The Only Guide You Need For Empowering Remote Teams For Success

Forget everything you thought you knew about remote work. Empowering your team for success requires a brand new playbook—and we've got it right here. 

With the right structure, support, and tools, you can increase efficiency and productivity to maximise the benefits of remote work. 

And when it comes to finding the best tools for improving B2B sales for your remote team, Forward has the solution. From sales to negotiations for remote teams, Forward can empower your team for a seamless experience at every turn.

Are you ready to empower your team and strike the perfect balance between flexibility and efficiency? Learn what empowerment looks like and how to establish the ideal remote sales workspace.

What Does It Mean to Empower Your Remote Sales Team?

A successful remote sales team begins and ends with trust. Reinforce that trust by encouraging autonomy and allowing your team the authority to make more decisions. It might take time and effort to pull back, but the rewards and potential for growth are endless.

Did you know that 90% of employees report increased productivity with remote or hybrid work? This shift towards flexible working environments allows employees to better manage their time and reduce daily commutes, which often leads to improved focus and work-life balance. As a result, companies that adopt remote or hybrid models not only experience higher productivity levels but also see an increase in employee satisfaction and retention.

Sustainable success also requires efficient, user-friendly technology. Ensuring that your team has all of the necessary software and tools can bolster their productivity, as long as they know how to use them.

Check in regularly and foster a supportive environment with room to ask questions and gain additional tools or training as needed. Remember, remote work offers an opportunity for employees to grow and achieve their full potential, so be the nudge they need to succeed.

Establishing an open forum for feedback can help you identify gaps in knowledge and technology. It’s crucial to embrace this feedback from your remote team as to what’s working and what comes up short.

How To Create an Empowered Remote Sales Workspace

Making any changes to your remote workspace might feel overwhelming, but it’s worth the effort to tackle one segment at a time. Creating the optimal setup doesn’t just enhance sales, it supports your team’s overall well-being so they can be more productive.

Is your team using several tools for different purposes and struggling to stay on top of all of them? Maybe you need new software that streamlines processes to reduce stress and missed opportunities.

Redesigning workspaces to be more interactive is the first order of business to increase productivity. Be sure to find the proper balance of professionalism and personalisation when crafting your remote setup. 

Creating open discourse with your team to see what they need most will help you arrive at an ideal arrangement. Previewing some elements empowers teams and helps you determine which options will have the greatest impact on overall organisation and performance. 

Addressing key issues that your team frequently identifies as problematic, like inefficient software or meeting platforms goes a long way to improving the team dynamic.

Drive Growth Through Sales Tools and Technology 

How many tools does your team currently use? Do you have sufficient technology to meet all of your needs at each stage of the funnel?

A successful B2B sales workspace should include a range of tools covering various aspects, including:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM), like Salesforce or Hubspot
• Project Management, like Trello or ClickUp
• Analytics, including Google and Pipedrive
• Marketing Tools, including email and social media, like Mailchimp 
• Document Sharing, like Notion and Dropbox

This arrangement could mean your team needs to access several platforms everyday. It can be overwhelming and disorganised, leading to missed opportunities with qualified leads. 

What if there were a way to bring everything together in one place to streamline every process for your remote sales team?

Forward integrates with the top tools your team already loves, CRM to SEP, email to PPT, and Excel to Google. Everything from sales to negotiations for remote teams become easier and more efficient, allowing them to engage more qualified buyers.

In today’s digital world, your team needs to be able to handle everything electronically. But, that’s not enough. Customers crave quick and easy, meaning complicated or slow processes can derail a deal. Outfitting your team with the right technology is more critical than ever.

Consider your current process and how challenging it can be to work through the day-to-day tasks. Maybe your employees make comments about roadblocks or you notice the cumbersome process for obtaining e-signatures from clients. Forward’s digital sales room helps you streamline these processes to empower your team and boost overall successes.

Personalise Your Remote Sales Process

Even if you have the best tools for improving B2B sales, you could be missing the boat with your messaging. 

Did you know that 71% of customers expect personalisation when interacting with businesses? This growing expectation underscores the importance of leveraging data and analytics to tailor customer experiences. Companies that successfully implement personalisation strategies not only meet customer expectations but often see increased engagement and higher conversion rates as a result.

Clients still crave personalisation with remote sales because they want to feel heard and appreciated. Just because you aren’t face to face with your buyer doesn’t mean they want to be treated like a faceless entity. There’s no room for the old sales tactics in today’s remote sales world.

Adjusting to this new sales approach requires some research to develop a deeper understanding of your target market’s needs. Ask yourself a series of questions and do a deep dive into the market to find the answers.

• What are my target audience’s pain points?
• What do they need that they aren’t finding elsewhere?
• How can I solve their problems?

Start by combing through social media posts and comments on relevant articles to identify frustrations. Analyse the competition for customer comments on shortcomings. You might even consider running polls and surveys on various platforms to ask the people what they want. 

Review the data you collect to refine your customer profile to ensure you can meet their needs. Utilising this data to enhance personalisation tells your buyers that you understand them and want to meet their needs.

Providing your remote teams with the ability to personalise sales content empowers them to make stronger connections. 

Streamline the Sales Cycle With Pre-Defined and Proven Templates

Creating structure can support remote teams through the sales process because it provides consistency. When everybody on the team can see where each client is in the sales cycle, it closes gaps and eliminates confusion.

Part of crafting this structure involves creating standardised templates for each part of the sales funnel. Consequently, your team becomes accustomed to consistent sales processes, which in turn builds their confidence in your system.

Of course, you don’t want to lose that personalisation approach, so you need to have templates that are adaptable for various situations. 

Essentially, the template serves as a skeleton for each prospect. Your team can then fill in and personalise the information relevant to each individual customer, providing the ideal balance between structure, consistency, and personal touch.

For example, you have a proven sales proposal template that includes all of the key data you need, like your business identity and pricing. These elements have a static position in your digital proposal, and your team doesn’t have to keep inputting that data.

However, your sales team can adjust certain fields to speak to a prospect and give them that personal touch. Swapping names, pictures, and dates to make the template look and feel like your team crafted a custom proposal will wow the customer. Your team will appreciate the efficiency. 

Consolidate Your Sales Content

How many campaigns do you run at one time? Surely, you have multiple prospects at various stages of the sales funnel at any given point. How do you track that across multiple platforms to deliver the appropriate content at each point?

If you’re struggling to maintain so many moving parts and finding your team losing out on deals, it’s time to streamline the process. Centralising sales collateral so that everyone is on the same page at any given time is essential for successful remote sales teams..

It’s easier to track client contacts, manage and adapt digital content, and communicate about future initiatives with a centralised control. 

Even though your team is spread across multiple locations, and even time zones, you can all access the most recent information available. Multiple team members can work on the same document in real time so you can increase accuracy and consistency across the board.

Further, in terms of data, your team can access the same analytics at any time when you consolidate. When everybody sees real-time analytics, it’s easier to identify trends and fluidly adapt to meet buyer needs.

Ensuring that your remote team has access to this information develops a more successful work environment that translates to sales success. It creates smoother transitions through phases in the sales funnel and presents a seamless experience for your customers, even if multiple team members help throughout the process.

Develop a Mutual Action Plan for Enhanced Buyer Interactions

Mutual action plans (MAP) support the remote sales process from all angles by creating transparency between parties. It signals trust between you and your buyer while setting forth the expectations for each step in the process. For remote teams, that requires reliable platforms to sustain the MAP.

Building a solid MAP involves a few basic principles, but it can be customised in many ways to accommodate different industries, business sizes, price points, and more.

• Craft a value statement that highlights the benefits for the buyer.
• List all critical stakeholders involved in the transaction.
• Detail the list of deliverables and services with definitions of each.
• Fill in key dates to set up a timeline so the buyer understands when they can expect things to occur.
• Set out the responsibilities for each party involved.

MAPs expedite the sales process by solving conflicts faster and keeping both parties on the same page. They also empower sales teams by employing standardised templates for key documents and an established methodology. 

Did you know that, on average, it takes 31 touches and over 100 days for B2B teams to close a deal. This extended timeframe highlights the complex nature of B2B sales, which often involve multiple decision-makers and a higher level of scrutiny compared to B2C transactions. Consequently, sales teams need a well-crafted, multi-channel engagement strategy that nurtures relationships and builds trust over time to successfully close deals.

MAPs can reduce the number of touches and days by removing inefficiencies and improving the overall customer experience. When both parties can collaborate freely on documents and see the entire process up front, removing barriers and closing the deal faster is easier. 

Buyers can see the expectations and benefits at the outset, meaning fewer objections to overcome down the line.

Empower Your Sales Team With Actionable Insights From Engagement Analytics

How do you know what product to launch next? Are you trying to decide between two new offerings? You could follow your gut to make your decision, or you could follow your target market.

Understanding your audience is the best way to develop content and products that resonate with them. To understand your audience, you need to know how they engage with your digital content and offerings.

Engagement analytics provide insight into what works and what doesn’t by identifying the content that draws actions from buyers. You can learn a great deal from the right metrics and identify areas for refinement to increase your conversion rates.

Analysing all virtual interactions, from website visitors to chats initiated, is the best option for enhancing your communication strategies. Monitoring these metrics and appropriately analysing the data allows for continuous improvement and adaptability.

Collecting and analysing engagement data helps remote sales teams refine MAPs and marketing campaigns. Integrating current engagement analytics helps your sales teams reach your target demographic and provide more personalised content.

Overcoming Common Remote Sales Challenges

Are you struggling to keep your remote teams on the same page across the many virtual platforms you use? Have you noticed any of these tell-tale signs?

• Communication breakdowns between teams, or worse, between your teams and potential buyers. 
• Limited information, lost data, or confusing content that led to missteps in negotiations and lost sales.
• Distractions or mistakes that led to lost documents or emails that didn’t reach all of the right parties.

All of these issues signal a breakdown on your remote teams, and they can cost you at any stage of the sales funnel. The most frustrating part is that these issues are completely preventable. 

Drawing everything together in Forward’s digital sales room can eliminate these costly errors and get your team on the same page.

Real-Life Success Story: How Forward Empowers Gyfti’s Sales Team 

Gyfti, an SaaS platform with a unique mission, had a problem. The company hoped to help businesses strengthen client relationships by delivering exceptional, personalised gifts, but traditional processes left prospects underwhelmed and lost. 

The Challenge: Overcoming a Traditional Sales Cycle to Stand Out From the Crowd

Lengthy email exchanges, lacklustre presentations, and poor timing threatened to unravel Gyfti’s gifting. It seemed almost impossible to make an impactful statement about their innovative product to differentiate themselves from the competitive set. 

Despite Gyfti’s unique offerings, their business processes provided significant challenges to conversion rates.

• Excessive Emailing: Continuous back and forth with clients led to cluttered inboxes and missed opportunities.
• Lacklustre Presentations: The Gyfti team chalked up countless hours to customising presentations for clients without striking a chord.
• Gaps in Tracking Customer Engagement: How do you know when to follow up with a prospect if you don’t know they viewed your proposal? Gyfti sent loads of emails but never knew whether they were ever opened, read, or shared. 

Gyfti knew they needed to make changes to reach their goals. How could they overcome these struggles to create functional, efficient buyer journey? 

The Solution: Forward’s Digital Sales Room

Forward’s cutting-edge digital sales room posed the ultimate solution to Gyfti’s struggles. engagement. The innovative, immersive platform opened doors to new engagement options that supported Gyfti’s mission - to deliver exceptional, personalised gifts. 

Using Forward’s platform, Gyfti reworked their approach to streamline sales processes for a more efficient, immersive buying experience.

• Dedicated, Personalised Environment: Working from an exciting, branded space reinforces their message with every client interaction and creates exceptional impressions at every turn. 
• Engaging Multimedia: Say good-bye to vanilla and hello to mint chocolate chip with hot fudge. In other words, Gyfti now uses interactive product demos, videos, and presentations that accurately demonstrate how they can help buyers improve their customer engagement.
• Hands-On Exploration: Direct interactions allow for deeper understanding of consumer information. 
• Collaborate in Real-Time: By engaging in real-time, the Gyfti can collaborate more freely and promptly answer customer inquiries. 

The Results: An Effective, Efficient Customer Engagement Experience

Forward help Gyfti deliver a seamless, personalised approach to work through their sales processes more efficiently. The new, customised approach led to increased customer engagement and better sales conversions.

• Streamlined Engagement: More efficient processes made it easier for prospects to engage and understand how they benefit from partnering with Gyfti.
• Enhanced Clarity: Reducing the back-and-forth interactions and excessive emails allowed for clearer communication and fewer misunderstandings.
• Innovative Experience: Immersive exploration led to an overall improvement in the buyer’s journey..
• Personalised Solutions: Tailored solutions meet every client’s needs without endless hours wasted. Team can collaborate in real-time to work more efficiently.

Empower Your Sales Team With Forward’s Digital Sales Room 

Remote sales teams may face some unique challenges that we didn’t encounter in person, but it’s easy to overcome them with the right tools. We have the technology and software to expedite every part of the sales process and empower remote sales teams to succeed.

Electronic documents, digital content, social media, and a wide range of analytics make it easier than ever for sales teams to close deals fast and easy. It’s possible to deliver a personalised experience for each customer without overburdening your sales team.

Leveraging various platforms allows your sales teams to cover all their bases and automate some tasks so they can focus on what matters. Bringing all of your favourite platforms together reduces gaps in the structure and process, and Forward makes that possible.

With Forward’s digital sales rooms at their fingertips, your remote sales teams can find true success. 

Elevate your B2B sales. Get started with Forward for free and experience the future of sales today!