Sales people are treated a little different.

It’s no secret. When other teams are doing team building exercises, sales teams are having competitions and quota discussions. Sales reps are too often put in a culture that focuses on individual performance. But recent research from CEB suggests that the changing business environment has made cherishing the individual performers bad for business.

The study found that over a period of ten years, from 2002 to 2012, the impact an individual's task performance has on profitability companywide decreased, from 78 percent to 51 percent. In that same period, the impact of how often people collaborate with their coworkers, an employees’ “network performance,” increased from 22 percent to 49 percent. Even in sales, where lone wolf style employees are notoriously prevalent, network performance now accounts for about 44 percent of the impact.

It’s obvious that the changing business environment has put lone wolf sales reps on the decline. But what type of new breed is stepping up to take their place? Let’s take a look.

Social and collaborative

Today’s sales reps have the ability to collaborate and crowdsource intelligence and resources from their team in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago. With internal social networks, they can easily aggregate skills, insight, and expertise to close more deals and identify new opportunities. This type of collaboration can increase cross-selling, decrease sales cycle times, and bump up conversion rates.

This type of collaboration does not require any type of radical reorganization. Even in companies that have fully invested in a social sales force, their structure, processes, and metrics have remained mostly unchanged. The only difference is the engagement in a more social and collaborative method of selling, and the value of that social network increases dramatically the more sales people participate.

Accessible to other departments

In addition to transparency within the sales department, sales reps need to begin looking outside their borders for opportunities to share information and collaborate. With technologies like CRM evolving so quickly, sales is aligning more closely with the rest of the organization. Teams from across the office or across the globe can now work within shared tools, track progress with shared metrics, and collaborate in real time.

The sales process no longer starts and ends with a sales pitch. The content created by marketing is just as important as the sales pitch, and the service your new clients receive after the deal has closed creates brand advocates that can uncover even more opportunities. To view sales as an isolated department does a disservice not just to your sales team, but to your customers.

Finely tuned

Where the lone wolf salesperson had only their number to judge their performance, today there is far more insight into sales activity today than ever before. Sales people can now analyze their number of activities, the number of demos, the length of sales cycle, and a hundred other metrics that were once opaque. This added insight and data allows sales departments to adjust, improve, and perfect their sales strategies and techniques.

While there will always be a  place for lone wolf sales reps in niche markets, these types of salespeople are in danger of going extinct as they will prove little match for better organize, collaborative teams of sales reps.

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