Your Sales Team: Is Everyone Pulling In The Same Direction?

Team work is not a subject that has been given much prominance on sales management courses in the past, but this is now changing. No longer can the "lone wolf" sales person be effective. High customer expectations coupled with increased product complexity requires a team approach to resolving problems and promoting sales.

Going forward sales strategies will only be successfully achieved through team work. Particularly where large clients are involved, any approach rather than a team work selling approach is unthinkable. Sales people who manage key accounts have to interact with different client contacts in a number of roles - such as Buying, Planning, Control - and they have to think their way into these people's subject areas. Only the specialisations of individual team members mean that these contact partners have the opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues who have specific knowledge and experience.

The move towards a team approach to selling is supported by a study in which 120 managers from sales, marketing and personnel were involved. 78% of the organisations surveyed are starting to work in permanent teams with 68% also introducing project teams working for a limited duration on a project. According to the businesses surveyed, the arguments in support of introduction of sales teams are closer customer relations, increased efficiency and increasingly sophisticated project organisation.

In the opinions of those surveyed, the most important indicators of success were close co-operation / intensive exchange of ideas in teams, high team goals and collective responsibility. However, what was decisive is for the team to be actively involved in the definition of its goal and to formulate its own goals as precisely as possible. It is only in doing this that a definite team function that has a motivating effect was achieved.

It was also considered very important that team members should have skills which complement each other. Furthermore, it was absolutely essential that these skills should refer to both technical and social competence skills.

The survey also demonstrated that teams must be of manageable size for team work effectiveness. Among the companies surveyed the average number of people in permanent teams was 6.6 employees. And the sales project team, at an average of 6.1 members, was not significantly smaller.

Any one who has ever worked in a team will be aware of the problems that are associated with team work. The sales manager of a pharmaceutical products manufacturer says "Any manager who puts togehter a team without ensuring that it has a clear function and a set goal to achieve will not succeed".

Nonetheless, around 30% of those surveyed bemoaned a lack of team management by their managers. Points including time wasting during consultation, over compromising and inability to achieve sales strategies were also criticised. The criticism shows how important it is to provide team work training not only for the team members but also management training in relevant team building skills for the managers before the team is put into place.

Despite the problems associated with introducing teamwork in to the sales process the positive experiences with sales teams generally outweigh the negative ones. An average of 66% of those surveyed had good to very good experiences with permanent teams and the verdict on project teams was even better, being some 5% above this. These positive experiences reported by sales teams show that both the company and the individual team members really benefit from good teamwork and all sales managers should review their own management training to ensure they have the necessary team building skills in place.


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Richard Stone is a Director for Spearhead Training Limited that runs management training courses that improve business performance. You can view more details by clicking on the link.