Team selling continues to be on the rise. Why? Here are three reasons:
Transformational Market Change. First, several markets are undergoing a transformational change where the customer is demanding that the salesperson bring a broader and deeper level of knowledge to the sales process.
A good case in point is the healthcare market where political, social and economic trends are transforming the landscape. Hospitals now expect their suppliers to become partners to help them to deal with significant challenges driven by reduction in reimbursements and changes in their care delivery models. This means that in order to sell successfully, the salesperson has to know more about areas such as: hospital economics, payment models, disease states and end-to-end supply chain costs. This requires a team – a single salesperson cannot do it alone.
Availability of Technology. Today, salespeople have easy-to-use and powerful CRM systems and software applications available to them, which allow them to share information and insights to a degree that was hard to image even five years ago. Simply put, the technology enables salespeople to collaborate more effectively than ever before. So, not only is there more of a need for team selling, there is also the means to do so.
Sales Management Support. The frontline sales leader has always been the pivotal job for achieving sales excellence. Today, successful ones are operating differently. Among market leaders, these sales leaders expect and support their salespeople to leverage all the personnel resources available. They facilitate idea exchanges across their sales teams, use collective brainstorming to figure out how to unstick stuck deals, and borrow effective approaches to talent management and salesperson development from peers in other areas of the business. Sales leaders are fostering relationships with personnel outside their divisions, such as: marketing, manufacturing, tech support, and customer service, as well as with counterparts in other sales divisions when multiple divisions inside a company sell to the same customer.
Customers today expect salespeople to know more and to know it at a higher level of proficiency than in times past. The higher up in the customer organization, the truer the proposition. Senior-level executives expect the seller to bring fresh perspectives to help them frame their challenges and to offer new insights to generate alternative solutions. They want help understanding more about what they don’t know – not product presentations. If this trend continues, so will the shift to team selling.