The sales management paradox in a recession is that projects can simply no longer afford the high costs of on-site sales management by a senior sales leader, and yet now is precisely the time they cannot afford to do without it.

Sales teams are perpetually in either a virtuous circle or a vicious spiral. Success breeds more success, but lack of momentum is also self-reinforcing.   Sales teams today are working harder to make fewer sales and in some cases sales momentum is at a snails pace.  Add to that shrinking team sizes requiring longer hours to provide 24/7 coverage, drastically reduced earnings and little prospect of a quick bounce-back… and even seasoned real estate sales professionals are questioning their life choices right now.

At times like these, even the best sales teams need help, through a clear vision, strong coaching and inspiring leadership.

One solution that has proved successful in providing this leadership but at a more sustainable cost level is remote sales leadership; using a combination of remote technologies to help a sales leader to assess team performance and provide coaching and leadership at a distance.

Regular face to face time is still a must but can be a little as once every 6 to 8 weeks for a team that is performing well, where morale is good and the commitment to using technology is high.  Teams newer to the process or facing performance challenges will require much more frequent direct influence.

Some larger developers with multiple projects within a manageable geographic territory are beginning the strategic thinking to make remote sales management effective.  Their Sales Leaders who used to run 1 or perhaps 2 projects are now running 4, or even more.

Often, however, they have received little or no additional training or tools to help them with this greatly enlarged responsibility.

In some cases this leaves even highly effective face to face Sales Leaders like the old music hall plate-spinners  – dashing from project to project just barely stopping the plates from falling.

This is not effective for their teams or for your sales, never mind the toll it takes on their personal productivity and life balance.

So what are the essential components of effective remote sales management?

1. Realistic expectations and progressive phasing in….

Don’t rely solely on remote interactions. They are only a part of the solution. Sales Leaders still need to visit teams regularly – as described above – and much more often at the start. As the team and process evolve, and the Sales Leaders’ confidence in remote management grows, they will be able to blend their face-to-face visits with more and more remote interactions.

2. A first-class, remotely accessible CRM system.

Remote access means web accessible, any time anywhere from any machine, including Internet café, hotel business centre and (at a push) smart phone. For Sales Leaders constantly on the road, anything less is a real challenge. A great deal has been written about the power of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems to improve marketing effectiveness (for example – 6.5 Tools to Track the Performance of Every Marketing Budget). As you will read below, your CRM is also at the heart of an effective remote sales management strategy.

3. Your CRM must contain meaningful, relevant and accurate information.

The “big buckets” of data to capture in your CRM system is well covered in this recent blog: Six Tips for Managing Your Prospect Database. The bigger challenge, however, is to ensure that the information in the system is meaningful, accurate and absolutely up to date. Without this, effective remote sales management is going to be extremely challenging.

Quality information comes from sales team commitment (as opposed to compliance) to the system. They must understand and buy into the sales process and prospect rating system and understand the importance of all of the information that they are tasked to input.  In our experience true commitment only comes from allowing the sales team to “co-design” the sales roadmap, sales language and even to an extent the CRM interface.  By definition, therefore, the CRM system must be customized, often quite heavily, to suit each and every project. Systems which are “ready out-of-the-box”, but difficult to customize by definition fail this test.

We favor BrightBase from BrightDoor Systems because it is web accessible and extremely easy to customize: All of the essential “building blocks” are user-configurable, allowing us to customize each system in the way that best suits the (evolving) needs of each project.

4. You need to know how your CRM system can aid remote sales management.

Sales management is all about asking the right questions …then coaching and guiding as needed. The power of the remote CRM is that it allows the remote sales manager to know exactly what is (really) going on with each and every agent, each and every customer on each and every project and so to focus valuable and limited face to face and phone time asking the right questions of the team.

• The right CRM system, implemented correctly, provides accurate data on what is going on. Just as important as the data itself, however, is the data quality and metadata (things like time stamps and audit trails). Quite often some of the most revealing insights come from analyzing how, how often and when agents are using the system and where they make repeated mistakes.

• An appropriately trained Sales Leader can deduce from this which agents need further training – and not just in use of the system but in their core understanding of the sales process; which agents are on top of their work and which are struggling; who understands and is following the sales roadmap and prospect rating system effectively and who is just going through the motions.

• These insights allow the Sales Leader to ask the right questions, discover the real truth and spend phone and face-to-face time giving the right training and coaching rather than wasting time trying to unearth root causes of poor performance or low morale.

• The Sales Leader can also create individual customized action plans for each agent within the CRM system. We are not talking about standard action plans for different stages of the sales process / sales track (as valuable as these are). We are talking about individual prompts to help individual agents with their personal “blind spots”. This could be prompts to help make sure that closing paperwork is followed up correctly for an agent who tends to be all about the chase and the thrill of the sale but lacks diligence in follow-up. It could be prompts to help get a salesperson back on the phone, or to push an agent to ask for referrals and if this is something they lack confidence in.

5. Invest in Sales Leader skills.

The good news is that the learning curve for a strong face to face Sales Leader to become a good remote Sales Leader is not as daunting as it may at first appear.

• In terms of technical/system training, most will find using the CRM system pretty intuitive. And for any who lack the aptitude, interest or whose travel patterns prevent them getting regular access to the CRM system it is straightforward to set up customized daily / weekly batch reporting to ensure they have all of the necessary information available.

• The more important and more challenging part of the learning curve is learning how to use data and meta data to derive insights which previously would have been gathered, sometimes partly subconsciously during direct interactions with the sales team.

• The key here is to focus on individual coaching not group training. The best results are achieved by working 1-1 with the Sales Leader to understand how they assess and lead their teams face-to-face and then identifying for them how to use the system to derive similar insights (as well as recognizing where the CRM cannot help and coming up with other solutions such as mystery shopping web conferencing etc). As a simple example, asking a Sales Leader to focus on the meta data is unlikely to produce much more than a blank stare. Take the same Sales Leader and ask them how they currently learn what is really going on with their teams and they may tell you that they gain their most useful insights, not from what it said, but how it was said, when it was said and what was not said. This is the conversational equivalent of meta data and similarly useful insights can be gained

• A third key skill is how to ask the right questions from these insights without creating an atmosphere of “big brother” paranoia about the CRM system (see Remote Coaching below).

I. Teaser 1 – Remote Coaching:

This blog has “gone deep” on remote diagnosis – how to help Sales Leaders assess what is going on, or at least where to probe and what questions to ask. We have focused on this area because this is perhaps the area that is most different to face-to-face sales leadership. Also if this is mastered it frees up the face-to-face time to focus on coaching and leading. It is important, however, to be able to provide some coaching and leadership remotely and a variety of tools and tips exist to make this more effective than was possible even a few years ago. This will be the subject of a future blog – if there is interest in the topic

II. Teaser 2 – Technophile Sales Teams.

It’s not all about the Leader. For optimum success, you need a sales team who are enthusiastic and highly technology capable, particularly with the web and social media. Exactly the skills you want to be developing to make your sales team more effective anyway. Again, if there is interest, this can be a future blog covering sales profiling, assessments, recruiting tips, etc.

In conclusion…

Remote sales management like any leadership skill can be mastered with the right tools and coaching. Managing across multiple locations requires smart use of technology – mostly so that you can make the best possible use of precious face-to-face time. The investment in Sales Leader training/coaching is significant but allows them to do more with less and still experience great success stories.