Sales IS a Team Sport
The best teams are built with individuals who work together for a common purpose and are willing to sacrifice for the good of the team. Not seeking personal glory. Great teams are built when “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (Aristotle). This applies to any field of play and, in business, the field where you play is the battleground on which business is won.
Winning does not happen immediately. Getting the right team together to support each other and to win takes time. Even with the best team there is no guarantee; it still takes effort, practice and occasionally, more changes to the team or the starting line-up.
At their height, the Chicago Bulls had Michael Jordan to lead the team, but ably assisted by Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant both of whom joined the Bulls in 1987. Jordan joined the Chicago Bulls in 1984 but never won the championship until 1991. It took four years after the team was assembled for the results to come. Even with the best players and the best supporting players winning does not happen immediately.
The world of sport is littered with great teams and great individuals that never won their ultimate prize. Winning is about fine margins, attention to detail and great individuals, perhaps not always the best, and the will to win. One great player may win the occasional spoil but it is not sustainable.
George Best was, at the time, one of the best football players in the world. Despite many challenges his touch on the pitch was legendary, as was his personal life. In 1968, Best was awarded the title European Footballer of the Year, yet throughout his entire 37 caps for his country they never once qualified for the European Championships nor for the World Cup of Football.
The best teams very often have some great players and star performers but one individual stand-out player who disrupts the team or tries to work alone may be fine for a short period but is not sustainable and may lead to others leaving the team.
In U.S. Basketball, we think of great players and the impact they had, but sometimes it is not always the positive impact that brings results or causes damage to the team. Between 2005 and 2008, the Washington Wizards made it to the Play-offs. Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton were part of the 2008/2009 team and both keen gamblers. A locker room incident in 2009, where they argued over gambling debts, and both drew guns on each other, had a huge impact. Both were suspended and one never played in the NBA again. After both players were suspended, the Wizards lost more games than they won and never returned to the play-offs until 2014.
It is not just how you play to win as an individual within the team. It is who you are and how you react and work with your colleagues and associates. Sales is a team sport, and it matters that the individuals within the team work together both in the sales pursuit and more widely as a team.
But all teams need a way to play. We call this the Sales Process. The tools you need are called Systems, such as presentation tools, competitor analysis sheets, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and reporting. Working together for the common goal requires understanding of what tactics work and what needs more work, what needs to be changed and even if some of the team members need to be changed.
My boss came to talk to me about an existing account we had within the company. The salesperson working the account had been on it for a year and had managed to retain the business but had not grown the account or secured much in the way of wins.
The Sales Manager went to see the Chief Operating Officer of the company to find out why and wanted the client to be completely open. Not only did the COO feel the salesperson was too focused on his product and not on the needs of the customer he also did not like him personally.
We all accept that business should be about what you do, what value add you bring and your contribution more than your personality.
However, we are all human beings, and we are sociable animals, which means sometimes we get on with people, sometimes not. Whether a personality clash had got in the way of a productive partnership, or the different approaches led to the clash should not matter, because it was not working for either party.
The sales Account Manager on the account was changed and I inherited an account that was seen as going nowhere. In truth it grew very little as opportunities were sparse but on a personal level the relationship progressed and the cost of serving the account in terms of time and effort reduced so there was a win there too.
Sometimes the team is not just the team within. The team that is the client account and the sales team itself must also work as a partnership.
In John Adair’s book, The Action Centred Leadership we have become used to seeing Task–Team–Leadership as the three elements of great leadership. These same principles apply to sales and how to build an effective sales program in any business. The task is easily the sales pursuit and all that goes with that to win the deal. The team and individual come together to win. And this is shown in Figure I.1.
There are a myriad of books on sales and sales techniques, sales methodologies, and sales skills development. Type “sales techniques” in amazon.com and you have over 60,000 results to choose from. Different markets and industries require different approaches and skill sets. Selling an Airbus to a national carrier is somewhat different to selling photocopiers to a small office. Accepted there are many common elements, but there are more differences in the style, the approach, the level of detail, the size of the team, the duration, and much more besides. However, both require a team, and both have a task to complete.
Figure I.1 The three elements of Action Centered Leadership
Team building can be simple and yet very effective, such as an evening out or trip to the beach. It does not have to be a three-day wilderness adventure and raft-building. However, it is widely recognized that team building within a business is important; so it should also follow that team building within the sales team is important. Very often this is confined just to the sales team. It would be better for a wider team to be involved in team building, the marketing team, and those that are actively engaged in supporting the sales process and the pursuit of the sale.
Putting together the elements required of an organization to build an effective sales engine requires an understanding of the task in detail and the tools and systems to support that. It requires great players and ones that can work as part of a team. Bringing that all together will deliver sustainable, repeatable wins and allow the company to continue developing and tuning their product or service and the way they go about the sales pursuit to even better results.