Episode 77: Balancing Egos, Skillsets and Team Contribution - Why Variety is Important in Every Team

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Over the last week or two I've had a bit of time off, some lovely time with the family in Fiji, no doubt. Those who follow me have seen plenty of content come through from my time overseas, but I also managed to find a little bit of time to read through. Actually it was a really good read. It was the Salesforce State of Sales report didn't take particularly long, but what it did was take into account the views of about 7700 sales professionals. So quite a broad range of people that the report took the views of. And there was something that really stood out to me. One quote in particular that I'd like to talk about to everyone today or with everyone today, and that is 81% of sales representatives say that team selling helps them close deals. So 8 out of 10 salespeople view working with their teams together collaboratively helps them close out deals. That one really stuck with me because the number was far higher than I expected. Whilst I think many salespeople recognize the potential for working with others in their team, for me I actually expected the number to be a lot lower as to the number of people that actually do work collaboratively with their teams. And perhaps I'm reading too much into it to look at 81% of people, meaning they're active, because if they believe it works, they're possibly active, perhaps not. But regardless, it's a really powerful concept that teams we work with are huge around. The best high performing teams that I've seen across my 22 years in the sales industry absolutely know how to leverage different skill sets across their teams. So today we're going to talk around the importance of having a variety of skill sets and a few other things across Our sales teams that will help us bring the total capacity or ability to drive serious results across our teams up. So raise that level as to what we can achieve across our teams. But before we do so, I just want to spend a moment looking at what team selling or having a variety of perspectives involved in deals means. So for me and the teams we work with and those in our business, we generally look at three areas when it comes to having a variety or a group centric approach to closing out deals. So the first one is all around working with peers, which I think is the most common one that can be peers in different geographies, peers who have specialties in different segments or areas of your business, that is industrial versus medical or those that work really well, specifically in different stages of the buying process, lead generation versus closing versus key account management, for example. A second area I see when we talk about team selling is all around leaders. And that's when teams are able to work with their leaders, be at one level up or be at multiple levels up to bring in some extra clout or real competency into their process. But also the networks that these people bring in. Really, really common. When we see how teams work together, what the successful model or blueprint looks like. The third area is other departments. And I think that that again, it's quite an obvious one. But when we have sales teams working with rev ops teams or technical leads within businesses, marketing teams, customer service teams, even operations teams, I think are really, really impactful when we consider how we can work as teams to close out more deals. But I think the overall message for me around team selling is that variety is so important to be able to really work together as teams. And by that I mean having a really broad set of skills that we can tap into as well as broad set of perspectives and experiences allow us to bring together a much bigger pool of skills that we can then use to create value for our customers. Because at the end of the day, it is all about creating value. And I think for me, that's where team selling really excels. Because when we can bring together all those perspectives, it's so much easier to create value for customers rather than needing to learn it all ourselves. The end result being there that we end up spending so much time learning that we have less times with our customers. And yes, learning is very important, but we need to be in front of our customers or we simply just don't have the bandwidth, the internal capability or capacity to be able to take on everything about every part of our business or what the customer might need. So what I'd love to do today is talk through how we can balance some of the skill sets across our teams to really maximize the value that we can create through team selling. So that is how we can have all different types of skills across the entire team rather than needing everyone to be really good generalists at everything. Look, it is somewhat polarizing because we certainly see phone based in particular low value sales teams where leaders and businesses want them to fit into a mould, a cookie cutter type of approach. And I think in some limited areas for me that works well. But again, over 21 years in selling where I've seen teams work really well together is when you have specialists or experts or even just higher levels of skill spread across a team so that we can roll that in when and if we need it. So the approach that we take in terms of determining whether or not we have the right skill set across our broader team is to actually match what we have against the processes or the stages in our sales process. So we'll typically work off five stages in our sales process. And for us generally, in fact, if you jump back to episodes one to six, we go into the sales process in some serious detail and they, in fact, they are the mandatory podcast episodes that we send everyone who we work with back to or recommend they go back and review before we actually start really engaging around a sales process. But for us, we'll generally work off five stages within a sales process and we'll have a look at the skills that we have within our business or within the business that we're working with to make sure that we actually have it covered across the team. All of those amazing types of skills that we want to be able to roll in to create value when and as we need it. The other piece that's fantastic about this is it actually helps us identify gaps across our team from a talent point of view. And then in our future recruiting, we can get really specific when we're looking to bring certain types or certain skill sets into our business. So before I get into this, the one thing I will say is that having a broad set of skills across the business doesn't replace the need for everyone in the team to have a baseline level across key elements of their role. So a baseline level at being able to listen, a baseline level about around being able to create value, around being able to do some basic, basic prospecting, some basic objection handling some closing skills, asking for the business and looking after their customers. What this does do though, is it allows us to be really clear what competencies we have to bring in at the pointy end of our engagements with customers. So for those customers who need more than just a baseline average to be able to get what they need from us. So let's jump into it. We're going to have a look across these five areas of a sales process being lead generation, number one, meet and greet and needs analysis, number two, presentation or quotation being number three, the post sale work. So the closing stage, number four and number five being key, account management. So when we won the deal and we're managing the customer through post sale, and I think by looking at these five areas it keeps it really simple, but also allows us to very effectively identify where we have skill gaps or perhaps skill surpluses across our team. So let's start with lead generation. Lead generation. No doubt this is where we need to have hunters within our team. So these are people who are experienced in generating leads. Because I'm a huge believer that when you can generate your own leads, you are never ever out of work in a sales role. Whilst we do have lots of businesses globally that will have leads generated from a marketing team or through a level of automation, I think the same number, if not more, of sales teams actually need to be generating their own leads. And the vast majority of businesses we work with actually blend out lead generation being across both their marketing teams and their sales teams. So essentially both teams work together to fill those lead generation needs. So the type of skills we're looking for in the lead generation part of our business are those who are generally really, really effective at networking, at cold outreach, at referral, selling, bringing new business into our realm of influence so that we can then start to work with these customers. The piece here that I think a lot of businesses overlook is that those who are really good at hunting don't necessarily have to then be amazing at running the sales process. Whilst it's hugely impactful to have a hunter who can find their own business and close it, and these generally are the most highly paid and sought after salespeople, bar none, those who can find their own leads and close out their own business, it's not a requirement. And an example I'd love to share is, in one of my businesses about 10 years ago, we had two salespeople in particular. One was exceptional at understanding customer needs and stepping them through the process. In fact, his feedback from customers and his NPS scores were always 9 out of 10 and 10 out of 10. He was amazing at it. But when it came to lead generation, he really fell Flat. And in fact it was an area that caused significant amounts of anxiety for this person. And in fact we had two or three within the business at this stage. The business I was in, guys, girls, didn't really matter that it was more about the skill set of not being comfortable out generating their leads. And yes, we worked with these people to build up their lead generation skills to have a baseline level that was acceptable. But within this same team, we also had a team member in particular who was outstanding at knocking down doors, had no problems at all, cold calling, no problems at all, going to networking events, no problems at all, even door knocking. And this person was exceptionally good at generating the leads. However, their skills at then nurturing the customer through the process really started to fall down. And again, we did some baseline work with this person to bring that up. But we found they were just amazing at this cold outreach piece. So what we often used to do is pair the lead generation team, or this lead generation individual with those that were really effective at then working through the sales process and managing the customer. Unbelievably effective. In fact, one of the strongest strategies we had across the business I was in at the time, across anything we tried, was to pair these skill sets. So I think the question to ask yourself here is to have a look across your team and recognise whether or not you have the skillset to be able to generate the number of leads that you need. So have a look at the leads you need per week, per month, per year. Have a look at the type of people in your business and what their long term historical averages are around generating leads in this same period of time. And that will really quickly show you if there's a skill gap in your business around lead generation. Experience says that the majority of businesses actually do have this skill gap. So it then comes down to training and coaching to bring your baseline up to cover some of the gap as well as recruiting people who are really focused on that lead generation piece. Okay, so that's lead generation from team based approach to selling. We then go and have a look at the meet and greet and needs analysis part. And this is where I generally find most businesses have ample amount of skill or talent within their business to be able to team sell. These are the types of people that are very much a generalist. They have a broad based skill set, but they know your product offerings really well to then match it with the customer. And sometimes this is where I see the opportunity is that we might have very much technical specialists who can partner with a great sales generalist. To roll into a meet and greet or a needs analysis part of the sales process to actually then understand what the business business has that can match with their needs. So the generalist salespeople are doing the asking the questions, the listening. But it's then the technical person that uses the summaries coming from these generalists to pair for the customer the service or the product or the offering that the business can best match. Super powerful. Because often our technical people aren't great question askers because they're really excited to jump towards a solution. Whereas when we have a generalist in there who's prepared to spend more time understanding the customer needs, it becomes really powerful because our technical people are just held back from being able to throw in that solution too early. Also works really well when we have bigger deals with multiple stakeholders that we can have that time spent through a generalist really understanding what the customer needs before we come in too heavily with the deal. And I can remember very specifically an example of this. About six or eight years ago, we were working with a customer who had a very, very specific product need. And it was all to do with a shopper experience at floor level. And in fact this one was around lighting in the time and the customer was so focused on the price of a product that they were actually missing the requirement around customer experience. And we had a really strong generalist salesperson actually be able to work through with a customer that there was more than just that single price driven need that was then able to pair with a technical person who was able to design specifically for this customer. And we're talking about 80,000 pieces at a reasonable sales per piece that they were able to actually design this through the factory that we had through the business at the time to build a product that met most of their needs. That just wouldn't have happened if one person had been there on their own. So I think the question here to ask yourself is who in your team can sit in front of your customers and have a conversation that can go anywhere, and who in your team, once they understand what a customer wants, can really clearly articulate the value the business offers? They're a terrific group or type of person to pair together when we're out in front of customers because we not only get to the bottom of what our customers need, but we can also then pair in the type of product or offering that we have most effectively. So that's the meet and greet and needs analysis stage, pairing generalists with strongly technical or very experienced salespeople. When it comes to what we as a business third area is quotation and presentation. This is when again, we need to have a really strong level of this across many in our team because presenting is a fundamental requirement of being salespeople. If we can't present, we generally find it hard to build relationships, which means that growth tends to be something that we struggle with. However, the skill sets that I see is really impactful here that are often underrated is a really strong sense of financial acumen. So that's really understanding rois, how to work with numbers, and the impacts that numbers can have on proposals and with customers. Because often our salespeople are fantastic at presenting, running through our solution, building relationships, but they do tend to fall down when it comes to a financial acumen piece. And this really can hold us back, particularly in the next phase, which is the negotiation piece, but also within presentations, if we can't talk with some financial agility around how our offering can impact the customer. So here where it works really well is having good generalist salespeople pairing with those who have super strong financial acumen. Now, that inherently ends up often being leaders within teams. Sometimes finance partners are rolled in, but also very commonly we have the most senior people in sales. Teams often get rolled in for these discussions because financial acumen is one that often comes with time in a business and really understanding the levers. So I think from a quotation and presentation point of view, the skill sets that are fantastic to leverage across a business, a financial acumen. The other areas where we really commonly see teams working really effectively is when we're rolling in marketing teams at this point of time. And the reason we talk about that is that the marketing teams are often really savvy at pointing out the features, the benefits, and then the outcomes or the value that's created from our products. And I think for me, rolling in marketing teams is sensational from a learning point of view for our salespeople that are in that meeting as well doesn't necessarily have to translate to just what customers want. It can also be an opportunity that when we work with marketing, for both parties to learn and we build a better marketing offer. But our salespeople build their skills from really understanding from who should be or from people who should be the experts in marketing our products. So I think the key question to be asking here from a quotation, a presentation point of view when we're looking to share knowledge across teams is who in your team knows how to build trust? Well, so that's your generalist salesperson, but then who in your team, can you throw in with some financial agility? And that may also actually extend to some legal and some regulatory agility as well, to be able to provide the customer with enough reassurance that it's not just a product they're buying. But there's some real strength in the numbers that come behind that. So if you can ask yourself that question again, this is an area where we do see a few gaps. We see them particularly from a lead generation point of view. We also see them quite regularly from quote or presentation point of view. Less so in the meet and greet, needs analysis, but certainly in the other two areas. Okay, so that's three there that we've gone through. Let's have a look at the fourth, which is closing and onboarding. And I think this one is very straightforward here. This is when we have sales team members who are adept at closing. And that comes down to being able to handle objections seamlessly, but also being able to move customers through that next stage of the business. And far and above the types of people that succeed most effectively here are those who are not afraid to lose a customer deal. So they are not worried about keeping their pipeline big and healthy. They're not afraid to ask for the business because they simply don't fear losing a customer. Their focus is actually getting to a yes or a no, rather than worrying about if it's a yes. Now, sometimes these people can burn custom deals, and this is where working as a team can be really impactful. Because when we have a really heavy and proficient closer that can walk in, work a room, ask the right questions to get a deal done, but we pair them with our generalist salespeople, we get to balance if that close goes too far or becomes too hard. Because generally, in my experience, it's the really strong closes that are the ones that we have to watch from a cultural point of view, because this is where I guess the stronger egos come in that sometimes move from being healthy to a little bit unhealthy because they are so focused on getting the deals done that they don't necessarily hear some of the other things happening across the business and don't necessarily balance some of those cultural needs, like listening to customers and making sure we're taking the approach that decisions may have to be made in their time and not ours. So for me, generally, what we're looking for here is what I love to call people who can make it rain or rain makers. So these are the type of people that we know we can pair with some of our softer generalist salespeople, those who don't necessarily find it easy to ask for the business, but if we compare them with with a strong closer, whether they be through the leaders of the team or other people within the team, then we can often find some really effective combinations happening out of that. And I think the question to ask yourself here is that if you needed to send someone into a deal to get it closed straight away, who would you turn to? Most businesses I say have at least one of those, but generally that's not enough. We need to have multiple numbers of these people that we can turn to to help close deals, otherwise it often ends up falling back onto the leadership. There's often sales leaders are quite adept at doing so. So who have you got in your team that can make it rain to be able to pair with your generalist salespeople? Okay, last but not least is the post sales management piece. These are the people that are really effective at detail that we love to see pair across team selling here. Those people that are often implementation focused. They generally will communicate really effectively and a more customer focus versus the winning. I find that hunters and lead generators and even technical people don't necessarily make the best team members when it comes to post sale because they're very focused on winning or the technical elements of a product rather than actually getting across the detail and having a look what the most important results are for their customers. So the type of people that I generally see within sales teams that I've worked with succeed at that are those people that when you hand them spreadsheets to fill in, are really diligent at filling in every column. Those people who when you need weekly updates across their customers are always on top of the stages of where their customers are at. And even actually, in fact, probably most impactfully is the ones who are fantastic at your CRM administration. These are the type of people that make really effective post sales management buddies. And when we talk about team selling are the ones that I like to pair in with salespeople, post sales customer acceptance. And for me this is really important because referrals are often so important to businesses around the world that we need to make sure we're delivering really well and meeting the commitments we made to our customers, not just to do the right thing, but also from a future business point of view. So the question here to ask yourself is when you need detail, who do you go to? Because they are the people that are generally really effective at the post sale implementation and the ones I'd be having in my team to Work with customers are after the deal is done. Okay, so before we finish up today, what I do want to talk about, just briefly, is how we can balance all of these skill sets but still effectively manage across a team, rather than needing to look at just individual requirements to manage. Because as soon as we're managing a team of individuals, our time gets thrown out the window. As leaders, we simply can't get across everything when we have to have a bespoke way of management for every person in the team. So if you're really interested in this, and I think it's one of the most impactful ways that we as leaders can be more efficient with our time, but still drive great results, then I'd encourage you to go back to episode 24, which spoke about how we meet as teams. But to give you a really short synopsis on this, there are essentially four ways that we look at it. The first one is a macro team meeting. So it's a broad meeting for the whole team, which is your weekly sales meeting. This is where we keep everyone focused on the team goals, but more importantly is we get them thinking in a forward fashion about what we need to achieve this week. And that's a great time to be able to pair all of our different team skills together. But most importantly is that meeting should set the tone as to what we have to achieve at a macro level. Second meeting is the team micro level. So this is where we get to deal with some individual levels of skill development or training or coaching that we require. And that is our training program, which I'm a huge advocate of being every single week, 40 to 45 minutes per week. But this is when we get to roll out a really broad range of skills that we focus on. And there's a number of episodes across the podcast that are focused around training, so please jump into those. But most importantly is when we also allow those that are specialists within our business to be able to train the team on the areas they're really good at. So the really good hunters can train the teams or their team on lead generation. For example, the third of the meetings, which is more now at an individual level. So rather than a team macro or micro level, we're talking about an individual micro level. Pardon me, an individual macro level. This is where we do deal or account reviews, which I've spent a lot of time focusing on with customers over the last 18 months or so. This is where we bring the teams together and we workshop their deals. It's a time when learning is absolutely multiplied because every deal that we talk about or customer that we talk about or account that we talk about has learnings that can be multiplied out across all different types of customers in the business. So I love this being an individual macro approach because we get to talk about individual problems that can be broadly applied to the team. And last but not least, this is where we do get to spend some time managing the individual needs of our team members and that is our one to ones which I call the individual micro meetings. So one out of four of these meetings being focused specifically on individual needs. Great one to one format being how are you, what are you proud of, what's in your way and what's your learning plan? Episode 56 is a really nice episode to jump into and listen around the individual or one to one type of meetings that you can roll. There's a whole podcast dedicated to this. But I think the message here that I want to talk about broadly is that having lots of different types of skill sets within our business doesn't need to result in us having tailored or micro management plans for every single one of our team members. There are ways we can spread the skills across the business effectively without killing our time to make an impact as a sales leader. Okay, so that's it for today. Wow, there's so much in there. We spoke about the sales process or the stages of the sales process and how we can look at applying team based selling across that. We spoke about how we can make sure that as leaders, we're not having our days becoming effective to manage all different types of skill sets within our team. And then also at the start, we actually focused on the importance of team selling and how it can make a real impact. And according to 7,700 salespeople around the world, about 81% of them think it's really beneficial. So before we go today solo episodes, I really want to talk about health and fitness. Tip. And this is one that I have spent quite an amount of time of over recent weeks. And it's all about preparation. And for me, as I get older, what I've recognized is that preparation is one of the keys to keeping me on track from a health and fitness point of view. And the way I go about this is that before each and every Monday, so generally on a Saturday or a Sunday, I will be really clear around what my training schedule looks like for the week ahead. And the reason that this helps me is it allows me to massage my days as I need to, or massage my training, probably more importantly as I need to, to make sure it happens if I leave it to chance, it's much less likely that it gets done. So by planning it out ahead of the week, I have a much higher success rate. This also comes down to meals. As a family, we will generally talk about meals on a Saturday or Sunday. This isn't a sit down table conversation where we're really detailed, but just we're in the car. We talk about what are we doing for food this week, what's going to get in the way of eating well, where do we need to be better organized than perhaps we otherwise would need to be, or where can we have let things slip because we've got some quieter parts of the week? Really helps us make sure we're eating well, but also helps us have a broad approach to sleep. Because when we know when we're training, when we know and how we're eating, that sets us up to avoid the late nights or the early starts that are unnecessary because sleep generally is a killer of eating well and being able to exercise. So my advice here is take a planning approach to not just your exercise but also your food and your sleep and I think you'll see some really positive benefits come out of that. That's it for today. Lots in there. I hope you really, really enjoyed some of the discussions around team selling and how it can impact your business. But until next time, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're stronger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.