Today’s B2B sales professional must navigate a rising tide of decision makers, influencers, cosigners and stakeholders. With each new person who is introduced to the selling situation, new perspectives and individual needs must be accounted for, making the sale even tougher. The Corporate Executive Board calculates there are over five decision makers involved in the average enterprise sale across all categories.
In his new book, “Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges,” Tim Sanders argues sales genius is a team sport. “There is no lone genius in sales. Groups of regular folk working together as a team trump innovative thinkers.” For sales managers, this truth should impact everything from recruiting to training and rewarding top performers. Indeed, it requires redefining what “top performers” look like.
Reaping the benefits of dealstorming requires overcoming a bias against cross-departmental collaborations. A 2014 study by Miller Heiman Research Institute revealed that when it came to retaining strategic accounts, world-class organizations (defined as companies that outperform their rivals by an average of 20 percent across key metrics) were twice as likely to manage them with interdepartmental teams and sales department members.
“A good first step in building a wide team, particularly in identifying resources, is to ask, ‘Who knows something about this problem?’ If a deal’s sticking point is price or terms, add someone from finance or someone from legal,” Sanders states.
Don’t be afraid to reach out too widely, he adds. Sanders quotes David Burkus, a former pharmaceutical sales representative who has written extensively on creativity in the workplace. “The people who solve tough problems often come from the edge of the domain. They have enough knowledge to understand the problem, but don’t have a fixed method of thinking,” Burkus says. “Their unique perspective allows them to generate a diverse set of ideas and still have enough domain knowledge to evaluate which ideas have merit.”
