Nearly one in two organisations with the highest performing sales teams don’t expect them to sell in isolation. Instead, they expect everyone to pitch in.
The findings of our 2015 State of Sales report clearly highlight the value of joined-up, team selling, suggesting top performers are almost three times more likely to make selling a universal responsibility than their underperforming counterparts.
Winning with collaborative selling
In the UK, one company that’s certainly embracing the possibilities of sales collaboration is luxury car dealer H.R Owen.
Customers buying a top of the range car naturally expect a top of the range customer experience, delivered through every interaction. Salesforce has been instrumental in helping the company create the collaborative, connected culture it needs to deliver on those expectations – giving new power to individual reps, while simultaneously uniting teams.
As H.R. Owen’s Marketing Director, explains: “We can all view the same information on Sales Cloud, which means there are no more silos. We can invest, analyse and act as one, which has resulted in a more connected – and successful – business.”
Having this single view of customers is another sign of a high-performing sales team. We found that 61 percent of top performers worldwide have a single view of the customer, compared to just 14 percent of underperforming teams.
(And here in the UK, not one of the companies with underperforming teams rated themselves as ‘outstanding’ when it comes to having that invaluable, single customer view.)
Connecting with customers as well as colleagues
Today’s top teams are also marked out by the diversity of their customer-connection activities, with UK top performers over five times more likely than underperformers to rate their capabilities in omnichannel sales interactions as either ‘outstanding’ or ‘very good’.
H. R. Owen again provides a great positive example, the company having brought a number of different customer engagement channels together to help support a modern, seamless customer experience.
“Our online enquiry form is integrated with Sales Cloud, so potential leads are automatically logged and assigned to a sales person. We also provide different contact numbers on different websites; the number dialled by the customer is logged on Sales Cloud so we know the source of every lead.” Marketing Director, H.R. Owen
Sales Cloud also lets H.R. Owen’s staff know if an incoming call is from a number associated with an existing customer, ensuring their details – including past purchases, service history and logged complaints – are all readily available to maximise the quality and value of the interaction.
Team selling keeps your salespeople satisfied
As we’ve seen, today’s most successful sales teams belong to organisations that foster a wider, collaborative selling culture, and are confident in their ability to connect with customers across their channels of choice.
But our annual report unearthed another important differentiator between sales leaders and laggards: how much value they place on their reps’ happiness. Ninety-three percent of top sales teams rate employee satisfaction as very important. What proportion of under-performers do the same? A mere 46 percent.
Companies with high-performing sales teams are also more likely to recognise the additional value they deliver to products and services; 84 percent of the high-performing UK teams surveyed for this year’s report said their teams provide ‘good’ additional value, or ranked them even higher, as their key differentiator.
The conclusion? Companies that sell together, win together. The organisations currently pulling ahead are the ones that recognise the value their sales teams bring, keep them connected – to customers as well as their colleagues – and live the team selling dream with a company-wide focus on making the sale.
What to delve deeper and discover what else makes for a high performing sales team? Read the full Salesforce 2015 State of Sales report.
