Sales in the Subscription Economy #5
How to manage your remote sales team during Coronavirus, building a strong culture during a recession, and the importance of hiring more women to your sales team!
Sales VPs: you don’t have time to read everything out there, but no worries, I’m doing it for you. I read, curate, and summarize the best content on subscription sales & sales team recruiting on the web every week.
Here's what you need to know this week:
Tips for Managing a Remote Workforce During Coronavirus by Lydia Abbot with LinkedIn
Key Takeaways:
Establish a remote leadership team: which of your current managers have remote work experience? Rally a team of internal experts to lead the charge who are highly skilled at tackling the communication challenges come with managing a remote team.
Create a handbook chock full of true north documentation: keep everyone's eyes on the prize(goals), create clear & well documented expectations for your remote workforce, refine SOPs (standard operating procedures) for everything your team does, ensure your tech stack is up to snuff and everyone knows how to access your full suite of tools from home.
Set up a formal, and informal, communication plans: how, when, and where (Zoom?) will your team communicate? How will you need to adjust your management style? How much oversight will you have over your team's daily activity and how will you accomplish that?
Prioritize transparency and open communication in all things.
Minimize the number of communication tools you're using for collaborative documentation, online team chats, and video conferencing, etc. KISS: keep it simple stupid.
Be patient. This is going to be an iterative process. Managing a remote team comes down to trust, communication, and moving toward the same company wide goals.
5 Tips for Recruiting More Women in Sales by Brooke Bachesta of Outreach.io
Key Takeaways:
Gender diversity in the workforce can lead to more innovative and productive companies (when measuring their market value and revenue) if companies believe and genuinely champion that gender diversity is important – not merely a line item on their job listings page.
Tip #1: Use gender neutral, growth-mindset language in your job descriptions. Even seemingly neutral words like exhaustive, enforcement, and fearless can create gender bias. Instead try language like, "loves learning" or "enjoys challenges".
Tip #2: Use the same data driven assessments for each candidate in order to fight bias. These assessments are typically administered by a third party between the initial screening call and before the first formal interview.
Tip #3: Involve women in your interview process and as hiring managers. Candidates should be interviewed by a diverse group of people who each evaluate candidates using the same score card or criteria. Evaluating candidates using the same criteria by a diverse hiring committee will further reduce bias.
Tip #4: Create a sense of community within your organization – extend introductions to new female hires to women's and women-identifying groups within your company. If you don't have one, you need to rapidly work toward creating one.
Tip #5: Have clear and equitable promotion and growth paths for women. Only 21% of Sales VPs are women. Have an open dialogue about career goals and empower women to actively pursue that path.
Here’s How to Create a Culture to Withstand Economic Downturns by Kevin Ricklefs of CHG Healthcare on Recruiter.com
Key Takeaways
Prioritize transparency: When leaders are up front and honest, their people will feel respected and be more willing to help solve problems. Employees will inevitably discover or infer what is happening, anyway. Transparency will create trust and make sure they are armed with the facts instead of indulging in speculation.
Budgets must shrink and belts must tighten when the economy takes a downturn – get employees involved in deciding what gets cut. This will increase trust and organizational buy-in of said cuts.
Cut perks: Helping people find purpose in their work and building a team environment based on trust are far more important than fun, replaceable perks. Nobody should be let go so the company can still have catered lunches, provide snacks, or get a new ping-pong table.
Continue investing in your people in ways that cost less money: internal coaching, mentorship, masterminds, etc.
Nicely done! You’re fully informed for the week on subscription sales & recruiting news – now go crush it!
Visit Subscriptioncoach.com. Maybe you're suddenly on a hiring freeze, but need help navigating sales during an impending recession, let's talk strategy!
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