PREFACE

A jazz quartet. A Navy SEALs unit. A TV production crew. A marching band. A Formula 1 pit crew. A football team’s offense. A surgical unit.

You’ve probably encountered many instances of great teamwork throughout your life and may have wondered: What makes great teams great? What common characteristics do they have? How do these traits lead them to become high-achieving, successful teams, year after year?

Since you’ve picked up this book, I’m guessing you work on teams that sell together and you’re looking for those key characteristics to make your team great—collaborative, supportive, winning.

You’ve come to the right place. Whether you lead or contribute to teams that collaborate to sell new business, retain and develop existing clients, or cultivate third-party partnerships, this book is for you.

In your world, you may have noticed that more and more of your pivotal new business or client meetings require multiple players working in sync. You may have also noticed that conducting a well-orchestrated group sales meeting or pitch is a rare occurrence and one that is more difficult to achieve than it appears on the surface.

That’s the primary reason I decided to write this book: to give you a process for building an effective selling team and, as a result, help you win more consistently.

I realized early in my selling career that one of my differentiating talents was coaching teams that were getting ready for big pitches and pivotal client meetings. It occurred to me at some point that though this came naturally to me, it was a foreign concept to many of my peers. I realized that my ability linked back to an earlier experience in my life. Long before studying finance, getting my MBA, and embarking on a rewarding banking and investment management career, I spent my youth as an actor in New York City. This included television commercials and live theater. Remember the movie or TV show Fame (“I’m gonna live forever . . .”)? The setting was a place called the High School of Performing Arts, a school that trained and developed actors, dancers, and musicians from across New York City. Well, that school is real and I trained there as an actor. In addition to learning how to perform, move, and behave during an audition, my acting experience taught me how to work well as part of a team—people from diverse age groups, experiences, cultures, and ways of thinking. I developed what I like to call a “group performance discipline.” In addition to understanding my role and learning my lines, I also recognized how important it was to work together with others—crew, directors, and other actors—in a way that allowed the broader company to perform effectively as a team. To stage a successful production, everyone depended on me just as much as I depended on everyone else. We practiced together; learned to trust one another; performed together; and shared feedback, failures, vision, and successes.

Fast-forward to my professional career in finance. As I began to take on responsibilities for client relationships, and later, business development responsibilities, I realized that I used the same group performance discipline I had learned during my acting days to prepare for, execute, and follow up from sales meetings. This discipline helped me win and retain business; lead many successful teams in sales pitches; and later, as a manager and consultant, coach teams and their members on how to work as a unit in order to drive more wins.

As a sales coach, I have worked across a wide variety of industries with hundreds of selling teams; several thousands of sales managers, sales professionals, account managers, and subject matter experts; and numerous senior management teams. The principles contained in this book are road-tested and current, reflecting the challenges faced by selling with others to drive revenue, and helping you to pave the path to success.

I believe that selling is a craft—and only a small percentage of people do it exceptionally well. Team-based selling is becoming more common; yet doing it effectively is even tougher than selling alone. This book’s goal is to raise your awareness about the complexity of team selling and show you how to do it exceptionally well. Whether that means winning new business opportunities by pitching with several colleagues, or working with one partner to retain existing clients, you will learn a practical process and gain the tools to help you build winning selling teams, or enable their success as a coach or contributor.