Large opportunities tend to require expensive resources, and sales organizations must be able to prioritize and allocate these resources to make it to the finish line. You may have the right solution, superior capabilities, and the best sales team, yet still get tripped up by an internal lack of cooperation, coordination or communication.

That’s why the most successful sales organizations see internal collaboration as a key differentiator. Having the right sales processes and communication structures in place allows them to respond to customer needs efficiently and effectively.

It’s essential to establish, encourage and reward the use of collaborative customer management processes throughout your sales operation. Building a collaborative culture enables sales organizations to capture and share customer experiences, competitive intelligence and market insights across functions and departments.

Fostering collaboration at this level results in an elastic sales team—one that can easily draw on internal resources from anywhere in the company to build the right solution for this particular customer at this particular time.

And it goes beyond having these essential resources on tap. Internal experts function better as a team when they have a collaborative structure for strategies, messages and knowledge.

One of the best ways to collaborate is through an internal social media network, which encourages salespeople, management and subject matter experts to connect and share information and intelligence.

Social collaboration creates a social sales community that can exchange knowledge in ways that make the entire organization better able to mobilize and respond to large, complex opportunities.

Joe Galvin, one of the sales world's most prominent thought leaders, is now a Salesforce Sales Community contributor. This community is a new collaborative networking group for sales executives sharing best practices and innovations in sales leadership. We encourage all salesforce.com customers to join Rogers and other top sales thought leaders in the new Salesforce Sales Community. 

About the Author: 

Joe Galvin leads the MHI Research Institute, formerly known as Miller Heiman Research Institute, as Chief Research Officer. (Miller Heiman has joined with four other companies to form MHI Global.) His mission is to continuously research, measure, and analyze the best practices, innovations, and emerging trends for complex B2B sales organizations to provide clients with the insights required to make strategic decisions.

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