With communication tools for remote sales teams readily available, many companies realize that employees don’t need to be in the office to produce great results. According to a Mercer study conducted in May 2021, 70% of the companies surveyed indicated that they were planning to adopt a hybrid work model.
Due to the COVID pandemic, the business environment has changed from an office setup to a partial or fully remote setup.
What is a Remote Sales Team?
Remote sales teams are sales professionals who make sales without the need for face-to-face interactions. They build relationships with their customers through consistent communication by phone or the internet. They use technology to contact prospects and close deals instead of having in-person meetings.
CSO Insights reported that salespeople spend just 33% of their time actively selling. This means that most of their time is allocated to non-selling activities. That is why more organizations are now investing in communication technology. Sales enablement tools have gone up 567% from 2017 to 2019 to provide better support for sales teams.
Benefits of Remote Sales Teams
Remote sales teams, also known as virtual sales reps, don’t have to deal with travel wait times, parking, and choosing the best suit for their meetings. They have more time to conduct virtual meetings and set up appointments. This way, remote sales teams can be more productive and efficient.
Since remote sales teams are hired over the phone and the internet, they don’t need to be physically limited to the geographical location of their company. Companies can hire sales specialists globally. 90% of senior sales executives expect themselves to work remotely, based on data from the April 2021 Talent Works survey in the U.S.
Businesses can adapt to buyers’ preferences with a remote sales team. You can also widen your target market by connecting with prospects in other cities, states, or countries. More and more people are doing virtual purchasing nowadays. Many of the sudden changes in behavior–both B2B and B2C–are changing rapidly, and if you fail to heed these changes in the new normal, you may struggle to catch up.

The 7 Best Communication Tools
Remote sales teams must deal with significant changes to behaviors and spending patterns as economies and traditional activities recover because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prospecting, social engagement, and selling now rely heavily on technology because sellers and customers are in different physical locations. Sales reps need communication tools to build relationships with their customers. To remain ahead of the curve, you have to provide your remote sales teams with the best communication tools available in the market.
Drift for Prospecting
Prospecting starts as early as when someone visits your website or social media page. As a salesperson, you want to greet them with a welcoming message. Drift offers an AI-powered chatbot and conversational sales and marketing tools. Instead of visitors filling out a contact form, Drift chatbots are programmed to initiate conversations with prospects. Your remote sales team won’t have to manually introduce themselves; this software lets you break the ice with your prospects. It can provide the following services for your company:
- It records the duration and response time with your lead
- It asks qualifying questions and important information
- It automatically sends user information to CRM
- It connects all chat interactions to the sales workflow and calendar
- It looks an appointment
- It customizes messages and responses for better personalization.
Cost: Starts at $600 per month for ten seats.
Aloware for Calling and Texting
Remote sales teams rely on phone calls and text messaging to connect with prospects and customers. Aloware is a cloud-based contact center software that provides smarter contact solutions to manage calls and SMS on one platform. As a premier partner, Aloware comes with a powerful HubSpot integration that allows users to create automated workflows and maximized data sync solutions. Your remote sales team will get a sales dialer inside the CRM, complete with automated call recording, voicemail drop, and a live dashboard to monitor performance. Aloware is constantly releasing product updates to address emerging trends in contact center automation. It can provide the following services for your company:
- It has unlimited calling capabilities.
- It has two-way SMS and MMS messaging capabilities.
- Its softphone feature can be opened in the browser, on your desktop, or within your CRM.
- It has a mobile app for salespeople who are on the go
- It has an automated voicemail drop feature
- It has a power dialer with an AI-powered local presence
- It comes with sales automation tools to convert more leads
Cost: 14-day trial and starts at $35 per user.
Mopinion for Reviewing Customer Insights
Communication is a two-way process. Your sales teams must have an insight into how customers feel about your company. Mopinion is a platform that creates polls and surveys from website visitors, apps, and email users. Allowing your sales team to view customer feedback lets them improve customer engagement.
Mopinion gathers insights from surveys and interprets them with sales context in mind. It compiles customer experience data from websites. It collects feedback from apps installed on IOS and Android devices. It analyzes email campaign responses, open rates, and more. It can provide the following services for your company:
- It creates interactive surveys and polls
- It has a huge collection of templates for a wide range of purposes
- It provides insight into how well your company is performing
- It can be integrated with HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Marketo, Zendesk, etc.
- It can run analytics for email marketing.
Cost: Starts at $229 per month.
Reply for Multichannel Outreach
Remote sales teams can use communication tools to nurture leads and build brand loyalty and trust over time. Your employees can do their sales outreach efficiently by using Reply software.
It is a sales engagement platform that automates LinkedIn outreach, SMS and WhatsApp messages, and email search. It can identify which channel your prospects are spending most of their time on. You can also track and analyze your sales team’s progress with in-depth reporting. It can provide the following services for your company:
- It can be used to look up verified email addresses on LinkedIn or Sales Navigator
- It combines all reports from emails, calls, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp
- It generates tasks based on multichannel messages sequences
- It can run text quality scoring for warm leads
- It can be integrated with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, etc.
Cost: Starts at $70 per user per month.
MonkeyLearn for Text Analytics
There are times when it can be too overwhelming to deal with many leads and customers. MonkeyLearn is an AI platform that allows you to analyze text with machine learning to turn emails, customer feedback, support tickets, and documents into actionable data. MonkeyLearn uses keyword analytics to track customer retention, intents, and sentiments.
MonkeyLearn can provide analytics for net promoters, reviews, customer satisfaction, support, and surveys. This is to help your sales team better understand how their customer reacts at different points. You can focus on which leads need more time and which leads are ready. It can provide the following services for your company:
- It runs text analytics based on your defined keywords and tagging
- It can identify and tag cold, warm, and hot lead tickets
- It can detect sentiment expressed in tweets, chats, articles, reviews, etc.
- It can export text analytics into graphical charts
- It summarizes and analyzes data through reports
Cost: Starts at $299 per month for a single team.
SproutSocial for Social Media
Most remote sales teams are doing social selling. They have to advocate what they are selling by sharing relevant content in their social media feed. SproutSocial is a platform that comes with an employee advocacy feature so that your sales teams can become brand advocates. This social media management and engagement platform can be used to automate workflows and simplify operational processes when managing your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts.
SproutSocial features other products for social engagement, content publishing, social data analytics, and social conversations. It can provide the following services for your company:
- It gives access to approved and curated content for sharing
- It provides insight into interesting topics being followed by your customers
- It allows your sales team to stay relevant with their networks
- It can be used to look up people with common interests and group them
- It provides context and post-text suggestions for message alignment
- It reports which types of content work best for certain sales reps
Cost: 30-day trial and starts at $89 per user per month (billed annually)
Boomerang for Email Campaigns
Salespeople could be spending too much time checking their email accounts for follow-ups, new replies, and unread messages. Some emails might be unchecked, and you might miss out on some opportunities. Boomerang for Gmail is an email productivity software that lets you track if someone replies to an email and set reminders on important messages.
If your remote sales team uses Gmail for email marketing campaigns, Boomerang lets you control when you send and receive email messages. This works best for salespeople with virtual sales appointments. Boomerang can provide the following services for your company:
- It can schedule emails saved in the drafts to be sent automatically
- It lets you choose the date when emails will be sent to your target recipients
- It can set a priority time for certain emails to be opened
- It archives emails that no longer need to be updated
- It can schedule a follow-up message for emails with no response
Cost: Starts at $4.99 per month.
Summary
Your employees may be far away, but they will never be out of reach if you choose the best communication tools for remote sales teams. They depend heavily on technology to market and sell your products. Companies need to accelerate rapidly during this new normal and use data and sales technology to connect the dots driving revenue growth and customer connections. Empower your sales team by equipping them with sales tools that can help them connect with their customers meaningfully.
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What Communication Tools do You Use with Remote Sales Teams?
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