroduce that same level of connectivity and discipline necessary to keep everyone on track.
Helping Your Teams Thrive During Difficult Times
The novel coronavirus pandemic is radically altering the way we think about work. It’s changing our relationship to other people and to the office.
Even so, your job marches on. And if you’re going to adapt to the new sales environment, you need the right tools for the job.
That’s where we come in. Traq makes it easy to keep track of every little detail, separating signals from noise and allowing you to capture what matters. And that’s the focus you’ll need to thrive during these difficult times.
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