This past week we had Ryan Burke from InVision join us in the studio to talk about building your remote sales team. Ryan is currently the VP of Sales at InVision and is the person credited with setting up and growing their fully remote sales organization. InVision gives teams the freedom to prototype, review, iterate, manage, and user test web and mobile products without a single line of code and all in one place. Today they count over 1.5MM designers and companies like Evernote, Adobe, Twitter, Salesforce, and Viacom as customers. The InVision sales and support team today is north of 30 people with AEs, SDRs, CS staff, and more stretching from Hawaii to Boston.
During our podcast, Ryan laid out the below framework for building your remote sales team.
Hiring: Ryan shared with us a few key qualities to look for when trying to hire sales people, particularly for a remote sales team. First, the person should be incredibly passionate about the company and the market opportunity – more so than their excitement for working from home. Second, because in a remote team you are not able to simply communicate with the person sitting next to you, the person should be incredibly proactive and willing to actively pursue questions and contact team members.
Interview Process: The entire interview process at InVision is conducted on Google Hangouts. The process begins with a selective review of the applicant’s qualifications and career success to date. The candidate is then interviewed by a recruiter and two individuals in the role, followed by a group demo, and one-on-one quick fire interviews. Finally, InVision checks references where they focus particularly on the culture style of the candidate, their time management, and communication skills. All of which are particularly important for building your remote sales team.
Training: Onboarding a remote sales person is essential to their success at the company. At InVision, they ensure that the first 3 weeks are completely scheduled for the rep. The schedule includes daily check-ins with your manager; introductions to other people in their role, on their team, and the broader company; and more traditional training classes.
Post-Hire: Like any sales organization, the majority of a rep’s time is client facing. However, at InVision there is also a focus on interaction with people beyond your core team. They have setup company-wide task forces that focus on continued improvements to the remote experience including training, culture, and onboarding. They also have a Thursday sales call where, in addition to the core team, they typically have one senior executive from another department join the meeting to meet new individuals on the team and share insights about their own team. Finally, Ryan holds a standard Friday sales meeting via Google Hangouts where they discuss the pipeline and forecast for the upcoming week.
If you missed this edition of the podcast and want more information on any of the above give a listen now!
