How to Delegate Sales Tasks to Remote & Hybrid Staff
If you’re avoiding delegating sales tasks to your remote & hybrid workers, you’re missing opportunities for:
- Increased closing rates
- More purposeful work time
- Improved employee trust
- Optimized operational efficiency
- Higher revenue
No doubt, managing remote and hybrid teams is challenging. But it’s the new normal for B2B sales. Intellectually, we know delegation (often an underdeveloped skill), is more important than ever. But in practice, it takes time to figure out where to start, especially with a team of blank faces staring back at you from a Zoom window.
The good news is you can start delegating sales tasks to remote and hybrid workers painlessly ASAP.
Below are five tips from managers in B2B to adapt to your remote or hybrid workflow and reap the benefits of a few minor adjustments to your processes.
Let’s dive in, but first, we’ll identify some sales tasks that deserve the delegation treatment.
5 business development tasks you should be delegating to remote & hybrid staff
- Contacting new prospects and existing clients
When your sales team has the correct language to represent your business and impress future clients, delegating cold calls is a no-brainer.
The added benefit of improving your delegation skills is that it forces you to build SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and documentation to support sales tasks remotely. This process promotes higher operational efficiency and sets you up quite nicely in the event of putting the business up for sale.
- Quote building
With streamlined quoting software, quote building is fast and easy and can be entrusted to anyone on your team. With Quoter, manager approval controls let you set the boundaries for what your team members can view, edit, and submit to clients with or without your approval.
Quoter offers unlimited seats so that you can add your entire team for the same price. Seriously, anyone on the payroll can start using Quoter ASAP.
- Follow-ups (quote reminders)
Now’s the time to automate your process for following up on quotes. You can do that with Quoter’s automated quote reminders, which frees up time for everyone on your team. Or, you can share access to the email tracking dashboard and assign your best and brightest to follow up with clients. Most importantly, using quote tracking and delegating the task to a team member can help ensure that no quotes get lost in the shuffle.
As HubSpot reports from a study by Brevet, “80% of sales require an average of five follow-ups to close the deal.” That’s a lot of time spent following up. Time which, if you could be released from the task yourself, could put you in a position to focus on other things.
- Quote revisions
If there wasn’t a back-and-forth on a quote, did the quote even really happen? Quote revisions can be tedious and error-prone when you’re working in an Excel or Word file and then downloading the document and emailing it back to the client, but in Quoter, it’s all consolidated in one workspace.
You can delegate quote revisions with peace of mind by taking advantage of manager approval controls, which let you review edits made to a quote before it is sent to the client.
- Post-sale follow-ups
After winning the quote, the actual relationship begins. Keep tabs on your customers with scheduled follow-ups. Delegate the task of tracking new wins and making contact to your sales team.
In many cases, clients appreciate post-sale follow-ups. It gives them an opportunity to provide feedback, and your sales team an opportunity to deepen the relationship. Long-term, you can create more higher-value customers and generate more revenue by nurturing existing partnerships.
Next steps
Now that you know what sales tasks you can start delegating to remote & hybrid workers, it’s time to do the thing.
This might feel as daunting as trying to teach your six-year-old how to ride a bike but over FaceTime. Let’s look at some practical ways to get started.
5 tips for delegating sales tasks to remote & hybrid staff
- Task yourself (to task your team)
Make delegating tasks part of your standard workweek routine. When it’s in your calendar to assign tasks, it’s easier to treat it as just another item to check off instead of a big, daunting, invisible obstacle. Make it visible, like how TCE Company CEO Sarah Goffman does.
“I use Asana, which helps me lay out all my tasks for the day,” she says. Goffman lists it all, including daily recurring meetings with her engineering team. The key here is that having it all laid out in a list mentally prepares her for the tasks ahead.
“Some of these things I do out of habit, but I still put them in my list because when I start checking things off my list, I think, ‘Oh, look how much I’ve done today!'”
So, go ahead and write; assign a review of unopened proposal emails from the past month to Bill & Ted in your Google Calendar, Asana, notepad, or whatever you use to keep your workday somewhat sane. Make delegating part of the program to deflate its perceived challenge, and keep yourself accountable to make it happen.
- Define the task with “ruthless prioritization.”
In Harvard Business Review reporter Raghu Krishnamoorthy’s investigation into how effective managers drove performance remotely during the early COVID-19 years, he discovered a recurring theme. Employees didn’t want helicopter bosses; they wanted hands-on support, even at a virtual distance.
One of the ways this manifests in online environments is by taking thorough measures to define tasks. Krishnamoorthy calls it “ruthless prioritization.”
“Everyone on the team needs to understand what needs to be done when it needs to be done, and by whom,” Krishnamoorthy says.
You can get ruthless by providing clear instructions for sales tasks in shareable documentation that can be accessed anytime by any team member. Build as you go; as MSP marketing expert Paul Green says, “Do it one documentation piece at a time,” addressing the need for documentation as it arises. This will make the task of creating clear resources more manageable.
- Share examples of what “good” looks like
Delegating can be nearly impossible when you have it made up in your mind that only you can get the task done the right way.
Todd Kane of Evolved Business Consulting would suggest taking that energy and pouring it into building documentation of “what good looks like” for every role in your company. Take it one step further and start creating examples of what “good” looks like on a task level.
Past proposals can provide a wealth of information to new sales employees about your standards for composition, pricing, and level of detail. Quoter lets you create and save intelligent, reusable proposal templates. With unlimited seats on your Quoter account, you can provide all of your team members access to viewing past proposals and using saved templates to build new quotes.
- Increase check-ins & reviews
We know we know: more time on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, woof.
But a few more touchpoints with your sales team can go a long way to freeing up time to focus on growth opportunities. And it’s an essential step towards maintaining visibility with your employees and bolstering their confidence. At this point, they’re looking to you to show them the way. From Krishnamoorthy’s research, “employees considered the managers to be even more of a key resource in getting the job done remotely.”
Make check-ins and reviews part of your new routine (and add them to your daily task list!) These can be daily or weekly, depending on your team size. The more regular facetime you can accrue with team members, the more likely you are to “identify vulnerabilities and construct a radar for potential trouble spots,” as Krishnamoorthy says.
With a consistent check-in schedule that allows you to connect with every employee, you can be assured that no one is falling between the cracks and tasks are being completed to your ruthlessly-prioritized specifications.
- Set objective measures for success
After communicating the task clearly and providing examples of what “good” looks like, the natural next step, as Kane advises, is to measure success objectively based on things your sales team can control.
Particularly in a remote environment, it’s necessary to rely on trackable data to incentivize and make decisions about your sales team.
As Alt-Tech CEO Daniel Mitchell warns, “Don’t play off hunches.” The proof of performance is in the data, including quotes won and lost, which can be easily tracked in Quoter’s reporting & analytics dashboard.
Remote and hybrid work has forced an emphasis on data-driven decision-making. Take advantage of the tools that can help motivate your team and build trust.
Next steps: Delegate or automate?
Delegating sales tasks to your remote or hybrid workforce presents a powerful opportunity to orchestrate a more operationally-efficient work environment where sales soar and team members are entrusted to own their successes.
Imagine what it could look like if you could automate many of the tasks you’ve been delegating. We’re talking about:
What would you and your team do with the time saved? What verticals would you conquer? Follow Quoter on LinkedIn, and let us know what’s in store for your business in 2023.
