Bringing the Right People to the Table

In my prior blog I spoke a lot about the need for sales to have deeper, two-way conversations with customers.  As I have these discussions with sales operations and sales executives, there's much discussion about sales enablement for "sales reps" and "sales teams"; however, the need for sales reps to better leverage their own immediate and extended team(i.e., sales, marketing and engineering) as part of the sales process receives little attention.

I included a chart in my last blog from some of our customer experience research indicating that one of the top messages buyers are telling us is that sales reps need to "bring the right people to the table". This may be intuitive and standard practice for the "A" reps, however, how are we ensuring that we're making this as easy as possible for the "A" reps and equipping our "B" reps with the knowledge and capabilities to accomplish this task? Are you expecting your front line sales individuals to know too much?  And to what extent are you providing these reps with the knowledge and capabilities to best leverage expertise within your organization to approach clients with the best "team"?

Questions to ask yourself about your current state in this area include:

1.  Are my sales reps sufficiently fluent in our customers' language (and needs) and our companies' products and solutions to have a deep conversation with customers?
2.  Do sales reps know when to bring in the right people for customer engagements? (e.g., presales engineers, industry specialists, subject matter experts(SMEs))
3.  How do sales reps access SMEs for questions? (e.g., SME access through your internal sales enablement application; leverage of internal social media capabilities to get questions answered)
4.  What process do you have in place to help reps justify the need for more resources for an account and/or opportunity? (e.g., through the account planning and opportunity management process)
5.  How do you ensure that sales reps always know where to go for information? (e.g., One sales exec. indicated at a recent Sales Leadership Board Meeting that "Our sales teams are not seeking information on a daily basis; therefore, they continuously forget it exists or where to get it.")

It's not always what you know, but who you know.  And leveraging expertise across the organization can, in may cases, be the difference between winning or losing a deal.