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.
Strategy Sessions—When Do You Want the Bad News? Who Do You Want It From?
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.
