What is Team Selling? How Can you Close Deals 5X Faster with Team Selling?

The sales ecosystem today is increasingly competitive for both buyers and sellers. We’ve all hit roadblocks while selling a product to a potential client. Questions around a specific technical feature, deep integration, or even about a competitor’s feature is a definite hiccup that stops the deal from closing. 

With complex deals, the easier the process it is to sell the product to the client, the more convinced they will be. 

What if we told you there is a reliable method to improve your sales process and minimize these roadblocks? 

Enter team selling. 

Read on to find out how your sales team can leverage the art of team selling to close deals faster and the secrets to finding sales success. 

What is Team Selling?

In simple words, team selling refers to the process which makes use of a collaborative approach that is commonly used in account-based selling to close more deals. 

Team selling, also called cross-functional selling, is where the sales department brings in two or more reps from different departments to close a sale efficiently. 

The process is all about leveraging effective communication and the required skills of a cross-functional sales team that leads to successful collaboration in sales. 

For instance, let’s say you are selling a highly complex product to an enterprise account, where your sales rep understands the workability of the product but is not aware of its technicality. 

This is where you bring in more participants in your sales call to increase your credibility and answer potential questions from the client to allay the buyer’s concerns around the process, integrations, and so on. 

Why is Team Selling Important?

Selling is all about simplifying the buying process as much as possible.

Team selling is one of the ways to do it. 

By leveraging the best minds from various departments during the call, this sales strategy allows you to obtain deep insights into the customer’s needs and vice versa. 

Apart from improving the buyer experience, here are some of the advantages of incorporating team selling as a part of of your sales strategy.

#1 Team Selling Broadens your Sales Reach

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Each team member of your company brings immense value to the table, meaning more people have valuable information about a key account. These team members will add definite worth to getting the most effective solution to the sales process in case of a hiccup. 

One of the benefits of team selling is that the team focuses on the specific task, which helps in the iterative process, which in turn sheds more light on your product. 

#2 Team Selling Adds Legitimacy to your Overall Selling Process 

Prospective clients want to feel valued. 

With team selling, you bring in expert members from all departments, including product, sales, engineering, and marketing, to instill a sense of trust in them as not just a seller, but also as a brand. 

This sense of trust is exactly what a successful enterprise relies on before forming long-term relationships with your organization.

#3 It Demonstrates your Organization's Leadership in the Market 

When you involve specialists from all sections of your organization to smoothen the process of buying, you are more likely to establish trust and address their concerns with clarity.

Presenting your buyer by bringing in a team of experts exponentially increases your credibility in the market and builds enhanced trust in your product by going that extra mile to support all the needs of your customer. 

#4 Aligns Overall Team Expectations 

As your team inclines towards expertise and insights, you tend to ask important questions from the clients to ensure a smooth sale and gather all the required information you need to get an oversight of your client’s needs. 

Team selling aids this process by narrowing down on the client’s main concerns to identify roadblocks faster. This shortens the sales cycle while improving client satisfaction along the way. 

When Should you Consider Team Selling?

Although team selling sounds very reassuring, it isn’t right for every situation. 

Buyers with smaller needs might be overwhelmed, while others might be more interested in a deeper relationship with your team. 

Team selling makes sense in these four unique cases:

#1 The Account is Complex

When a potential deal is multi-faceted with multiple factors to consider, it is best handled by a team of experts. A complex sale can consist of account planning, negotiations, legal issues, cross-functional issues, and more. 

#2 The Account Is Larger than Usual 

When your account is eight or ten times larger than your typical account, putting together a diverse sales team will not only bring in authority but also help you uncover potential roadblocks to identify the best resources needed to win the sale. 

#3 When You Want to Speed Up the Process

Typically, a large enterprise SaaS account takes anywhere between 3-5 months to close. 

To speed up the process, team selling can expedite the sale without setting a faux deadline or putting unnecessary pressure on the prospect. 

Bring in concerned team members specific to the client’s concern to address the issue quickly and move forward. 

#4 Add Substantial Leverage to the Account 

Most clients love to feel important. Most sales, especially big ones, move quickly if you give them access to the C-level. 

While this isn’t always possible, you can consider it depending on how valuable the account may be to you. When prospects feel valued by your team, they share valuable information and offers to be a vital resource. 

Team selling adds leverage to the account by helping your clients in unique ways for different functions to make them feel important. 

How to Implement Team Selling Across your Organization Effectively

Team selling is a powerful sales strategy that promises big returns, but only when implemented in the right way. 

Before incorporating team selling, consider factors like which key accounts you wish to leverage for team selling, any important members you want on the call, who should lead the call and what support you need from management. 

Your team selling will comprise of an internal team and an external team, in some capacity. The internal team will consist of AEs, SDRs, marketing managers, product teams, and support teams. The external team will include communities, customers and their reviews, integrated products, and more. 

Here are a few ways to implement team selling effectively: 

1. Choose team members strategically
2. Establish clear rules on each team member’s role
3. Make use of account maps to avoid confusion and miscommunication 
4. Get rid of data silos 
5. Review and follow up regularly 
6. Provide the customer with heightened value and make them feel important 

7 Ways to Master the Art of Team Selling to Help you Close Deals 5X Faster 

#1 Pick Team Members Strategically 

When building your core team members for team selling, it is vital to pick the right people with appropriate skills, experience, and strategy.

From sales reps to marketing managers to product specialists, they can all take center stage to add in expertise at various stages in the sales call. 

Each team member will contribute to making a big impact. Cross-functional selling works best when team members have skills and personalities that complement each other to support the sale. 

#2 Establish Clear Roles with Team Members 

Although team selling is leveraged in an organization to make complicated deals simpler, team selling can prove to be tricky if your team isn’t aware of their roles and misalign the goals. 

Ensure you rehearse before getting on the sales call with your client. Pick a sales leader and have them cue other participants to speak at the right time, whenever required. Make sure everyone knows the product and the demo sequence in and out. 

Sharing product knowledge between the team members and the client is crucial for a successful sale. 

 #3 Leverage account roadmaps 

With a myriad of moving parts of the demo and a number of members involved in the call, setting a defined path to lead the call might not be as easy as expected. 

Team selling is a team sport and can often be perceived as messy to handle overly complex sales. 

To avoid this, making use of account roadmaps to visualize your product’s path to the client helps your team members and the client understand your product, identify gaps in the pitch, and avoid duplicate work. 

#4 Set Up a Reward System 

One of the primary challenges of team selling is establishing a reward system for individual team members that perform exceptionally well. 

Regardless of team selling vs individual selling, setting a clear compensation can be a challenge to appreciate those members who display excellent skills. In team selling, this can pose a problem. 

To avoid this, set the right award system in order to motivate your team to close the sales deal efficiently. 

#5 Capitalize On your Tech Stack

Team selling is the most effective when your team showcases why the client should pick you. 

With multiple moving parts, knotted contexts, and various decision-makers involved, it is possible to lose focus on your end goal. 

The secret? 

Make use of your tech stack. 

To stay on top of the deal, your tech stack can prove to be extremely useful. Leverage your sales leader as the fulcrum to manage better usage of your CRM throughout the cycle. 

Technology tools like Salesken can help you narrow down your pitch even further by picking the right feature such as call tracking metrics, analyzing the client’s emotions, assisting you with the right data for follow-ups, and more. 

Coordination, as a result, is vital. Leveraging the right kind of technology can make large enterprise account sales easier. 

#6 Choose and Filter Quality Leads 

As exciting as team selling is, identifying the right kind of accounts to pass on to your team selling members is crucial to determine its value. 

According to reports, team selling is the most effective for deals between 5-10x your average deal size. 

With large enterprise accounts, the benefits of load distribution and bringing in a fresh perspective from various members of your company to the sales pitch can make team selling a great option. 

#7 Always Prepare Beforehand 

Don’t let the lack of complete product knowledge be a major roadblock between you and your client. 

Control the performance of your team in the sales call to avoid surprises about your product and other processes. 

To avoid this, always go in the call by preparing beforehand and letting the sales leader spearhead the pitch carefully. 

‍Practicing sales calls beforehand, analyzing the sales pipeline, reviewing the client’s profiles, and more will set you up well in advance for your next meeting. Set bigger and achievable goals for your team members to help them improve their skills and achieve personal goals easily, and in turn, close the sales deal faster. 

Team Selling for the Win!

With team selling, closing that big sales deal can become a reality and also get you closer to building a lasting relationship with the client. 

It establishes a sense of trust and legitimacy with the client both during and after the sales cycle and helps you come across as a champion in your field. 

Salesken’s intuitive team selling features can not only help you close that sales deal faster but also assist you with all the actionable data you need for your next pitch. To watch us in action, book a demo now!