The year 2020 has taught us a great many things as sellers. One of which is the importance of utilizing internal team members to help get deals closed. If you have not typically utilized a team selling strategy, this might be the perfect year to add more team collaboration to your selling.
Not sure about the idea of team selling? What if we told you a study by Gong.io found you may be 258% more likely to close a sale when involving just one another team member than if you did it on your own? Now we have your attention don’t we?
While we don’t know what exactly the future holds, we know it will take some time for everything to be back to normal (or whatever our new normal looks like). Meanwhile we can use this opportunity to learn new ways of selling that can benefit teams no matter what the circumstances.
Now let’s see who we can add to your team.
Customer Success Teams
No one knows their customers the way a dedicated customer success team does. Now is a great time to partner with your customer success team to learn if any of your current customers are looking to expand.
While 2020 is a rough year for most businesses, to say the least, there are a number that are thriving and growing. Rather than just assuming all is lost, start working alongside your customer success team to see if you can identify any customers that might benefit from expansion. If you can, maybe offer a special discount to help sweeten the deal and lead to a quicker sale.
Many companies have added to their product or service offering since the beginning of the year. If you’re one of these, work with your customer success team you can search for accounts in your territory using specific Salesforce criteria (current subscription, industry, location, company size, etc.) that could utilize this new product/service and team up with customer success to contact these accounts.
Marketing
Any sales team needs a solid marketing team by their side to help support them when leads and prospects aren’t flowing in the way they typically do.
A well timed email campaign based on a prospects industry or role can have a huge impact. We’ve seen a number of organizations get creative with their offerings, if you’re one of them, make sure your audience knows that! If you have new ways to use the product or service you offer, give your current and prospect customers any and every opportunity to learn more.
Your marketing team may even have an arsenal of tools you’re not aware of that can help drive in the specific types of leads you’re looking for.
Nobody knows what potential customers are looking for more than the sales team. You are the folks having the conversations, hearing the problems people are trying to solve for. Don’t keep that information to yourself! Communicate with your marketing team and they just might surprise you with the means they have of getting the right message to the right audience.
Sales Leadership
Perhaps you’ve always experienced a close relationship with your sales leadership team. Or perhaps you’ve been given the freedom to work fairly independently, only really checking in as needed.
Whichever is your experience, or maybe it’s even somewhere in between, the knowledge and experience your leadership team has gained over the course of their sales career is more beneficial to you than ever before. Take advantage of that experience!
You may need to reach out to them for advice, don’t assume they’ll be calling you to give you the answers you need for working with specific prospects right now. While we can’t recommend going to your leadership team for every deal you’re working, they can be a great resource for those ones that are so close to the finish line and you just need a little help pushing them across. Or when you need a creative solution to a problem a prospect is trying to solve and you’re not quite able to put all the pieces together on your own.
We’ve heard it since childhood, “two heads are better than one”. And it’s true for selling! If you’re looking for a new way to sell this year (or any time!), start looking at the resources you have right in your organization and seek out opportunities to try out a team selling strategy.
