I started my sales career selling in small software houses. You ran the deal, you might have a pre-sales person to help. The first sales role I had, I even had to do the demo.
"If a salesman can demo it, then it shows how easy the system is to use" I was told.
It was when I started working for Oracle that things changed. There was multiple salespeople and multiple stakeholders. Internally and I realised that there were externally too.
I still remember taking a call from an irate Oracle salesperson "what are you doing calling up my client?" he said. I didn't know people owned clients and as nobody from Oracle was talking to this part of the business, I thought it was fair game.
I had to grow up fast and embrace team selling.
Now we have systems to help us. The CRM should tell us who from within an organisation has a relationship with whom. If it's updated of course.
Better still is social media as a way of mapping out accounts.
One of our clients is creating a matrix of relationships across their top accounts. Surrounding the prospects. You cannot lock the competition out, but if all they see is you and your insightful content, then where else will they go? Your company becomes the natural choice.
It's worth mentioning at this point that the cold callers and those that tell you that relationships are not important are no even visible to the client and so won't make the short list. Sorry guys!
We are now recommending this as a common strategy to companies that sell SaaS / Cloud and so therefore there is a renewal and to our retail clients. They both have a similar business issues which is, you have to get the new business sale, there is then a renewal. The renewal, creates a break point where the client can cancel or go out to the market again.
You job as the salesperson is to get that renewal and continue them as clients.
Where does the team selling come in?
Think about all the departments that are involved - Sales, Pre-sales, Aftersales, customer service, renewal teams, plus the leaders of all these teams. They all could have an analogue relationship, they should have a digital relationship. You make sure that these teams are continually present. The same insightful content will work for new sales, as it will for renewals.
Be ever present with your clients. There you have a team selling strategy on social.
One of the most strategically important uses of team selling is the collaborative internal process by which sales organizations determine which major deals to pursue… and which to forego. Amazingly, many sophisticated selling organizations make these critical "Go/No-Go" decisions more or less randomly, with no input from other parts of the business. Choices to pursue enterprise deals are all too often made emotionally, driven by statements like “It’s a big deal,” “It’s right in our power swing,” or the ever-popular “It’s ours to lose.” But what do such words really mean? Do they have anything to do with the real business rationale for pursuing a deal? Do they help us to assess the actual business risk we face?
