Team Selling Dynamics which Drive Revenue

By Robert Gonye

Who Should Be A Part of the Team?

IT’S a given; the revenue centre of a business is a part of a team selling process. Revenue centres usually include sales, customer success, marketing, sales development reps, solutions consultants, and executives.

However, anyone from your company can be a part of this process. For instance, if you’re fielding questions left and right about your roadmap, it might make sense to bring in someone from your product team. Let each unique situation and prospect request lead you to the right teammate. A digital marketing team player will have an understanding of online presence, however, will not know how to manage sales funnels. Having a team that communicates to the clients’ requirements impacts the sales positively.   

How to Implement Team Selling:

1. If you are an individual contributor

Start by building relationships with your co-workers in other departments. I imagine you’ve already done this being the social butterfly you are. Once you have people you know and trust, ask them to join calls when their expertise is relevant. You lose nothing by adding incentives such as personally buying lunch for any of my teammates who join a sales call with you. Who doesn’t like free lunch?

Before the call make sure you give your teammates context on the situation and the specific task or talking points you’d like them to cover. Here’s a great checklist to get started:

•             Who are we meeting? — Include information about the company they work for and their role.

•             Where are they in their decision process?

•             Key use cases they’re evaluating — How do they plan on using the product? Why are they planning on using the product? What benefits do they expect to receive from the product?

•             What topics are you covering on the call?

•             Where would you like your teammate to contribute and why? — This is a great opportunity to not only inform your co-worker but also show them the deep respect you have for their expertise and importance to have them join you.

2. If you are a sales leader

You need to understand if your Annual Contract Value or annualized revenue per customer contract can support team selling (Account Value). While team selling can help in many selling environments, not all sales require a team effort. A good rule of thumb is an Annual Contract Value over an agreed amount that can normally benefit from team selling. With this said, you know your business better than anyone else, so you can evaluate this on a case-by-case basis.

Once you have answered that pivotal question, these steps will help get you started:

•             Align activities with incentives — Make sure everyone has skin in the game and by skin in the game it means we pay everyone involved when their efforts lead to net new revenue.

•             Determine who your leader is — This is most commonly a salesperson but this could also apply to partnerships or any other person acting as the lead of the project.

•             Make sure everyone knows their role — For example:

o             Customer Success: explain the customer on boarding process, what is required from both parties for a successful working relationship, and instil trust in our ability to create great outcomes for customers.

o             Sales Engineering: take the prospective customer on deep-dive through the platform with a goal of displaying usability and intuitiveness of the User interface with the business.

o             Product: walk the customer or prospect through our roadmap and ensure they have an understanding of where our companies focus lies.

•             Build a process that can be documented, tracked, and scaled. I think we all know the famous Peter Drucker quote, but it’s worth repeating, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. Start with simple on market tools such as Excel or Google Sheets — track who has joined, what their roles are, how the conversation went (qualitative data), and lastly, what the outcome is. Did the opportunity progress a stage in the pipeline?

In summary, there are no silver bullets in sales, but team-selling comes pretty close.

Remember that your organization is made up of extremely bright people who all hold different nuggets of knowledge about your products, competitors, and the industry at large.

If you want to accelerate your deal cycles, grow your average selling price, create better customer outcomes, and eliminate showstoppers. Team-selling is a great place to start.

Robert Gonye is a Business Growth Expert and Influencer. He writes in his personal capacity. Comments and views: Robert@realgrowthsolutions.net

Robertgonye2@gmail.com

The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.