How We'll Sell as a Team

A team sell is where multiple people on your side participate in the sales process. That’s because they each bring expertise needed to qualify and hopefully win the deal.

Teams need a leader, but they also need a game-plan and coordination.Too often it’s taken for granted who will do what and when.

Assumptions like that quickly can lead to inefficiencies (where two or more people are doing the same thing) or missed steps (where someone assumes it’s someone else’s job to do).

To prevent that from happening, each year it makes sense to review the best way to work as a team. Get everyone together and make some decisions. Here are five things to decide:

(1.) Roles and responsibilities - Clarify who does what. Normally the sales executive or relationship manager is the team leader. But in really large accounts, with multiple projects in play, that relationship manager takes on more of an executive role with others acting as team leader for their project. There’s no one right answer. The only wrong answer is to assume everyone knows what the answer is.

(2.) Team meetings - How often will we get together as a team? And under what circumstances? This is a thread-the-needle decision because getting everyone together costs a lot (time). Everyone’s busy so scheduling is a pain. But if you don’t meet at all, you lose cohesiveness. My advice: these meetings should be short and infrequent.

(3.) Updates - Updates, on the other hand, should be frequent. When you do this well, you don’t have to have lots of team meetings. The question is, under what circumstances do we need to update the whole team? And, who does the updating? And, how quickly after the “event”? What vehicle will we use to make updates? All these questions need to be answered.

(4.) Strategy - Deciding what you’ll do next is often situationally dependent. Where it makes sense to have everyone involved in creating a win strategy once you have a qualified opportunity, you may not need everyone involved in your strategy on what to do next after every key event with the client. But the team leader should update everyone on what that strategy is. When might you want input is when something unexpected happens, a major change happens in the client account, or a competitor does something that puts us on defense. Again, the more you decide these things ahead of time, the fewer mistakes are made in the heat of battle.

(5.) Key steps - How will we handle responding to an RFP? Pricing? How will we handle team presentations? It’s best to have a step-by-step process for each of these. Who does what and how. It’s more efficient to have a process for putting together a multiple presenter event than to reinvent the wheel each time. For example, you may decide that in a multi-person presentation, when an audience question comes up, the relationship manager/sales executive will direct who on the team will answer it (not necessarily the teammate who is presenting at the time).

These 5 areas will get you started. Once you go through your decision making as a team, I recommend these last two pieces:

First, everyone on the team needs to commit to the “plan” (what’s been decided).

Second, everyone needs to agree that it’s okay (and even expected) to hold each other accountable to their commitment. 

Have a great week!

Bob

P.S. As always, if there’s something you’d like to work on as an individual or as a team, reach out to me: [email protected]. I’d love to help.