Team Selling - Reality or Myth? By Ben Zoldan, CustomerCentric Selling Affiliate	<< Back
Have you thought about the experience that many organizations put their buyers through? From the first time the buyer learns about the company and offering, through their evaluation process, how they assess the benefits of using the offering and, ultimately, through implementation? Scary thought, huh? Let’s track it: You receive a “hot” lead that was generated by your marketing department. It’s a potential several hundred thousand-dollar opportunity. You pass it to your top salesperson, Mary. She is asked by the prospect to fly out next week and bring a sales engineer and a professional services manager, as well as mail some collateral about her offering prior to the meeting next week. Does this sound familiar to you? If all sales processes start with a story, are all the pieces of this story in synch? Meaning, is the expensive, glossy product marketing collateral that Mary sends out, in alignment with the kind of sales call the entire sales team is supposed to execute? Will it contribute to what happens after that sales call? Has anyone even attempted to architect what the ideal team sales call should look like? When you consider an effective team-selling environment, can you draw similarities to that of a winning sports team? A winning sports team has a defined set of roles for each player and always has a pre-defined game plan from which each player should execute individually, so as a whole, the team will succeed. Good teams are made up of good players and there is always a talent prerequisite. The best teams, however, are created when good players are inserted into well-defined team systems, whereby individuals follow processes within the total team concept. When individuals follow a system, a “community” is born. The community has interdependence among the players, the coaching staff, and throughout all the personnel in the back-office. Each player and staff member co-exists within the system. Players follow the processes within the system that is ultimately governed by the goals of the community. For a community to truly prosper and achieve its goals, each of the components of the community must execute a plan that is aligned with the other components. There should be a natural hand-off from player to player, coach to player, and so on. This begs the following questions: If your organization were really serious about shaping your customer experience, from first awareness through customer satisfaction, which of your “C” level executives would own the total customer experience? VP Sales? VP Marketing? VP Professional Services? VP E-commerce? OR, how about the CEO?!? Is the messaging that marketing has given to the market in alignment with what actually comes out of the lips of your salespeople? How do you define a lead? Would your salespeople and marketing staff agree on that answer? Do your brochures go on and on about how robust, seamless and cutting-edge the product is? Are your salespeople expected to have discussions about the products or should they lead with business issues and take a buyer through a needs-development process? When your salesperson is required to bring in sales support resources, in the form of a situational expert, are there pre-requisites for use of the resource? Does that resource follow a defined process that is an extension of the salesperson’s process? When a buyer becomes a customer, is this truly a continuation of the total customer experience, or does an entirely new experience begin? Can you architect the “ideal” customer experience? Have you tried? And, can your salespeople, marketing staff and services people insure that the majority of customers have this “ideal” customer experience? Is it a coincidence that the companies that create effective team selling environments are the same companies that have the highest level of customer satisfaction? In our experiences, the answer is clearly “no” – it is not a coincidence. In many corporate cultures, individual business units like marketing, sales, pre-sales and professional services tend to act as silos. This leads to heavy finger–pointing in the staff meetings. “Marketing sends us crappy leads!” “Sales promised the customer something we cannot provide!” “Services missed their deadlines!” You’ve heard it all before... Does the left hand really know what the right is doing? Unlike other operating units within a company, sales and marketing are typically the only organizations that have resisted defining it's best practices or sales process(es) to maximize sales effectiveness and customer success. Moreover, its rare that we find processes defined and synchronized across all customer-facing entities, from Product Management, to Marketing, to Sales, to Sales Engineers, to Sales Management, through professional services. Each has their own pre-defined processes, but it’s rare when an organization defines a complete and total customer experience process, from the time a message is sent to the marketplace through a successful customer implementation. Instead, most organizations have relied on the disparate processes and practices of the individual business departments that touch the customer. Let’s examine if some of these “silos” are out of synch. First, product-marketing. “The XK2000 v.7.5.5 is the most robust, seamless, integrated, cutting-edge solution in the marketplace.” With this type of messaging, product marketing helps these products take on a life of themselves. Everyone in product marketing can talk about “it”, but how many of them can really tell you how their customer’s use “it” to achieve a business goal or solve a critical problem? By job title? Within a specific market? We really don’t want salespeople to lead with “it”, so why do all the web sites, white papers and product-marketing materials focus on “it”? If you were to create collateral that was intended for “C” level executives, wouldn’t you want to stimulate curiosity about how you helped another executive solve a key problem or achieve a business goal with the use of your offering? By job title? By industry? While a lot of product marketing organizations create messages educating internal and external constituencies on the products and features, what if a group was tasked with creating messaging around how customers actually use the product to save or make money? Could a customer-usage department replace a product-marketing department? Could this ultimately help to bridge the gap between sales and marketing? Just the term “product marketing” itself may makes me cringe. Does team selling begin with the hand-off between marketing and sales? How about pre-sales or sales engineering - Prior to the infamous “demo”, do most sales engineers find out from the salesperson what capabilities to demonstrate to a prospect, or does he/she show all 847 features, until you have to wake the prospect up from deep REM (if you are still in the room). What standardized documents do salespeople share with the engineer that will help the engineer know exactly how to prove to buyers that using the offering, will save or make them money? And, what about your professional services group - Are they a continuation of the sales cycle? Going into a new project, how do they find out from the sales team what are the individual goals of the decision-makers? How do they find out what the current situation is and how the salesperson positioned the use of the product to help them achieve their goals? Are your consultants qualified to initiate and sustain relationships at the executive levels and have meaningful conversations around business topics? How many enterprise software implementations fail due to lack of executive level sponsorship? Has your professional services ever heard, “Well, your salesperson sold me something different.” This friction between the people responsible for implementing your offering and the people responsible for winning customer contracts cannot be contributing to your overall success as an organization. How many buyers have been left with a bad taste in their mouths from a previous technology implementation failure? Could the answer lie within defining and executing a complete team selling process that integrates marketing with sales and sales with pre-sales and services? Maybe team selling is not just about winning deals… maybe it’s really about creating the “ideal” customer experience? So, what if you could: As part of your sales process definition, extend the process to include every customer touch point in the total customer lifecycle, from customer awareness, to solution development, to company positioning, to facilitating your buyer’s evaluation process, through customer success? And, what if once you defined the total customer lifecycle process, you could architect messaging for each step of the process, to include market awareness messages, actual words that come out of your salespeople’s lips, technical proof, etc, so your buyers hear a consistent message throughout the buying cycle? And, what if, during your prospect’s buying process, you could provide proof of your commitment to customer satisfaction by demonstrating how you’ve defined your “total customer acquisition process”, from how you create market awareness through how you turn that awareness into customer success? Would that help demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction? One of the founders of CustomerCentric Systems, Mike Bosworth, recently made a keynote speech to a large information technology company, in which he said: “I encourage you to get each of your customer facing “silo” heads to attend one of our public CustomerCentric Selling workshops, as a team. You will learn about how customers want to be treated and make difficult decisions. You will learn how to develop sales ready messaging to enable your salespeople to have consistent meaningful dialogues with C level executives. You will learn how to define and document your sales processes. You will learn how to evaluate your “funnel” of prospects and forecast future business much more accurately. You will learn how to integrate product development, marketing, sales and services into a single customer experience. All in three and a half days!” Can you think of a better way to spend three and a half days? Ben brings an array of senior level experience in sales, sales management and sales methodology implementations to CustomerCentric Systems™. He has built his career on the fundamentals and philosophies of CustomerCentric Selling and decided to align his consulting practice with CustomerCentric Selling, to help his clients achieve their growth objectives. Ben can be reached at bzoldan@customercentricselling.com.
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Team Selling - Reality or Myth?