Generally, the issues turn out to be similar to remote engineering, remote support, remote anything teams.
Can you get truly effective, proper management in the remote location?
Generally, with a remote team you are facing two management issues:
- The management talent pool is often smaller in the remote location; and
- Many great managers only want to work in the HQ
so
- You can’t scale effectively, because you lack strong enough leadership of the team
For most start-ups, the majority, this means a remote sales team doesn’t work at all, at least, not for a while. Keep them close. Close to the CEO. Close to the customer success team. Close to the engineering team.
But if somehow you can get a truly great VP of Sales to work remotely, or a great Director of Sales for a portion of the team …
It can and does work.
In the end, almost every SaaS company ends up with distributed sales teams. Especially with remote SDR offices, SMB offices, etc. And field sales almost by definition is distributed. Just like basically every internet company ends up with a distributed engineering team, at some point.
Management is the challenge.
If you have the VP and the DNA … go for it.
