The sales team plays a significant role in a business’s operations and success, so all members must work at their maximum potential. Encouraging collaboration within the team is a practical approach to help sales professionals become more productive and complete their tasks with minimal errors or downtime.
Employees often find collaboration and teamwork essential, but unfortunately, not all workplaces are collaborative enough. A Queens University of Charlotte study found that three out of four employees think teamwork and collaboration are important, but 39 percent of respondents believe their companies aren’t collaborative enough.
Prioritizing your sales team’s needs may help you boost productivity and improve your company’s overall performance. Learn more about the value of a collaborative sales team below.
Better Business Performance
In sales, your company can collaborate on three levels: planning, execution, and resources.
- Planning: The sales team creates multilevel contracts in this segment to build and maintain solid relationships. When your team members collaborate when planning, they can share vital information to close deals and attract new customers.
- Execution: After planning, your sales team will execute their plan to attract and retain customers. This involves high levels of collaboration as they would need to delegate tasks to establish support systems in the legal services, financial, marketing, and IT departments.
- Resources: Utilizing and sharing the resources with the team can also boost productivity and improve communication. Some of the resources a sales team can share include equipment and information.
Collaborating in the three levels will allow the sales team to improve their performance individually and as a team, driving business growth and leading to higher sales and more profit. Some ways to encourage collaboration involve more group projects, access to messaging apps, and frequent team meetings.
Shorter Sales Cycles
Lack of communication among the team can result in the sales team performing repetitive tasks.
The more time your sales team spends performing the same tasks, the less time they have to sell. When your sales team communicates with the other members, they can collectively create a plan to make their selling process more efficient. This eliminates the need to perform repetitive tasks unnecessarily, making the sales cycles longer and messing with your pipeline.
Encouraging your sales team to communicate will allow them to distribute their tasks effectively, giving them more opportunities to engage in sales activity and increase revenue. Closing deals is also simpler when the team collaborates and assists each other, shortening the sales cycle. Encourage your sales team to participate by offering manage software, tools, or apps that helps the team keep in touch, update their progress, and collaborate no matter their physical location.
Quicker Problem-Solving
Whether there is an internal or external factor causing problems in your company’s workflow, an uncollaborative work environment can slow down the problem-solving process. When your team collaborates to solve a problem, each member can focus on a specific concern to collectively solve the issue.
Teamwork creates shared goals, allowing your sales team to focus on solving the same problem together. However, this can be challenging if you don’t have enough members on your team. The last thing you want is for your team to feel overwhelmed by problems and increase downtime, which can potentially influence a customer’s decision to continue doing business with you.
A great way to streamline problem-solving in your company is by ensuring that you have a fair number of team members who can come together when an issue arises. Consult a reputable recruitment like Sales Talent Agency to add top talent to your team. Creating a motivated team with sales professionals who share the same goal will help you focus on solving problems and maintaining your brand image.