Selling From Home: How to Create a Strong Sales Culture That Drives Results

You may eventually get to the point where you have the bandwidth to bring in new tools. Before you do, make sure they're able to generate quick wins or you risk losing your team's goodwill. We added Salesforce Inbox, a feature that allows our reps to automatically capture their emails in our customer relationship management (CRM) tool and eliminate the manual logging of sales activity. The tool also makes scheduling meetings easier by automatically generating a rep's availability in emails. Both functions required minimal setup effort, but created huge time savings our reps felt immediately.

Now that I understood the problem and the resources that existed, it was time to actually rebuild our sales culture from home.

For inside sales, we returned to the tried-and-true team building exercise: contests. We challenged reps to see how many discovery meetings they could have in a week. The reps got cash prizes for every meeting set, and the top performer for each week got a bigger dollar amount. The entire team could see who was winning via the virtual leaderboard, because High Velocity Sales tracked our reps' activities in real time.

The reps liked the cash, but probably the biggest reward was bragging rights. In the office, we'd display the winners on screens across the sales floor. With everyone at home, we sent out links to those screens and celebrated the winners on team calls. As for me? I'll consider all those calls and emails my reward!

For field sellers, the culture of togetherness was crucial, and Quip brought people together. Our sellers loved being able to have multiple people work on a document live, receiving automatic notifications about action items, and tracking the progress of their deals. That initial excitement made it easy to encourage sales reps to actually use the tool. In less than a month, we had 350 account plans in Quip and robust conversations taking place in the comments.

With Quip, our field sellers were able to connect with one another and their customers again. Better yet, they recaptured 'customer intimacy,' or what we call the deep relationships our sellers have with customers. Recreating that part of the culture at home was a huge win.