5.03 (V) Team Selling for Impact
One of the sales situations you may find yourself in in the course of your sales process, is a team sell. You may have a partner, a co-founder, or a co-worker with you in a sales meeting. Now that there's two of you, this makes selling easier right? Wrong. Selling is, actually gets harder with more than one seller in the room. Why? Well, remember when we laid the foundation for this sales specialization, and I suggested that high performance selling rests on a three part foundation? We talked about knowledge, skill, and discipline. And the key thing we talked about is how skill and discipline must be balanced with knowledge. In a team selling situation, now you have two smart people in the room and the balance gets thrown off. So how do we correct for this. There's a framework that I developed called Team selling for Impact, and I want to show you how the three critical elements of this model fit together. First, you'll notice that it has three phases. Preparation, execution, and follow through. Notice how much work goes into preparation. You and your teammate you need to figure out roles, goals, potential objections, and the stories you'll tell to make your key points. Now, for a moment, let's skip over execution and move right to follow through. This is where you de-brief the meeting and write your thank you notes. And now let's get back into the meat of it, the execution phase. There are two roles in a team selling situation. That of the process leader, and that of the perspective leader. Earlier in the specialization, we learned how to run high impact sales meetings, and here's where the process leader comes in. The role of the process leader is to execute the meeting, to run the show, the purpose benefit check, pivot through, do a crisp closing. The perspective leader on the other hand, is the one who adds color and context to the meeting by telling a story, asking an impact question or two, and describing the proposed solution. Think of it this way. The process leader is the left to right, west to east guy, or girl, and the prospective leader is the north south person. Notice that these roles are very distinct. The process leader runs the meeting, the prospective leader adds color. In this way, teams bring a clarity to the meeting that makes it run more smoothly and provide more value to the prospect. When this is done well, teams create separation between themselves and everyone else who is selling to your prospects.
