Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.
Everybody sells. Everybody either sells or “unsells” their company and its services with every action they take every day. From design to manufacturing to shipping to legal—everybody sells and has an impact on the company’s revenue and therefore affects the company’s livelihood. Some people just don’t realize it. Those who don’t are myopic in their view and perhaps should work somewhere other than your organization.
Obviously, this attitude starts at the top with the leadership of a company and whether or not it has a sales culture. One by one, industries are starting to realize that they need a selling function. Ten years ago it was consulting. Before then, you couldn’t use the “s” word in any of these firms. It was “business development.”
Now, even law firms and medical clinics are realizing that they need a sales function—that business just doesn’t come to them fast enough to fulfill their potential and that even they need to sell value and avoid commoditization.
But not everybody ever imagined that they would be in sales, need a sales training class, or have anything to do with sales. Most universities not only don’t teach it, but most business schools consider it a pedestrian activity (although over 20 million people in the United States alone are employed in sales and probably at least as many throughout the rest of the world).
When we work with firms that are trying to change to a sales culture, the first thing we have to do is take away the old stereotypes — the negative images of selling — and replace them with a vision of selling that is not only acceptable but also worthwhile. Not that the negative images of selling are undeserved. There are a lot of bad salespeople out there.
Most of the bad images people have of salespeople, however, come from those who tried to sell them one thing, one time, and didn’t care about their repeat business. Overselling, high-pressure selling, and all the sleazy images we have usually come from this experience.
But if we define selling in such a way that it’s earning the client’s business by solving his or her problems and serving clients in such a way that they never have a reason to go to anybody else, then most people find the definition acceptable. If we can define selling as outserving and outsolving the competition, most people would accept that — and that’s basically what it is.
If you don’t earn business in such a way that you can meet or exceed your clients’ expectations, you’re not really a sales team; you’re a sales-prevention team. Systematically, you will inoculate your customers against doing repeat business with you.
The real test of selling is whether people will buy from you the second time. You have to do more than just satisfy the client—you have to ensure the client’s return.
Real profitability lies in the second, third, and fourth sale and beyond because that is where the cost of sale is lowest and your pricing can be higher because you have lowered risk and delivered value.
As companies have moved from selling products to selling systems and solutions, their sales efforts have moved from single sellers, who wear all the hats, to sales teams. Team selling consists of two to two dozen people selling to a committee of two to sometimes 200 buyers.
Many sales opportunities will bring a sales team consisting of an account manager, a product specialist (or several), an industry specialist, a technical specialist, a service team, and an executive or two. Since your systems and solutions may now touch multiple departments and, therefore, multiple buyers, all these people may be selling to a committee of buyers.
In team selling, each one of these specialties requires different talents, personalities and competencies, and each team member has different roles and responsibilities.
Soccer or Silos—None of the Above
The real test of selling is whether people will buy from you the second time.
In some companies, the roles and responsibilities of a sales team are clearly defined. In other organizations, including many consulting firms, such roles and responsibilities are not well defined. (One partner described his company’s sales effort as being like five-years-olds playing soccer. We all run over here and kick the ball, and then we all swarm over there and kick the ball. If we score, we all take credit, and if we get scored on, everybody runs away.)
Other firms are so large—and have grown by acquisition — that they sell in silos. Multiple sales reps are often calling on the same account. They rarely talk to each other to share opportunities and contacts and, as a result, quite often end up competing with each other within the same account.
Siemens is a huge multinational company. Actually, in many ways, it is over a dozen companies, each with billions of dollars in sales.
Numerous clients buy from multiple divisions of Siemens—each of which has a separate sales force. This is normally not a problem until the client wants an integrated solution.
To present one face to the client and handle internal issues and communications, Siemens created a separate sales organization called Siemens One, headed by Ken Cornelius in Atlanta.
It was especially effective when the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), after 9/11, needed to increase airport security screening. This meant (the acquisition of) new systems, hardware, technology, and lighting, as well as consulting services.
Siemens One was able to coordinate the sales efforts of several of its divisions and produce a singlevendor solution. Its competitors offered partnerships and coalitions of multiple vendors.
The pain was strategic, and the problem was urgent. Dealing with a single vendor reduced risk and increased accountability in a solution where the political benefits went as high as world peace.
They got the business. They were not the low bidder.
“This approach and success has been repeated dozens of times on large, complex deals for Siemens,” said Cornelius.
Likewise, on a global basis, many times the account is handled by the local country. The result is pricing that varies all over the board for the same business. There is also a lack of synergy in the sales effort, where many times, multiple opportunities could be combined to outflank the competition.
Joe Terry was coaching deals for a client in London and was conducting a strategy session on a $2 million deal for a big-five consulting firm.
Everything had been agreed to, and the contract was waiting for signature. They broke for lunch and returned to hear the salesperson say, “You’re not going to believe this, but our U.S. salesperson in corporate just closed a deal selling a worldwide license for $450,000!”
The U.S. salesperson, with no visibility into the bigger picture, had cost the company millions of dollars in revenue from a prospect that obviously had a high likelihood of buying for hundreds of offices across the globe.
Poor negotiations? Maybe. But the real problem was the lack of teamwork and communication.
One of the first military principles of strategy is concentration of force. Unless an entire global sales team is coordinated and has a unified account strategy, the competition will have a significant chance of defeating you piecemeal. Additionally, procurement departments can outcommunicate sales teams in some situations and shop the same business around the world to get the lowest price. This not only leaves money on the table but is embarrassing to the high bidder.
In order to be most effective, teams need clearly defined roles and responsibilities as to who will do the prospecting, who will lead the account strategy, and who is responsible for providing product information and presentations. In fact, the best strategy is to map your organizational chart to the client’s organizational chart so that each person on your team knows which person on the buying committee he or she is responsible for and has a strategy to win that person’s vote.
At the same time, one of the first principles of best practice is clearly defined account ownership. Whether you have one owner for an entire global account really depends on your size and strategy and whether you have invested in those resources.
Companies that sell in silos should pick one leader of the account. That leader is given control and accountability over that account, and everybody else selling in that account is a member of that team and accountable to that leader.
Other companies define account management as simply caretaking, coordinating, or communicating. They define relationships as being friends, giving favors, and showing appreciation. All this is fine, but we define account management as allocating resources in the most effective way to achieve the greatest account potential whether it is a partnership, dominating the account, or just maintaining it.
In team selling, the biggest challenge is moving individual salespeople from loners to leaders.
From Loners to Leaders
When it comes to managing a complex, competitive sales evaluation, the best practice is one opportunity, one owner. That way, you may be wrong, but you’ll never be confused. And confusion probably will cost you more deals than commitment to a single strategy.
A plan needs to be short enough that the salespeople will use it, but it also has to be powerful enough to win.
In team selling, the biggest challenge is moving individual salespeople from loners to sales team leaders. Salespeople, by nature, are loners. As they started out in business, working for a smaller company without division of labor, they may have had to wear all the hats. Good “hunters” tend to be independent sorts anyway, but as they move to team selling, their job is to lead a team. The strengths that made them good as an individual may work against them in this regard — the first of which is communication.
Salespeople who keep the plan in their head have a hard time leading a team. In order to lead a team with a plan, you have to write it down, and many salespeople don’t like to write. And most have short attention spans. For some reason, they would rather talk about a deal six times than write it down once.
Salespeople are drivers. They work at a high rate of speed and many of them at low attention to detail. Many deal in relationships rather than analysis. In order to get them to lead a team, accountability and discipline need to be driven from two sources: management and the teammates themselves. The vehicles for doing this are the forecast and the strategy coaching session.
Make the Pie Bigger First—You Can’t Split Zero
Major enemies of teamwork in many firms include split policy and fighting over account control. One of the biggest myths of selling and barriers to effective teamwork is a CFO’s opposition to “paying double” commissions — especially for global account managers. This is a misnomer, but once this catch phrase has been set, it’s difficult to change.
Paying more commissions for additional people on the sales team, whether they are global account managers or industry specialists, is simply a greater investment in the account in order to achieve greater returns or volumes.
The real question is whether the benefits of having additional personnel on the account will yield a return to justify the initial expense. We teach people that if they can’t see their way to greater volumes, better margins, or a lower cost of sales through less competition, then they shouldn’t invest in account management strategies for that account in the first place. Instead, they should pursue the business at the individual opportunity level or as a commodity through the Web or through bidding.
Often times, fights over revenue credit and commissions end up meaning that sales teams don’t even pursue the business because they think that it’s the other person’s account. The deal falls between the cracks, or they step on each other in front of the customer.
The answer is a strategy that settles upfront what the split credit is and who’s going to contribute which effort. If need be, the possibility should exist of paying additional commissions. But get the business and make the pie bigger first.
One of our principals, Phil Johnson, was selling software to Amoco Fibers and Fabrics, an Atlantabased subsidiary of Amoco, whose corporate headquarters are in Chicago.
He asked them if Chicago would be involved in the deal, and they said, “No,” so he chose not to contact his guys in Chicago. He didn’t want to get them involved because he didn’t want to split the deal with them.
In the end, Phil won his deal. He sent over a contract on Friday afternoon. But on Monday, Amoco called and said they couldn’t sign it. Corporate headquarters had already signed a deal with his competitor for three sites — one of which was Atlanta.
Though Phil won his deal, he lost in the end because he didn’t communicate with the team in Chicago. He didn’t help them win, so they ended up losing the deal altogether.
The difference between amateur strategists and great strategists is their ability to test the plan before the battle begins. Great generals look at both sides of the battlefield.
Great chess players play from both sides of the board. Pool players and chess players can see their strategy three and four moves out.
Before every major investment of time and resources in an account — or move to a different phase of the sales cycle — there should be an investment of time by the sales team in a strategy review session. A strategy review session is not an exercise for the salesperson to sell the team on why he has a good strategy. It’s an opportunity to get the bad news early from your friends who want you to win the deal. It’s a test of your plan. Everyone — especially the plan owner — has to leave their ego at the door.
Leaders let everyone know what their role is in the execution of the sale, when each action item is due, and who is accountable for the results. Without a strategy session of this nature, you’re not a team leader — you’re a loner. And ultimately, you’re probably losing.
You can ignore a strategy and hope to win. In fact, you can win without a strategy at all—it’s called luck. (Don’t pay for luck. You can get luck cheaper on the Web.) If you want salespeople who make things happen through a team, though, they have to seek out bad news, blind spots, and assumptions early.
If you get bad news early, there are two things you can do: you can either withdraw from the account or change your strategy and actions. But bad news late is no good because you don’t have time to change, and you have spent your resources. The cement has set.
Until now, the people who have not had a voice have been the teammates — the product engineers and specialists — because the power in most sales teams lies with the salesperson or the account manager. But the product engineers are great sets of eyes and ears and can actually build better bonds at the lower levels. They are sometimes able to get information and actually validate a strategy and a buyer’s preferences when the salesperson has been screened.
The Blue Angels have made several documentaries about how they are so effective flying wingtip to wingtip—at the speed of sound—and how they manage to stay alive during these incredible aeronautical maneuvers. After every show or training exercise, they have a nameless, rankless debrief.
One of the principles we learned from our friends at Afterburner, Inc., a high-impact training firm that simulates fighter strike missions and teaches teamwork at the same time, is that it doesn’t matter who is right but what is right.
It’s not important to defend your strategy; it’s important to seek out criticism because, for pilots, when they’re not right, they’re usually dead wrong.
It doesn’t matter who is right but what is right.
Similarly, the support people who are in the account after the last sale also have great contacts. If they’re not included, you’re missing a great source of information and access. These people need to have a formal way to critique the account plan—especially the sales engineers, who are going to have to go in and give the presentations. If they don’t understand the plan, the stakeholders, the messages they are supposed to deliver, or the strategic pains they are supposed to link into, you are not going to get a very effective competitive presentation.
I’m a Veteran—Why Do I Need a Coach?
If you go to a professional golf tournament and stand at the practice tee, you see Tiger Woods with his coach — as well as most of the top golfers. The golfers themselves are the best in the world and are all qualified to teach.
Why do they need a coach? Because the unconscious competent does things by reflex and needs an out-of-body observer to pick up their flaws. The conscious competent needs to build consistency. The conscious noncompetent needs technique. And they all need the discipline that a coach provides.
Top tennis players have coaches, top track stars also have them, and they are very highly paid for the value that they bring. Sales managers need to make coaching a priority part of their job because competitive advantage comes not from awareness but from the consistency and discipline that tools and coaching bring.
Sales Managers—Too Busy to Win
Reinforcement and adoption of any process or initiative depend on the buy-in and consistent discipline of the frontline sales managers. They always have, always will. If this is so obvious, then why have so many client relationship management (CRM) and sales automation efforts failed from lack of adoption?
If front-line sales managers don’t buy it, they won’t sell it. If they don’t enforce the discipline necessary to adopt a sales process or technology, it will join the graveyard of failed initiatives.
Buy-in requires involvement. Getting sales managers trained first and involved in the design of the coaching template not only makes buy-in more realistic but also prevents the sales managers from sitting in the class like prisoners with their arms folded. They need to be team teaching with the instructor, linking each teaching point into a real deal that happened in their area.
If front-line sales managers don’t learn how to leverage themselves through coaching and strategy sessions, they can never really manage more than three reps at a time
Buy-in may not be as big of a problem as sales managers finding the time to coach—or, in reality, making the time to coach — because any quality improvement process requires for error prevention (coaching and strategy sessions), managers sometimes have to make time for both — growing the deal and growing the rep. Until they make the shift to growing the rep to gain control early, however, they will always be behind the curve.
One of the first things we do with managers is to evaluate the quality (i.e., who takes up time, is it proactive or reactive, what is urgent/important) and quantity of their time. Of the 168 hours per week, we identify the 15 biggest uses of their time and then ask them to tell us how much time should be spent in each area, including personal time. Then we have their managers identify their ideal time-allocation picture for a week. This in itself is very enlightening.
We then ask each manager to track the actual expenditure of time for a month. The results usually identify several things: Sales managers are too busy selling for the bottom 20 percent of their salespeople who can’t manage a complex sale. Almost every sales manager I have spoken with in the past 10 years admits that their bottom 20 to 25 percent of reps can’t manage a complex sales cycle effectively and probably never will be able to, yet these sales managers still carry a full quota for these salespeople.
In addition, we find that sales managers often are heavily involved in the last 20 percent of the major deals because of the rise in power of procurement departments. In this phase, the buyers are often better at buying than the average salesperson is at selling, so managers need to get involved in the negotiations.
These two forces draw sales managers into becoming the salesperson themselves or out of coaching the middle 60 percent, where their coaching abilities would allow them to leverage themselves and increase their win rate. Delegation of high-stakes deals is difficult. But if front-line sales managers don’t learn how to leverage themselves through coaching and strategy sessions, they can never really manage more than three reps at a time.
So forecasts end up being bad because coaching is bad because hiring is bad. To fix the problem, we have to start at the very beginning.
Coaching Done Badly
What are the flaws in coaching? One of the biggest flaws is premature prescriptions. The salesperson has worked the deal for six weeks, and the coach has all the answers in six minutes. Salespeople just love that.
Another flaw is stealing the deal — taking it over — especially in front of the prospect. Once a sales manager has stolen power from the rep in front of the prospect, the manager has it forever. By the time this has happened several times, the sales manager is no longer the coach but a glorified rep with a bunch of juniors.
Strategy sessions are a labor-saving device.The time saved by not selling to the wrong accounts, not selling to the wrong people, and not doing the wrong action items to win will more than pay for the time investment.
A jellyfish sales manager who listens to a strategy review but doesn’t challenge assumptions, create what-if scenarios, identify blind spots, or suggest ideas provides little value.
Getting the entire account team involved, even if by teleconference, results in more eyes, more information, and therefore a better plan. Often the technical teammates form strong relationships with evaluation committee members and can provide great insight into the sales plan. Excluding them is a mistake.
The best practice coaching style that achieves critical thinking while leaving ownership with the salesperson is the Socratic technique of using questions that prompt thinking rather than statements that prompt defense.
Obviously, in losing situations, documenting lessons learned is more productive than fixing blame and pouring salt on the wound.
Manager—Walk Your Talk. Be Prepared
Another flaw is not reading a prepared account plan or strategy document before going to the coaching session. If managers will read the input or sales plan that they have asked the reps to prepare, coaching sessions can be cut in half because the rep doesn’t have to spend the first hour telling the story.
Nothing offends sales reps more than taking the time to fill out a sales plan that a manager has asked them to complete, just to have the manager not read it. If the manager has read it, however, he can quickly move to value-added comments about strategies and assumptions.
It is interesting how salespeople and sales managers always seem to find time to try to “fix the deal” at the end, attempting to correct all the mistakes that were made in a 9- to 12-month sales cycle. But they don’t have time to conduct strategy sessions along the way to avoid chaos at the end.
When do we find time to have strategy sessions? With teleconferences and Web meetings, it is easier now than ever before. Strategy sessions are a labor-saving device. The time saved by not selling to the wrong accounts, not selling to the wrong people, and not doing the wrong action items to win will more than pay for the time investment. The return on time invested in strategy sessions is anywhere from 2:1 to 10:1.
We’ve turned millions of dollars worth of deals around in strategy sessions with our clients and have seen them work. But it has to be a matter of discipline. Lexmark does it every Monday. Some companies have strategy sessions at each change of phase in the forecast. Other companies simply say, “No review, no resources.” If it’s not worth 30 minutes of your time to review the strategy with the team, why is it worth 15 hours of their time to travel across the country and look unprofessional?
The main reason that salespeople should have a strategy session is because they want to win and will have a better plan and a more committed team if they have invested the time to lead.
Enemies of Teamwork
For some companies, the biggest barrier to success is themselves. Their culture and values are so rotten inside that when you leave their building, you just want to take a shower. They can’t partner with anyone else because they can’t partner with themselves.
If this is your prospect, you should seriously consider whether the company is worth your time in the end. If there is a project involved, it probably won’t be successful. If it is the company you work for, you probably won’t be successful. Leave. Fast!
It’s not worth the money.
| Top 20 Enemies of Teamwork | |
| Personal agendas | No compromise |
| Insecurity | Weak links |
| Misaligned goals | Glory stealing |
| No trust | Blame fixing |
| Favoritism | Overemphasis on compensation |
| Finger pointing | No vision |
| Rumor mongering | High turnover |
| Poor leadership | Constant reorganization |
| Selfishness | Carrying weak performers |
| Internal competition,silos | Cynicism |
These are the activities that are the sand in the gears of a successful team. They destroy trust. Use the preceding list to evaluate your own company's team behavior. Use it to evaluate your customers to see if you really want to sell to them. Then evaluate yourself to see if you have engaged in any of these activities. The best salespeople build strong teams inside their own organizations to get things done for their customers.
| Teamwork Scorecard | |||||
| Best Practice, Teamwork | Importance | Execution | |||
| Degree of Importance (1 = low 10 = high) | Agree, but we never do this | We sometimes do this | We often do this | We do this consistently | |
| Individual | |||||
| Individuals are recognized and rewarded for their sales teamwork. | |||||
| Support people consider themselves to be part of the sales team. | |||||
| Opportunity Management | |||||
| We map our organizational chart to that of the buyer's so that team members know their assigned stakeholders. | |||||
| Before every major investment of time and resource in an account, strategy review sessions are held. | |||||
| Account Management | |||||
| Each account has a clear owner to which team members are accountable. | |||||
| Split credits are settled up-front and support our strategy. | |||||
| We have global account coverage with well-defined roles for all members. | |||||
| Industry/Marketplace | |||||
| We have a strong sales culture. Selling skills are recognized, rewarded, and reinforced in our company. | |||||