A couple weeks ago, we sat down with Kevin McKeown, SVP of Global Sales at Mailgun, to talk about what has changed over the past six months and what he's learned managing a distributed global sales team.
The full conversation is on YouTube. All quotes below are Kevin's and pulled from the video.
Managing a fully remote sales team is different than managing a fully in-person team or even a partially remote team. You need to be more intentional with communication, check in with your teams more often, and generally adapt to a new form of leadership. However, it is very possible to have a successful remote sales team.
"We can be productive from anywhere; we can still get deals done and still work on big projects and big proposals and not have to be in a war room or become hunkered around laptops. It can be done from home. But you definitely have to make sure people are empowered with the right things."
Here are a few tips from Kevin on how to manage a high-performance sales team during this time.
1. Hold daily standups over Zoom. Institute a daily meeting where you see each others' faces. The agenda can be formal or casual, and the meeting should be brief. But you may pick up on more nonverbal cues than you would have over text or voice channels alone.
"[With standups] we know how we can help them and remove roadblocks because otherwise you can't just look over and see that they're frustrated or stuck on something. Just getting everybody together, to see each other face-to-face and get a sense of how people are doing, you can tell a lot based on how their visuals are, their facial reactions."
2. Encourage sharing in Slack. When you work in an office co-located with your colleagues, you end up transferring a lot of information almost by osmosis. When you move to an all-remote workforce, you have to be more intentional with your communication. Share everything in Slack so that your employees and co-workers can access and find it again later.
"I'm trying to encourage the team to put things into Slack and escalate them to the right teams, so that we can get issues solved and we don't have to wait for meetings and stand-ups for that. Slack's been amazingly valuable in this process to kind of keep communication flowing."
3. Keep an open door policy. Make sure your teams know how and when to best contact you, and remind them it's okay to reach out with anything. When all your communication is mediated, it tends to make people think twice about what they're saying. Something someone would have casually mentioned when they dropped by your desk may not seem important enough to type out or bring up in a weekly 1:1. Try to maintain informal communication channels.
"Our CEO hosts an “ask me anything” session every week that is scheduled for about 30 minutes. Some weeks it has a structured format like one of the execs presenting about changes in their team. Other weeks it's just a Q&A format and the team can submit questions ahead of time."
4. Provide a stipend for home office improvements. Make sure the team has the tools they need to do their jobs. Prior to the pandemic, most people didn't have ideal home office setups. Many still don't, but you can help make them better. Ensure your employees have the best home office setup possible, so you can remove at least one element of stress from their lives.
"Give them the ability to go buy some office things they need, maybe a desk or a monitor, because I've seen a lot of people weren't set up with great home environments for working."
5. Reconsider the ratio of employees to managers. Right now, you probably spend more time managing your teams. Frequent check-ins and intentional communication is more time-consuming. You may need to adjust your team structure and ensure each manager has few direct reports, so they can pay more attention to each one.
"You really have to rethink the ratio of how many people align to a manager in a virtual environment, because it's a lot more taxing than in a face-to-face environment where it's easier to solve problems. I'd historically always had an 8:1 mindset (eight sales reps to one manager) before you kind of hit that critical mass of where they couldn't be effective. I honestly think that might need to be lower, like 6:1 in a fully virtual model because there's just so much time you spend on Slacks and shadowing calls."
Ultimately, a fully remote sales team can also be a fully effective sales team.
"But that's I think the biggest thing for me is we've been able to power through and have good months in spite of being completely all work from home and all separated. But with the right tools and the right support and being attentive to your team, you can make it happen."
You can view the full conversation with Kevin McKeown on the Gradient Works YouTube channel. And please subscribe to our newsletter to get information like this delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
