TEAM SELLING: THE NEW REALITY
David Mattson
The game has changed.
Team selling in the business-to-business environment used to be an occasional thing, a weapon we saved for special, complex, high-stakes situations. Now, if we expect our team to succeed, it’s standard operating procedure.
Why? Because today’s B-to-B buyers are making most of their decisions collaboratively, as part of a flexible, data-sensitive, constantly-adapting team. Even in situations where one person is technically responsible for a purchase, that individual is connected to a network of communication platforms that enable internal players to affect how, when, and why any purchase is finalized. Think about it: Isn’t that how we decide what to buy for our organization? By interacting with the various stakeholders, hearing what they have to say, and reviewing the best data available?
That’s exactly what our buyers are doing.
Today’s connected B-to-B buyers are more cautious, which means selling cycles are often stretching out for longer than we might like. We know that. But what we may not have realized is that, as a practical matter, there is typically no longer any single “decision maker” — which is how we may be used to thinking about selling. Instead, there’s an ongoing internal conversation involving lots of people, a conversation about the best possible buying decision.
If we expect to be part of that conversation, we will want to start from the premise that today’s B-to-B buyers buy in packs. And that means we need to sell in packs.
This is a paradigm shift for many sellers. We may be more comfortable with the old paradigm: the one-on-one (me talking to a decision maker) or one-on-two model (me talking to a decision maker and an influencer). In this model, moving an opportunity through our sales process was kind of like a job interview. Sometimes we were being interviewed by one person. Sometimes we were being interviewed by two people. But however the interviews played out, those one or two people were the ones we needed to interact with if we wanted the job.
Even though we got used to that dynamic, and made that paradigm work for a long time … that’s not the game that’s being played today.
Recently, we finalized a project with a new client; the final contract required no fewer than thirteen signatures from the buying side. Meaning; Thirteen human beings had to sign off on the idea that we’d be working together. That’s not something we can make happen under the one-on-one or one-on-two paradigm.
With that fact in mind, consider these three non-negotiable realities of business-to-business selling in the current environment, and the three adjustments we can make to thrive in that environment.
- Cross-functional teams are bringing deep levels of expertise to every major purchase decision. Experts on the buying team know a lot about a narrow topic; they’re specialists. The typical salesperson, a generalist, knows a little bit about a whole bunch of stuff. It’s unrealistic to expect that salesperson to hold their own in that conversation. Our job: break down our silos and get our own content experts involved in the discussion, whether or not they’re salespeople.
- Buying teams comprise buyers and influencers with widely varying levels of stature and authority. Meaning: we should probably expect their senior executives to weigh in. We should expect them to be hard to reach, too. One salesperson with limited tenure and organizational authority isn’t going to be part of the conversation. In some situations, our own senior people can help us to move an opportunity forward.
- Each individual on the buying team presents both a distinct behavioral footprint and a predictable personal take on what does and doesn’t matter about a given purchase. Understanding the DISC style of every influencer on the purchase decision, and aligning our communication accordingly, was once a pipe dream. Today’s AI technology makes it a practical, achievable deliverable – but only if we use the tools and deploy our selling team based on the data that the best technology puts in front of us.
We may give ourselves plausible-sounding reasons for ignoring these realities, or pretend that the adjustments outlined above are not relevant to our world. We may think involving others in our sales process could give them the opportunity to blow up a deal, and we may have some cherished anecdote that supports this (self-fulfilling) narrative. We may think we can handle any and every aspect of the buyer journey better than someone on our team could. We may simply feel more comfortable doing what is already familiar to us.
That’s all head trash. The reality is that it is only teams that adapt to the current realities of selling in the B-to-B space will survive. Our first and most important adaptation is: Recognize this is no longer a job interview. It’s us making our case to a jury. The way a jury works in the real world – our world — is pretty simple: one juror with a reasonable doubt can determine the verdict.
We tell our clients: Know your jury. Do everything you can to make sure each member of your jury has every reason to lean into your case … and no reason to lean away from it.
David Mattson is Executive Chairman of Sandler. For more on deploying team selling effectively in your market, connect with Sandler.
