Chapter 8. BUILDING HEALTHY TEAMS

Kate Ehrlich, Ivan J. Blum, and Inga Carboni^[]

Sales teams face numerous obstacles to the internal sharing and coordination of information. They are often organized around customer accounts rather than functional groups and, as a result, are composed of people from multiple divisions, product groups, service lines, and specializations. Members have different reporting structures, which can fracture their loyalties and commitments. Also, people may be on two or more account teams, which further fragments their time and attention. And because they spend a lot of their time traveling, salespeople have few opportunities for the face-to-face meetings and direct phone calls that help keep them current with changes in status and information.

In addressing these challenges, many companies have stuck with outdated notions of what makes for a successful sales team. According to traditional thinking, high-performing sales teams are those that adopt the right account-planning practices and whose members have superior knowledge of their offerings. Building intra-team relationships is seen as a waste of time. We have met sales representatives who believe that working on a team sales proposal that may generate millions of dollars in revenue is less important than working with an individual client to win a narrower brand-specific deal worth a tenth as much.

However, recent research underscores the link between successful sales teams and their internal and external networks of relationships (Cross, Ehrlich, Dawson, and Helferich, 2008). Members of high-performing sales teams have close relationships with other team members as well as strategic relationships outside of the team (Ancona, Bresman, and Kaeufer, 2002), which helps them identify and seize opportunities. Members of high-performing teams trust one another (Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1999), which promotes information sharing and the discovery of cross-selling opportunities. And, perhaps most important, members of high-performing teams know who knows what within the team (Borgatti and Cross, 2003), which helps them assemble the right solutions for clients.

Although this research links success in teams to strategic relationships, it does not prescribe the steps teams can take to build those relationships, which is what we set out to accomplish in this chapter.