A global sales team provides many benefits. Having access to team members 24 hours a day allows you to create a productive project environment and leverage a variety of experiences and skills for customer interactions. Requests for information at the end of a work day in Toronto can be forwarded to European counterparts and responded to by the start of the next working day. Business flows regularly and seamlessly.
To build a successful team, special consideration should be given when choosing, onboarding and managing the performance of team members.
Choosing your global team
Choosing team members wisely is a must for a high-performing global team. There are a number of factors that should be considered when choosing your team members. Here are some of the key characteristics to look for when building your team.
- Alignment of personal values with the company’s values. Skills and performance can be coached and tracked, but values are lived and cannot be taught.
- High level of autonomy and the ability to work through issues. Remote workers can easily fall into an isolation syndrome, a pattern where people feel that they are working in a silo by themselves with little or no support. Allowing team members to fall into this pattern will create underperforming individuals and promote working toward one’s own initiatives and directions instead of the team goals.
Identifying these skills when hiring will improve retention and team success, and it will limit the amount of work required on your part to manage team members remotely. Other characteristics to seek out:
- drive
- competitive nature
- forward-thinking vision
- resourcefulness
- ability to perform with limited guidance and supervision.
Using behavioral questioning—questions that ask candidates to describe how they have handled previous situations—is a great way to help you get more insight into each person and find the right global team members. Ask such questions as:
- What was your specific role in a successful business situation?
- How did you respond to a customer complaint?
- Please describe your behavior in the last big customer call.
- How did you handle your last customer objection?
Onboarding new team members
Onboarding for new salespeople is crucial—particularly for geographically dispersed sales team members. Onboarding is the time to communicate the basics, such as parameters to live by, expectations of the role, company culture, team leader expectations, and legal and compliance rules.
In addition to providing yourself as a resource, a great onboarding practice is to assign a peer mentor to spend time with the new team member to help them get up to speed more quickly. New international team members may feel a lack of local support, so assign someone who is local or as geographically close as possible. Since it is sometimes difficult for new team members to express concerns with their team leader, a local mentor can relate to the struggles a new team member may have.
Ongoing development
Whether you are working with local, high-potential, or career salespeople or remote new team members, everyone needs a development plan. Use a contract of self-development with each team member that includes one, two, or three skills or behaviors to work on.
In addition, describe how that behavior will benefit the team or customer. It’s important to understand why the skill is relevant and for both parties to agree on what the manager will do and what the team member will do for the development plan.
Allow four weeks between reviews, and book an hour or two to review the action steps taken on the plan. You are looking for evidence of actions and improvements. When you meet, review the contract and have a dialogue about progress on the development plan. This should be a living and breathing document. After skills on the plan have been achieved, your team member should choose other skills or areas for development.
Even if you are not geographically nearby to help with development, the tools are in place to do so. For example, if one of your salespeople needs help with closing and listening skills, put together a plan and assign training modules around closing and up-selling. Do role plays over the phone, and play hard ball to see how she would handle it. Ask her to document five calls and walk you through each including her positive opening, how she applied listening to understand customer needs, how she asked for the order or further commitment, and how she closed the call.
Bottom line
When managing global teams you may go through the same things: onboarding, developing skills, coaching, and communicating. But the way you do these things is different because you are not all together in the same place.
Building successful global teams begins with hiring individuals who have the characteristics that are well-suited to working independently and remotely. A solid onboarding and development plan keeps team member performance on target.
This post is based on content explored in the new ASTD Press release, The Art of Modern Sales Management, which covers everything you need to know to be a top sales manager!
Sales management has changed dramatically in the past decade. With increasing globalization and many companies adding more virtual workers, the task of managing these diverse sales teams has become increasingly complicated. In a connected and evolving world it is hard to offer a definitive guide, but this book strives to sketch out a blueprint for managing performance in a changing sales landscape.
Each chapter is written by a sales professional and thought leader, many with experience as both a salesperson and as a sales manager. Learn from their experience and utilize the action plans at the end of each chapter to grow into a better leader for your team, whether they are down the hall or across the world.
