Sales trend 9 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 explores the characteristics and benefits of truly integrated sales teams.
The future of the individual ‘solo’ salesperson is coming to an end for most businesses.
What is taking their place is an integrated team of people working on sales together.
Sales leaders do not need teams of individual B2B salespeople, they need people with a diverse range of skills working as integrated teams across a range of sales disciplines and capabilities.
Teams who can cover areas such as sales and territory planning, account development, CRM & sales pipeline management, social media interactions, events management, content curation, data analytics, new business prospecting in new and existing accounts, solution selling, proposal development, project management and implementation, and ongoing customer care and engagement.
In fact, this is how we, the Barrett team, have been working now for the last 2 years and with great effect. It’s made selling a lot easier for us. This arrangement came about as an experiment to see if there was a better way of us managing our sales effort. The more traditional way we had before wasn’t really cutting it. So we switched and haven’t looked back.
Don’t take our word for it.
Our little experiment just happens to coincide with what’s happening on a much larger scale across a range of businesses much, much larger than ours. Most of the research into this arrangement is around SaaS and IT businesses with much larger sales teams that have been adopting and adapting to this approach as well with great effect.
The effects are that salespeople are making more relevant and intentional contact with new prospects off the back of social media curation and starting the relationship on a solid footing building the case for trust and confidence moving forward. However, rather than selling themselves in as the ‘only’ person the client needs to deal with, these salespeople are selling in the team who will help manage their journey and customer experience moving forward.
Selling is truly becoming an integrated team sport.
This requires immense levels of trust from all participants. No one can stand out as the ‘hero’, the ‘saviour’. It’s ‘we’ not ‘me’ both internally and externally.
This means that role clarity, what we are each accountable for, how we work in concert to find and deliver great customer results and experiences, and how we keep communicating are vital to the success of this type of sales team environment.
As Tim Colter of consulting firm McKinsey points out ‘Engaging customers in the future will require a multichannel sales strategy powered by smart digital investments, which caters to the different needs of first-time and repeat customers.’
This sales trend is about building an effective matrix of skills and relationships where everyone in each sales team ‘pod’ takes responsibility for their own part and the overall outcome of the plan. Everyone works on the sales plans and accounts plans; each activity can be managed and we watch for reactions from the market place; clients know they have a trusted team working for and with them; people are deployed effectively; whether internally based or field based, each team member has a high level of capability around consulting and solution selling capabilities.
These successful sales teams can act fast on opportunities because they are not relying on one person who ‘knows it all’. They use ‘test and learn’ strategies to continue to evolve and grow.
There is so much to manage an integrate in today’s complex business that is very hard a) to find a person who can do it all and b) have the time to do it all if we are to sell better.
The sales teams of the 21st century are integrated operators managing a large dashboard of behaviours and expectations – internally and externally.
Trust and confidence are at the heart of these operations.
Get this right and it’s full steam ahead.
Remember everybody lives by selling something.
Author: Sue Barrett
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