Two Or More To Tango
The story goes that when Larry Page and Sergey Brin met each other for the first time — at the Stanford Campus — they didn’t see eye to eye on many things . But a few months down the line, Page’s web-crawling brainchild — BackRub — intrigued Brin and his love for math. Google was born.
Hewlett and Packard. Jobs and Wozniak. Gates and Allen. Buffet and Graham. Williams, Stone, and Dorsey. Sachin and Binny Bansal. Seven engineers who got together four decades ago in Pune. These cooks didn’t spoil the broth. Rather, they fused their distinct flavours together and eventually changed our lives.
The same goes for professional sales. Rapidly evolving customer needs. Increasing competitive clutter. A complex sales ecosystem that gets more intricate with every passing day. The need of the hour is not a meal for one, but a buffet. And Team Selling is the way to bring a lot of cooks together to organise one.
If you know that involving three or more verticals in a deal gives you a 50 per cent win-rate — as compared to 30 per cent with one — then you know that Team Selling is the way forward.
Squad Goals
Team Selling is the process of deploying multiple personnel for closing deals. It’s an approach that is particularly useful for complex sales cycles.
As a sales leader and the designated problem-solver, you are not expected to be the one who unravels these knots. Rather, you’re expected to be the enabler, a person who gets the problem solved. In this context, the process of putting a team together assumes even more significance.
1) Specialisation matters: Domain knowledge is key, especially from a sales perspective. Having members with vertical (or product) specific expertise can go a long way in closing deals.
2) Cover your bases: This ties into the previous point. While members with domain expertise is a sales imperative, knowing which areas need to be covered too is a question that needs to be answered beforehand.
3) Go the Tribes and Squads way: While it’s as connected as ever, our post-pandemic, Agile world can at times be disconnected too. Ensure that even when your team is operating in silos, members are always structured in such a way that there’s a two-pronged focus on both business direction and customer needs.
When Your Team Sell Together, They Win Together
As a concept, Team Selling is diametrically opposite as compared to the traditional sales approach. If there isn’t healthy competition between members — which drives both performance and motivation — how does the sales department stay motivated? The answer to this has to do with two aspects:
a) The organisational shift towards embracing Team Culture, which has happened in recent years.
b) Success via Team Selling too is a motivator.
Closing high-stakes deals involves the contribution of every member. It’s a morale-booster that a skilled sales manager can use to increase the professional appetite of his team.
While motivation is key, leaders also need to focus on the following aspects to inspire commitment and drive performance among their team members. So:
1) Demarcate roles with clarity: You’re deploying multiple skills. You’re leveraging multiple verticals. So it’s crucial that you set clear responsibilities and expectations right from the get go.
2) Be in sync with the team: Bringing in personnel with different skillsets is one part of the puzzle. Knowing when to deploy them is another. As a leader, be in constant touch with your team members, and adopt a hands-on approach when helping them deal with their problems and mistakes.
3) Know that success is one for all, and all for one: While the idea of Team Selling is all about celebrating success as a single unit, leaders need to ensure that each member of the team knows the role he/she has played in it. Give due credit to important contributions. It goes a long way in making employees feel that they belong in a team.
One For The Team
While Team Selling focuses on group-related aspects, ticking these boxes as individuals — irrespective of your place in the team’s hierarchy — will help you perform at your best:
a) Do your due diligence: Stay up to date about the happenings at your client’s firm, and be in the know about which stage of the decision process they’re in.
b) Be familiar with client goals: An understanding of what they want from your organisation goes a long way in providing clarity on many fronts.
c) Know who contributes when: Not only will this contribute to your performance, it also doubles up as a gesture of respect for domain experts.
All said and done, we now know that it is a proven catalyst for sales cycles. If done right, it can do wonders for not only your company’s customer relationships, but also to your bottomline. As we foray into a post-Covid future, know that Team Selling is here to stay in the world of sales.