Skip to content

THE SEISMIC SPRING 2022 RELEASE IS HERE. Learn More

CHOOSE YOUR LANGUAGE

  • English
    • Enablement Cloud

      Meet the unified solution that’s igniting revenue growth for customer-facing teams.

      Learn More
    • PRODUCTS

      • Sales Content Management
      • Learning & Coaching
      • Buyer Engagement
      • Content Automation
      • Strategy & Planning
      • Enablement Intelligence
    • PLATFORM

      • Platform Overview
      • Integrations
    • What is Sales Enablement?

      New to sales enablement? No problem. Learn what it is and why it matters here.

      Learn More
    • USE CASES

      • Sales Enablement Teams
      • Sales Teams
      • Marketing Teams
    • INDUSTRIES

      • All Industries
      • Asset Management
      • Banking
      • Healthcare & Life Sciences
      • Technology
    • Read Their Stories

      Read how global customers from all different industries thrive with Seismic.

      Read Their Stories
    • CUSTOMER STORIES

      • Genesys
      • Deluxe
    • FOR OUR CUSTOMERS

      • Seismic University
      • Seismic Community
    • About Us

      Discover who we are, what we value, and how we work at Seismic.

      Learn More
    • ABOUT SEISMIC

      • Careers
      • Leadership
      • Diversity & Inclusion
      • Partners
      • Aftershock Store
      • Contact Us
    • NEWS

      • Newsroom
      • Analyst & 3rd Party Reports
      • Shift 2022
    • Sales Acceleration

      Explore best practices for onboarding, ramping, and upskilling your sellers.

      Learn More
    • WHAT'S NEW

      • Blog
      • Events & Webinars
    • COLLECTION HUBS

      • Resources Center
      • Enablement Explainers
      • AI-Guided Selling
      • Social Selling
      • Financial Services
      • Buyer Engagement
  • Get a Demo
Return to the Blog

4 Challenges of Working Remotely in Sales

During the global rollout of iPads at Oracle, I had the luxury of getting to deal with reps from every ...

Seismic
Seismic
August 2, 2017

During the global rollout of iPads at Oracle, I had the luxury of getting to deal with reps from every region and almost every product line. It was quite an eye-opening experience to talk to reps from places in Africa and SE Asia. One thing I learned is that being a remote rep, halfway across the world from headquarters is exceptionally difficult.

Often an Afterthought

No one likes to be an afterthought. It can be demoralizing and makes you feel isolated. And the reality is that a sales rep in a faraway region is almost always an afterthought. Headquarters will come down from on high and give you something, often without consulting. Or even really knowing how that will impact selling efforts. Whether this is new product introduction, messaging, or even training, you are stuck taking what they give you.

What is the impact of this? Isolation. Research indicates this feeling of isolation creates distrust in coworkers and management. In turn, this impacts rep performance. Let’s take a look at how being remote relates to news, content, and training.

News You Can’t Use

One of the key challenges is getting information that is relevant to you. Now, this is a challenge to everyone in a large organization. But if they are far away from headquarters, it is even more difficult. Corporate isn’t thinking about the remote regions when assembling newsletters or promoting webcasts. They include information for sellers that they interact with regularly. And the reality is that information is probably not relevant to the remote sales rep. In turn, reps have to dig and dig to find the information they need. Time looking for content is time not selling. Alternatively, if trust is lower due to this feeling of isolation, reps might not look for news at all. This likely will reduce sales force effectiveness.

How can you address this? This year Seismic introduced NewsCenter. A tool that enables sales reps to select what news matters to them. This enables those remote sales teams to select the news feeds that matter most to them. And it gives them the information they need to be effective at their fingertips.

Content That Isn’t Relevant

The first blog post in this series discussed localization and the need for localized content. Imagine you are a rep selling something in Indonesia. Do you think the content that fits large services firm in the United States fits a regional services firm in Indonesia? Are the challenges the same? Those reps need the new content delivered to them to help them do it, or content they can personalize to meet their needs.

How can you address this? You can produce content that they need.

The first thing to do is to track what content they do use through your sales enablement tool. Do this by region and product line. Also, reach out to heavy users of content to see if it works for them. And if it doesn’t, how you could improve it. Finally, continually work on building relationships with the regions. So they come to you with suggestions, updates or changes to your content.

Irrelevant Training

At the same time, remote sales reps probably don’t get the training they require. They receive fewer visits from corporate. Much of their training is not delivered by a product expert. Instead, it is delivered through a train-the-trainer model. In addition, if they are using localized content, are they even being trained on that? You should develop training to meet those localized needs. In some cases you will have to work with regional resources to make sure that training is appropriate.

These are just the start of the challenges for remote sales reps. We have not even addressed the issue around time zones, or sales support functions. Those reps are on an island, and it is the sales enablement (and marketing) team’s job to make them successful.

  • enablement
  • remote work

Related articles

Illustration of a woman pointing to displayed analytics.

5 reasons to use sales content management software

Did you know sales reps spend 440 hours searching for content each year?
Read More: 5 reasons to use sales content management software
Illustration of a woman making notes on a laptop and looking at analytic results.

How to uncover the truth about your sales content

Understand how and when your content is used.
Read More: How to uncover the truth about your sales content
Illustration of a seated woman pointing to large chart display.ing to

How companies can drive revenue growth through smart enablement

4 tips to help navigate digital and hybrid sales cycles
Read More: How companies can drive revenue growth through smart enablement

If you made it this far, we must be striking a chord.

Get a Demo
Seismic
  • Product
  • Seismic Enablement Cloud™
  • Sales Content Management
  • Learning & Coaching
  • Buyer Engagement
  • Content Automation
  • Strategy & Planning
  • Enablement Intelligence
  • Solutions
  • Sales Enablement Teams
  • Sales Teams
  • Marketing Teams
  • Resources
  • Blog
  • Resources Center
  • Trending Topics
  • What is Sales Enablement?
  • What is AI-Guided Selling?
  • What is Social Selling?
  • Integrations
  • All Integrations
  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Salesforce
  • COMPANY
  • Contact Us
  • Careers
ISO 27001 Certified by Schellman
  • © 2022 Seismic
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Follow us on Linkedin
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Follow us on YouTube
  • Follow us on Facebook