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Even as “back-to-office” campaigns ramp up across the country, many businesses continue to encourage employees to work from home. Remote work can improve productivity, lower overhead costs, and help organizations attract better talent by providing more flexibility.
For sales professionals making outbound calls, working from home offers a unique blend of challenges and opportunities. While the home office can provide a quieter and more controlled environment than a bustling office, it also demands greater self-discipline, focus, and efficient use of technology to maintain high performance.
With the right strategies, your home office can be a productivity powerhouse (emphasis on house), empowering you to flow through outbound calls without missing a beat. So here’s a list of tips from our team at PhoneBurner that can help you overcome common pitfalls, optimize your calling process, and keep your sales numbers high.
How PhoneBurner Supports Remote Sales Agents
We designed PhoneBurner to support remote outbound calling as well as sales agents in call centers. The following features can help you boost your productivity and performance, no matter where you work:
- Reach up to 4x more contacts with just a phone and internet—no special equipment needed.
- Use a softphone integrated with Krisp’s AI-powered noise cancellation to remove background noise.
- Coordinate with dispersed teams via scalable lead distribution, workflows, and reporting.
Try PhoneBurner for free here to see how it can help you place more outbound calls from home and enjoy better-quality conversations with prospects. Then use the tips below to move those conversations forward and close more deals.
1. Create a Distraction-Free Workspace
The home environment can be full of potential distractions—kids, pets, house chores, and the temptation to multitask. To keep calls productive, establish a dedicated workspace that minimizes interruptions. Here’s some advice for setting up an ideal home office for calls:
- Choose a quiet room (ideally with a door).
- Set up a comfortable desk.
- Communicate boundaries to your family members during work hours.
How PhoneBurner Helps: Unlike click-to-call, PhoneBurner’s power dialer keeps you locked in from the first call to the last. Dispositioning one call instantly dials the next, eliminating the temptation of procrastination and the tug of distraction.
As Kevin Biagi of Unishippers put it, “We were struggling with call reluctance. With PhoneBurner, once you pull up a queue, it doesn’t really allow you to take your foot off the gas.”
2. Establish a Consistent Routine
Working from home often blurs the line between personal and professional life. Establishing a consistent routine can help maintain discipline. Try the following:
- Start and end your day at the same time.
- Set specific calling blocks.
- Schedule breaks to recharge.
How PhoneBurner Helps: What’s the best time of day to make phone calls? Rather than Google it, find out your answer, based on your data. PhoneBurner’s cutting-edge call answer rate analytics let you see precisely when (days and times) your contacts are most likely to pick up, so you can create a routine around actual performance data.
3. Prioritize Audio Quality
Poor audio can make even the best sales pitch fall flat. While calling from home may eliminate the threat of bustling office spaces and chatty co-workers, it presents its own set of challenges. To ensure your calls are clear and uninterrupted:
- Have a plan for preventing background noises like barking dogs or construction.
- Invest in a high-speed internet connection so your dialer software doesn’t lag.
- Have an internet backup plan, such as a mobile hotspot, in case of connection issues.
How PhoneBurner Helps: PhoneBurner takes proactive measures to help remote sales professionals dial with clarity and confidence.
- Built-in noise cancellation: Our Krisp AI integrated softphone removes background noise to promote clear and interruption-free conversations.
- Tier 1 telecom: PhoneBurner sets itself apart from other providers by investing in a Tier 1 carrier network. This results in higher call quality, reliability, and deliverability.
- Connection quality monitor: Stop wondering if your internet connection is responsible for call quality issues. PhoneBurner’s built-in monitor will tell you.
4. Set Goals, Be Accountable
Whether you’re on your own or part of a team, accountability is key for work-from-home professionals. Set goals and monitor metrics that equate to success—such as:
- Call volume
- Connection rates
- Call-to-conversion rates
- Average call duration
Regularly review your performance to identify patterns and adjust your approach accordingly.
How PhoneBurner Helps: PhoneBurner provides robust reporting and analytics tools that give remote admins or individual agents detailed insights into performance.
5. Foster Collaboration
One of the biggest challenges of working from home is the lack of face-to-face interactions. Sure, there are virtual meetings, but without the casual conversations and impromptu brainstorming sessions that happen in the office, you might feel disconnected from your colleagues. To bridge this gap:
- Schedule regular team check-ins and collaborative sessions.
- Use tools like Slack to foster casual and professional interactions.
- Brainstorm ways to boost morale and create a sense of camaraderie.
How PhoneBurner Helps: Share our live, self-updating sales leaderboards and let your remote team “compete” on various outbound metrics such as calls, conversations, or closed deals.
6. Coach Remotely
In a traditional office setting, coaching often happens organically—through shadowing, quick feedback sessions, and side-by-side learning. However in a remote environment, effective coaching requires intentionality. Try this:
- Set up regular one-on-one coaching sessions where you can review calls, discuss strategies, and address individual challenges.
- Focus on both strengths and areas for improvement during coaching sessions. Positive reinforcement goes a long way in a remote setting, where reps might miss the everyday encouragement they would get in the office.
How PhoneBurner Helps: PhoneBurner’s call recording and live call monitoring tools are perfect for remote coaching. Managers can listen to past calls, provide targeted feedback, and even join calls in real time to offer guidance, making it easier to coach and support your team from anywhere.
For next-level virtual collaboration, PhoneBurner also integrates with virtual salesfloor software. This gives remote teams the ability to dial, learn, and celebrate wins together.
7. Leverage Automation
When a sales team is together in the office, it’s easy to distribute leads and ensure that reps are following workflow and follow-up best practices. Naturally, it’s harder to stay on top of this with a distributed team. With the right technology, admins can ensure that leads flow to the right team members automatically and that best practices are followed to a T.
How PhoneBurner Helps: Our dialing software includes two key automation features to support work-from-home reps:
- LeadStream: Give reps access to the right leads at the right time with our lead pools and customizable lead distribution engine. Reps can just log in remotely and have all of their leads neatly organized for them to contact—even without thinking.
- Customizable Dispositions: PhoneBurner disposition buttons are highly customizable so that no matter the call outcome, best practices are executed. A disposition button can leave a voicemail, send an email, trigger a text, and update the CRM in one click. It can also automatically record notes, and tags, and even set up a follow-up call.
8. Stay Motivated with Small Wins & Breaks
The monotony of extended dial sessions can lead to burnout without proper time to reflect and recharge. Here’s what we recommend to help keep your energy level high and your attitude positive:
- Celebrate small wins, such as setting a meeting or getting a positive response.
- Take short breaks to stretch, grab a snack, or refresh your mind.
- Use a timer to build brief, scheduled breaks into your day—this can help prevent fatigue and keep you sharp.
How PhoneBurner Helps: PhoneBurner’s seamless call flow helps you maintain momentum, since dispositioning one call immediately dials the next (unless you’re using pause & preview mode). This makes it easy to power through a call queue and celebrate with a break once the queue is done.
Making Work from Home Work for You with PhoneBurner
If you’re not impacted by RTO (return-to-office) mandates, now is a great opportunity to maximize the benefits of your work-from-home flexibility. While working from home presents challenges for outbound calling professionals, many of them can be overcome and even turned into advantages.
By setting up a distraction-free environment, establishing a consistent routine, and leveraging the right technology, you can enhance your productivity and effectiveness. PhoneBurner’s suite of features—from power dialing to performance tracking—makes it an ideal companion for sales professionals working remotely.
Ready to take your work-from-home outbound calling to the next level? Try PhoneBurner for free and experience how our platform can help you reach more prospects, close more deals, and stay productive wherever you are.
FAQ: PhoneBurner Features for Remote Work
1. Is any special equipment needed to use PhoneBurner?
No special equipment needed. Log into our cloud-based platform using any internet-connected computer, and make calls with any telephone or our integrated VOIP smartphone.
2. How does PhoneBurner help me manage a remote team?
PhoneBurner is full of features built to support our remote sales team admins. A live call dashboard lets you see which of your reps are dialing at any given time, as well as the ability to monitor and coach them in real time. Automatic lead distribution, live leaderboards, workflow automation, and other tools ensure reps stay connected and follow processes and best practices.
3. Can PhoneBurner help with home-office noise?
Yes! Breathe easy. Our smartphone has Krisp AI noise cancellation built-in to automatically remove barking dogs, honking horns, and other distracting noises from your calls.
4. Can PhoneBurner record my calls?
Sure can. Call recording is included in all of our feature-rich packages, but the amount of time calls are stored varies from plan to plan.
Elevate your outbound calling strategy with PhoneBurner today—because better tools mean better results.
