5 Easy Ways to Align Your In-house & Field Sales Employees
Alignment is essential to building strong relationships. Be it a husband and wife relationship or boss and employee relationship; alignment is important to build trust and transparency.
Similarly, if you have in-house and field sales employees in your sales department, aligning between both is vital to streamline your sales operations. But that’s easier to say than done.
Field sales workers stay all day on the field interacting with leads. And in-house sales agents are working from their desks to find and nurture potential leads. So, they barely come under the roof and mostly interact virtually, leading to poor communication and relationships.
Since field workers rely upon the intel provided by the in-house team and vice versa. Then, this miscommunication can lead to prospects' loss.
Thus, if you don’t want to lose potential leads due to poor coordination among your sales team, you have landed on the right post. This guide will walk you through cool tips to align in-house and field sales employees. So, let’s dig in.
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Why Is Sales Team Alignment Vital?
Wondering why it is a big deal to align your sales team? When you are going to monitor individual employees’ performance, why go through the trouble of team alignment.
An aligned team is not only good for your company culture or workflow. But it is also essential to improve your team’s morale, productivity and retention. Really?
Let’s take a closer look to understand why sales team alignment is vital:
Motivated team
Motivation is a key factor in engaging your employees. Not every employee wants a good salary or extra employment benefits to engaging. Some also want recognition, positive company culture and healthy relationships to flourish.
When your sales team is aligned, they can discuss new lead generation strategies and sales goals. They can help one another to convert leads faster. In short, harmony can be built in your sales team, leading to higher motivation and morale.
Better productivity
When your sales department is aligned, information can easily and quickly flow between sales representatives. Your sales agents can quickly gather the resources that they need to perform their job well. For example, field sales representatives can coordinate with in-house sales employees to receive details on a prospect before the meeting.
On the contrary, when your sales team lacks coordination, the information will flow slowly. This can lead to confusion and the loss of a potential customer.
Higher employee retention
Low pay or tough leadership are not the only reasons for employees leaving their job. A negative company environment and snobby colleagues are also reasons behind many employees quitting their jobs.
Thus, you can stop your top-performing employees from leaving their job with alignment. When your in-house and field sales reps have cordial relationships, they will be happy working with your team. They can freely share their problems with their colleagues.
Humans are social animals. Thus, your employees will thrive more in a communal environment. And will not leave their job.
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How to Align Your In-house and Field Sales Employees?
At TrackOlap, we often meet with sales teams that are fully messed up. We have found some sales teams where on-site and field workers don’t even know each other.
Fortunately, using our employee monitoring app, we have made it possible for large sales teams to build coordination and transparency among themselves. Plus, our field Employee management software has brought off-site and on-site teams closer.
So, do you want to align your sales team? If so, check out some of our expert tips:
Work on communication
We can't put more emphasis on this point! Good communication is essential to building a solid relationship among your team members.
However, the communication cycle should begin from the top. Leadership should create a seamless communication channel that allows junior sales representatives to interact with them easily.
Besides this, communication channels must be centralized so that interaction between in-house and field sales operators can be monitored in real-time. This way, managers can easily regulate conversations between their sales employees.
Our field sales tracking app has a dual communication system. This supports field sales workers to communicate with senior staff working in the sales department without any hassle. In fact, our communication allows in-house employees to share documents, pictures, locations and other details with field workers. Similarly, field workers can share media files with the office team and store them in the cloud backup for later access.
Track and analysis
Tracking is an essential part of improving productivity among your various sales employees. With real-time performance tracking, you can understand where your team members are spending their time and how you can make sure that they always stay productive throughout the day.
However, time tracking is not the only sales tracking metric that you should consider. There are several other employee tracking metrics that need to be considered while improving alignment between your on-site and off-site sales team members.
First of all, get an employee tracking app and then monitor the following metrics—
- Conversion rate. This metric states how many leads your employees have converted within the given time frame. It also focuses on how many actions your individual employee has taken to convert a lead.
- Average lead per hour. To make sure that your employees are always productive, you should measure their leads per hour. This will tell you how many leads an employee has generated within an hour.
Create a schedule
Field employees have a more flexible schedule than in-house employees. Field workers have to adjust their timetables according to clients and potential customers.
Therefore, it is a big challenge for in-house employees to communicate with field workers because they don’t know when they are in a meeting or on a call with a client.
To avoid this confusion, you can create a transparent schedule for every field employee. On the employee tracking software, managers can set schedul es for every employee. On the contrary, field workers can update their real-time status.
This way, everyone in the team knows what the other person is doing right now. It will help to communicate and build transparency in the workflow.
In addition, field workers often complain that they have more work on their plate than in-house employees. With a transparent schedule, you can clear this misconception and show your field workers that in-house employees are equally busy.
Set daily goals
Instead of long-term goals, you should set daily goals for your field and in-house sales teams. This will give direction and motivation to your team members.
Field and on-site employees can communicate and build a plan of action to achieve daily goals. Suppose you have given a daily target to achieve 20 leads to your sales team. In that case, both team members can sit together and prepare an action plan to achieve the given target
This will improve coordination and workflow between both teams. In addition, you should give one goal to your entire sales department. Don’t divide your sales goals between field and on-site teams. This will result in different internal department strategies, which can derail communication and raise team conflicts.
Assign a territory
It is often found that the sales department doesn't have clear rules defined for employees who are working in the field and who are working at the desk. In fact, in some small teams, a sales agent has to perform both field and desk duties.
Therefore, we advise sales departments to clearly define territories for field and desk employees. They should not send desk employees to the field or vice versa.
In fact, sales managers should analyze the skills and knowledge of the different team members and give them a field or desk role based on that. For example, if a salesperson is good at verbal communication, you should send them to the field so they can better convince prospects to become your customers
On the contrary, if the salesperson is good at managing records and creating strategies, you should keep them on the desk to support field workers with real-time information.
For this purpose, you can use a real-time performance report. Our field Remote employee software generates real-time reports based on employees' performance. The software considers multiple factors to create comprehensive reports like time taken to complete a task, goals achieved, and so o
Using these reports, you can set responsibilities for your sales team members and bring more productivity to your operations.
Alignment Makes a Big Difference!
Team alignment is important for higher productivity, efficiency and coordination. When your sales team works as one unit rather than multiple small sections, they can achieve more. Eventually, when your sales team performs better, it will increase your revenue and profits.
Therefore, aligning your sales in-house and field workers will not only impact your sales department. It will influence your entire organization and revenue generation rate.
So, don’t take it lightly when your field and in-house employees have conflicts or miscommunication among them. You should immediately get employee tracking software and make efforts to improve their coordination and communication and build trust among them.
Here, you can book a free demo with our team and better understand how to use the employee tracking app to align the sales team.