How to sell as a team when you work remotely

Team selling has become an essential part of sales strategy—and it’s no surprise why. Team selling strengthens team and client relationships, increases the buyer’s confidence in your company, and engages customers on a personal level.

In fact, team selling can increase your odds of closing a sale by 258%.

So what happens when your team is working remotely? The strength of team selling is its collaborative approach. But it can be difficult to coordinate when you aren’t sitting next to someone or walking over to talk to them.

Working from home also means you may have competing obligations and different hours of availability than everyone else, making it challenging to stay in sync with your selling team.

While team selling remotely isn’t easy, it is possible. Use the following tips and best practices to nail the sale as a team—no matter where you are.  

Best practices for selling as a team remotely 

When your team works from home, it takes extra effort and strategic collaboration to keep your sales on track and your team happy. Here’s how:

Clarify roles and responsibilities

Clearly defining team roles and responsibilities is important in any work setting. However, when working as a remote team, a defined sales structure is crucial. 

With each person operating more independently, and with fewer opportunities to collaborate in person, it’s important that each sales rep knows what they should be doing throughout the sales process. Without that structure, steps will fall through the cracks, and you’ll be less effective in coordinating your sales strategy.

Before starting work on your next deal, decide who will be the point of contact for the customer and define each individual rep’s roles for that account. As the deal evolves, you may need to bring in other team members (such as marketing or product reps) to address client questions or leverage their expertise for custom sales collateral, like presentations.

Make sure each person understands their role and the objectives they are trying to achieve so you can coordinate your efforts as a team. 

Maintain contact with selling team

Good communication is the foundation of a great sales team. But communication can be challenging when the team is distributed remotely.

To keep everyone on the same page, maintain regular contact with your selling team. 

Where possible, synchronize your work schedules so everyone is available to collaborate and coordinate during the same blocks of time. Use a shared calendar to easily see team members’ availability and book meetings. 

Take advantage of remote collaboration technology to stay connected and engaged. Apps and solutions like Zoom conferencing, Slack channels, email, Google Hangouts, and Lucidchart can help keep you on track. 

Pro tip: Email and chat can feel impersonal, especially when you can’t work with your team in person. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone or schedule a video call with your co-workers. Seeing a friendly face makes it easier to connect and engage authentically during a meeting and helps everyone feel more part of the team. 

Keep account info organized and accessible

With team members working from home, you need a clear, central location for accessing files, documents, and account info. Keeping account info in a single shared location makes it easier for everyone to stay on top of the status of a deal and prevents details from getting lost. 

Lucidchart helps teams stay organized with customizable account maps. Account maps help you and your team better understand a deal, identify decision-makers, and plan the quickest path to sale. 

The Salesforce integration lets you import and format your account contacts to create a holistic view of the complex relationships in the account. Data linking and simple sharing features make it easy to attach documents and give access to the entire team. 

Account maps can be an important reference throughout the deal cycle, allowing each team member to track who they’ve talked to, when they connected, and what information they learned. Sales leaders can refer to account maps for clarity before 1:1s and deal reviews and identify opportunities for coaching and areas that need more attention. 

Hold conversations within account documentation

When it comes to team selling, if the information isn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. In other words, when multiple people are working together to move a deal to closed-won, they need to be aware of every conversation and customer touchpoint. (This is especially important for remote and distributed teams who are likely working and communicating on multiple channels.) Without that context, reps may miss key insights and opportunities that could move the deal forward—or accidentally stop a deal in its tracks.

Keep deal conversations within your account documentation as much as possible. All threads should live in the account map rather than on multiple different channels. 

By communicating account details in one place, everyone can see what’s happened, who’s been contacted, and how that all fits into the bigger picture.

Talk through the deal during 1:1s

Working remotely can make it more difficult for sales leaders to recognize how their team members are doing and offer needed support. 

One-on-ones are a great opportunity to touch base with your sales team, see how deals are progressing, and learn what is working well and what obstacles your reps are facing. 

Schedule regular one-on-ones to get feedback throughout the sales cycle. Timely feedback will help you identify and resolve issues as they come up and adapt your team selling strategy so you never go too far off track.

By communicating with your reps individually, you can also better understand their strengths and leverage their expertise to drive the sale.

Continue holding deal reviews 

Deal reviews are another tool you can use to get crucial feedback and context for current deals in the pipeline. Deal reviews are a chance to meet with your sales reps individually to get a report on how each account is progressing, and any challenges or pain points they may need support on.

Deal reviews help sales leaders determine the likelihood of a sale and strategize ways to get deals over the finish line, so it’s important to continue holding deal reviews remotely to keep your team (and accounts) on track. 

Refer to the shared account plans and other account details together on a video conference and collaborate on the next steps.   

Close more deals with Lucidchart

Team selling when you work remotely takes careful coordination and ample communication. But when it’s done well, team selling can accelerate the sales process and close more deals.

Lucidchart can help you get there. Our workspace empowers your team to sell more and sell better by visualizing accounts, aligning your efforts, and maximizing your sales resources.