Some of the best ones certainly do. Field reps often don’t even have much an office to work from, and every startup has a great few reps (or many more) than work from home or otherwise remote, and often set their own hours as part of it. Your first international offices will often set their own hours by definition — they won’t even sync up with the home office.
But … the reality is, the typical SaaS inside sales team:
- thrives on a low level of constant peer pressure; and
- learns in large part by osmosis (being around other reps), no matter how strong the onboarding and training programs are.
If you take away that environment, and don’t have the sales culture where everyone is in the office every day, learning from each other (even if only passively), be challenged to do better (even if only from a leaderboard) … you’ll have to make up for it in other ways.
And most reps will struggle a bit without those reinforcements, in my experience at least.
Selling isn’t very collaborative, per se, but it’s still a team sport. Success does clearly feeds on success in sales teams. Having everyone together, during reasonably consistent hours, facilitates that.
