How To Keep Your Remote Salespeople Productive

Keeping Your Eye on the Prize

All too often, when I’m traveling, I end up focusing on two things:

1. The main reason for my trip, e.g., a meeting, conference, etc.; and
2. The upper pipeline scheduled calls/demos on my calendar.

Obviously, if you’re traveling for work, the first focus is most important. That’s why your company sent you out there. And the second focus is easy because it’s a priority. You have an appointment on your calendar, and you take the call from somewhere quiet with Wifi because that could be the call that finally pushes the deal through!

There should be a third focus when you’re traveling, though, although it won’t always seem like such a high priority. While it’s definitely not as exciting as the first two focuses, it’s just as important. It’s your lower pipeline.

The Third Priority

Salespeople know all too well that those upper pipeline deals got there from consistent outreach and nurturing of your lower pipeline. But when I travel, that lower pipeline gets no love. And, baby, that just ain’t right.

The hardest part of making calls and sending cold emails when you’re traveling is the fact that you’re not consistently at a desk. Your CRM and email client aren’t staring you in the face, because you’re too busy being a man about town.

Or so you think.

Let’s be honest, there ends up being a fair amount of downtime while you’re traveling. Whether it’s expected or unexpected downtime, people rarely take advantage of it. And cold calling doesn’t sound like as much fun as hitting up the hotel bar.

Before I get into how you can prioritize some of that downtime, I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way discouraging you from hitting up the hotel bar.

Hotel bars are awesome.

There is just something magical about them, right? It kind of feels like you’re in a movie. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me.

But I digress… You can definitely prioritize your downtime during business trips to nurture that lower pipeline. Here is how:

Step  1 Schedule an hour a day to make calls and send emails

It sounds incredibly simple, but I cannot think of anyone who actually does this. The key for me is that I convince myself that this hour I’m scheduling is just the same as when I’m scheduling a tele-meeting with a high-priority prospect while on the road. Sure, plans can change while you’re on the road. But just as you would call that prospect to reschedule ASAP, make sure you actually reschedule yourself for that daily hour block of calling and emailing.

Step  2 Prepare a list of contacts to call

You don’t want to waste any part of that hour searching for people to call. Take five minutes before your trip to create a quick CRM view (or a report, if you like to overly complicate everything) and save it. That way, you can quickly tee it up on the road.

Step  3 Actually execute on your plan

This is really the most important step. It’s so easy to push everything off to next week when you’re back at the office.

But then you’ll be recovering from jet lag, following up on the conference leads, completing expense reports from the trip, telling everyone how sweet the hotel bar was… and wondering why you did not just sit down for an hour and make some calls.

What You Should Do Now

If you need help with sales support, here are a few options to help you:

1. Download our eBook “Spend More Time Selling with a Virtual Assistant” and get a better understanding of how a virtual assistant can handle tedious sales tasks to give sales leaders and teams more time to sell and take care of customers.
2. Book a free consultation call with Quickskill. We can help you regain more of your time to sell by offloading repeatable tasks to a fully managed virtual assistant. One of our experts will help you create a plan to delegate your tasks and we will even train your sales assistant for you.
3. If you know someone else who’d benefit from sales support, share this post with them via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.