The Art of Herding Cats and Remote Salespeople: A Management Guide for Sales Managers & Executives

If you are currently responsible for a sales team, then you already know how this can test your abilities as a manager. If your sales team is remote, however, then you know how much more challenging your job can be. Your people are out of sight, sometimes out of mind, have unique problems, require special attention and even present unusual circumstances. It’s a bit like herding cats. If you’re new to sales management, well then welcome to the zoo. Sales management is fulfilling, stimulating, frustrating, rewarding, tiresome, gratifying, maddening, and more. When you’re managing sales people who are not located just down the hall from you, then you need to address their needs, and yours, a lot differently, hence making your job even more interesting. Don’t ever assume that you can simply manage them the same way you manage your local team. There are many unique dynamics that need to be addressed when your team is afar. I will review several key areas that will help you manage, motivate and retain your remote sales team.



The primary areas that I’m going to focus on will address three key points. First, it’s really harder to sell today than ever before. I’m sure you’ve all noticed, as salespeople and sales managers, the way the economy has changed things, the way the world is different, the way our customers are more informed than ever before by using sources like the Internet. They research more, they know more, and often times they know more than our own sales people; which is a reality and a little scary. It’s really hard, so we need creative solutions and creative ways to help our teams and our salespeople, and also to manage them, especially when they are remote because that adds another whole dimension to that challenge.



We also are faced with increasing costs for managing sales teams, managing people, or managing a company. The cost of a sale seems to keep going up because of all the challenges just mentioned. And, of course, we are demanding more inventive and effective ways to build and manage a sales team, especially our remote ones.



And finally, today’s job market is very open. Things are very tough in the economy and unfortunately people are losing jobs. With all the downsizing and layoffs that are going on, as sales managers, we can take advantage of that because now we have more candidates available to us, and they’re located everywhere. By that I mean that they are remote sales people looking for jobs. You might ask, “But how do I hire them, how to I manage them, how do I find them?” You really have an advantage over having them located near you. Unless you are in Silicon Valley or somewhere that has a real strong local talent pool, you don’t always have readily available resources from which you can hire. But say you have a strategy in place for a remote sales team, and you need someone out in the West or in the Southeast, and you happen to be in Chicago where the headquarters are located. If there’s no one available in Chicago, fine, you have some talented candidates out in California, or out in the Southeast; they don’t have to be relocated; they are already in place; and you don’t need an office there either since they can work out of their home offices. That’s an advantage to us, as managers, that we can reach out and hire people who are available in the market and looking for work and located in the areas where we want them to be, namely, in remote locations.