Whether your teams are working in an office, taking a hybrid approach, or fully remote, the ability to drive outcomes from across all of these environments is a key skill to set yourself up for success in today’s world.
Each setting poses unique challenges and requires distinct approaches to be successful.
Regardless of the approach your team has taken, the ability to enable teams remotely is an ever present need with the distributed nature of today’s global workforce.
Below are areas to consider when setting up your remote teams for success:
- Get the right digital tools and solutions
- Create a culture of sharing
- Use a variety of mediums
- Make live virtual sessions engaging
- Establish a check-in cadence
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Ensure you have the right digital tools and solutions in place
Ease of processes in a remote environment depends heavily on the strength of your tech stack and ability to leverage it in your marketing programs.
When building out your tech stack, you'll want:
- A centralized location for your customer data.
- A shared place to meet, communicate, and collaborate remotely.
- A consolidated hub to create and distribute content.
- A way to record and store customer-facing and internal calls.
- A space to build and facilitate live virtual learning and e-learning programs.
- A system of action to streamline your sales processes and ensure remote teams are able to work efficiently.
- A tool to track and analyze performance, as well as monitor and report on key metrics.
Once you have your tech stack in place, it’s important that you document and share with your teams how they should be interacting with these tools to minimize confusion.
Foster a culture of sharing
An emphasis on learning together and from one another should be key to any team’s culture.
To do this remotely, teams must find ways to encourage knowledge sharing across teams, to celebrate wins, and to document best practices.
While there are many sales readiness platforms that can aid in this area, there are also ways to do this in an instant messaging platform.
For example, create a dedicated channel in your instant messaging platform and encourage teams to share their wins, best practices, and their failures and learnings with the broader team.
Consider boosting interaction by offering incentives for those who share often, offer great insights, or engage in productive exchanges with their peers.
Ensure leadership and frontline managers are also engaged in the channel, while monitoring the space for any negative contributions that put the culture building objective at risk.
Provide a mix of live virtual training, e-learning, video, and practice sessions
Mixing up learning modalities to provide an engaging experience is as important in a remote world as it is in an office setting. Consider building programs that offer a mix of the modalities.
For example:
- Start with a live virtual training to introduce a new topic
- Create an e-learning to reinforce what the teams heard during the live virtual training
- Share short videos of best practices from the field week over week to keep the information top of mind
- Provide managers with resources to conduct practice sessions within their teams to help reps apply what they have learned and receive coaching on an ongoing basis.
Conduct engaging live virtual learning
Teams do not have to be in person to experience fun and competitive engagement when prodicing and running your programs.
Breakout rooms during live virtual training can provide an avenue for role plays, experimentation, and collaboration.
Bringing in examples from the field is also a great way to make live virtual learning more engaging. Even though many professionals are often great facilitators, those who have hands-on experience with the different topics are invaluable.
Additionally, creating challenges and awarding prizes during live virtual sessions can boost the willingness of reps to engage.
For example, say you are training your teams on how to engage with a particular buyer persona:
- Provide your teams with a template and have them complete an individual deal strategy activity before dividing into breakout groups to discuss their plans and receive feedback from their peers and managers.
- Then consider having a few reps prepped to “stand and deliver” their plans back with the broader group and receive feedback from leaders to align the group around the attributes of a strong plan. Be sure to highlight both the wins and areas of opportunity.
- Prepare a few reps who have had success in the past engaging with this persona to share their experience with the group. Ask them to share context for their deal, what they did, what the outcome was, and what they learned about how to engage with the persona based on their experience.
- Share a recorded call in a live virtual training of a great conversation a rep had with the focus persona. Be sure to highlight what it was specifically that the rep did in the call to engage the persona effectively.
Set up operating rhythms to support feedback and ongoing practice
Feedback and insight into what is happening out in the field may be captured in different ways in a remote world than it is in an office setting.
Consider establishing a check-in cadence with a group of marketers or front line managers to get a sense of how your different initiatives are landing in the field. Then, leverage this input to inform your reinforcement plans or adapt your approach in the future.
Additionally, consistent practice and coaching likely needs to be set into an operating rhythm to remain top of mind for teams.
Therefore, determine a frequency that makes sense for your organization and add either manager- or enablement-led practice opportunities, where reps can try out new skills and receive coaching.
Having a standardized cadence will increase traction for your programs and offer insight into how reps are retaining the information they have received.
The path forward
By implementing the above tactics, you will be on the path to helping your teams thrive in a remote environment.
To get started on this path, ensure you have the right tools in place as a strong foundation.
Then, build on your foundation by offering avenues for sharing, creating engaging training in a variety of forms, setting up practice opportunities, and supporting strong feedback loops to iterate over time.
Katie is Senior Revenue Enablement Manager at Outreach.
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