Sell as a Team

Learning Objectives

After completing this module, you’ll be able to:

• List scenarios when team selling can benefit your reps.
• Describe the function of Salesforce Account Teams.

Sell Together, Win Together

Salespeople are like solo musicians: They’ve mastered their skills—the art of pitching, selling, and closing deals. But just like any great musician, a sales rep can boost their performance with the backing of a great band. Think of the talented Stevie Nicks—awesome on her own, even better with Fleetwood Mac! This is especially true when it comes to complex deals; a sales rep should collaborate with others to close the deal fast. The sales rep still sings lead vocals, but what if they add an executive sponsor on the guitar, a sales engineer on the drums, a support rep rocking the bass, and a marketing rep on the keyboard? Look out Imagine Dragons!

Team selling can work on any deal, but it can be especially helpful when:

• The deal is complex.
• There is a specific product playing a big role, and the primary account rep isn’t an expert on that product.
• The deal is stuck.

Setting Up Your Account Team

A key to successful team selling is to clearly define each member’s responsibility. That way, everyone knows what is expected of them—and what someone else has already handled. You can use Sales Cloud’s Account Team feature to create and define these roles. This helps with:

• Accountability: Each team member knows their role on the team and how their performance is measured.
• Record access: To work an opportunity, you need to be able to look for yourself. The Salesforce Account Teams feature gives each member of the team access to the right records, so you can drop the manual sharing.
• Reporting: To determine compensation and credit toward quota, you have to know who worked on which deals. Plus, more accurate reporting strengthens your ability to coach and slot the right people in the right places.

Salesforce Account Teams can include people who have different levels of access to the account and the associated records, such as opportunities, contracts, and cases. It’s all up to you to customize it. For example, sales reps should touch all the relevant data, but support reps shouldn’t be able to edit contracts.

You can create a default account team for each rep, and you can decide what happens when that rep is assigned a new lead: Should the account team be automatically added, or should the rep decide lead by lead, based on the complexity of the deal?

Salesforce also has Opportunity Teams. Like Account Teams, these include a group of people who contribute in specific roles. However, they give access to different levels of data. Account Teams can have access to all the information on an account, like related contacts, cases, and opportunities. Your Salesforce admin can set the organization-wide defaults for accounts and opportunities to Private. In that case, if you give other users access to an individual opportunity, those users gain read-only access to the opportunity's primary account.

If you decide to sell as a team, take the time to clearly define the roles and responsibilities. That can set up a drumbeat of success and take your supergroup to the top of the charts!