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The importance of the “lone-wolf, superstar” salesperson is diminishing in many sales organizations, especially when the focus changes from just selling products to solving customer problems. In many situations, no person possesses the knowledge and skills needed to identify and solve customer problems. Typically, some type of teamwork is required. This teamwork may be among individuals in the sales organization, between the sales and marketing departments, or among the functions within the business. Although there are many possible teamwork approaches, the trend from individuals to teams is becoming increasingly prevalent.
One way to view teamwork approaches is presented in Exhibit 1.1.14 At one extreme is a core selling team—a formal sales team assigned to a specific customer. Team members can come from all business functional areas. Normally, a core selling team is headed by a sales manager. An example is the national account program employed by Nalco. When Nalco wins a national account, employees from Nalco and its customers form an account team. The team includes a Nalco senior executive who is paired with a senior executive from the customer company. The remainder of the team consists of people from sales and other functions at Nalco matched by the customer’s counterparts. As expressed by Jim Scott, Nalco’s vice president of corporate sales: “To be successful, you have to have people matched up from both the customer and supplier sides, from the executive level on down.”
In the middle of this continuum is a formal sales team designed to close a transaction with a specific customer. For example, Lockheed Martin Information Technology put together a team of sales, management, technical, pricing, contracts, and executive leadership to try to win a contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The team set up a command center near the customer, followed the Win Plan sales process, and created the slogan “One Company, One Team.” All members of the team worked together to devise responses to the customer’s negotiating points. This team process was expensive and took one and a half years to complete, but the result was a $401 million contract.
At the other extreme is a selling center where individuals are involved in a particular sales transaction in an informal teamwork approach. Individuals can come from any business function and can participate at any stage of the sales process. Often, it is the responsibility of the salesperson to orchestrate the resources of the selling organization to meet the needs of the buying organization. The Holophane Corporation implemented a sales automation system to facilitate teamwork among the business functions. All orders are entered directly into a database that is accessible to all departments involved in manufacturing and executing the order. As engineering and manufacturing work on the order, its status is continuously updated. Customer service personnel can easily respond to customer inquiries about the order or make changes in the order requested by customers. The sales automation system provides the information the business functions need to work as a team to meet customer needs.
Between these two extremes is a variety of approaches that differ in degree of formality, composition of team members, number of teams, and other characteristics. The important point is that the need for teamwork and the development of various types of selling teams is likely to increase in the future. And, as sales organizations move from a focus on individuals to an emphasis on teamwork, many aspects of sales management must change. Therefore, we examine the teamwork trend throughout the text.