459: How to Build a Remote Sales Team

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to build a remote sales team.

In today’s startup world, working remotely is more popular than ever. And the popularity of remote work is also spreading to sales teams as well. However, having a remote sales team can be challenging and you need to manage it properly to make it work for your business.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how having a remote sales team is possible, the type of people to hire for your remote sales team, mistakes to avoid when running a remote sales team and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About the topic of today’s episode

00:27 Why this topic was chosen.

02:11 How having a remote sales team is possible.

03:29 One major mistake most companies make when they start to build a remote team.

04:16 How hiring a junior sales person remotely can be a challenge.

05:26 The type of salespeople to hire for remote work.

05:56 The second major mistake most companies make when they start to build a remote team.

06:37 Why you need to think of your sales team as its unique ecosystem.

07:39 How to work with a remote sales team.

09:18 The third major mistake most companies make when they start to build a remote team.

3 Key Points:

Remote is happening and can work.It’s very hard to hire junior salespeople and have them be successful.Hire more experienced people on the sales side.

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat, we're going to do a very tactical episode around how to start, run, scale remote sales team. And it's because we have Steli here. And I've got questions, and I know he's got answers. And it's something that I'm really curious about. And I'm sure a lot of people are. Because the typical answer is, "Don't run a remote sales team."

[0:00:29]

Steli Efti: Yeah.

[0:00:29]

Hiten Shah: So that's the typical answer, and that's because people are used to basically the equivalent of call center, open office, lots of people in the sales room, talking and doing their thing, and selling, and picking up the phone, and blah, blah, blah. So that's not what a remote sales team is. And remote work is obviously on a lot of people's minds, pretty much everyone's now. And so, all right Steli, what do we need to know about how to run a remote sales team really well?

[0:00:58]

Steli Efti: Well, before I jump into that, because I want to give a shout out to the report that you've done. You and Use FYI, the whole FYI team, you guys are publishing more and more stuff around remote work. It's really, really good. You did a kind of a up to date state of remote work report. What's the URL that people can get this? For those that haven't seen this yet, you should check it out definitely.

[0:01:19]

Hiten Shah: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. It's UseFYI.com/remote-work-report.

[0:01:26]

Steli Efti: Boom.

[0:01:26]

Hiten Shah: And you'll get to it. And this was done a little bit ago. Then we have... My co-founder wrote 11 Best Practices for Remote Work. That was a hit. I wrote a post on remote work resources. We have another one coming up that I'm sure we'll talk about on the episode... On an episode in future. So yeah, remote work's a thing. People love remote work. So why shouldn't sales do it?

[0:01:48]

Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that... And this is something that is picking up. I used to get a lot of questions about how to run a remote company, and now, I'm increasingly getting questions around remote sales teams or emails in panic of people that are like, "All right, we've been trying for a year. We've gone through every mistake and failure. Is this actually possible? So please help." So let's talk about it. I think that we going to see... Remote sales is happening and will happen and can work. And there is going to be more and more selling happening in a distributed a...