Teamwork: How to create sales teamwork across your Organization?
Sales is a collective play.
While in the rest of this course we will focus on sales and as mentioned in the Culture lesson, sales is a team sport and has to be top of mind across the entire organization. Sales is everyone’s job just like every business is in the business of finance. Ultimately, it is sales and the output of sales, profitable revenue that funds the company and gives it its value. Strong sales performance is not generated by a sales team alone but a group of teams that work in unison to make sales and revenue happen. It is a team sport!
To set expectations well and ensure there is a good understanding of how each team contributes to the overall success: Here are the definitions and purpose each function and team is supposed to fill. It is important to ensure your organization is set for success right from the bat, so that the culture, process and strategies that will be discussed in the next lessons can disseminate efficiently and effectively. Here are the definitions:
Sales: The process of selling goods or services, encompassing activities like prospecting, lead qualification, and closing deals.
Marketing: The process of promoting and creating awareness for products or services, involving activities like advertising, public relations, and content creation.
Customer Success: The function within a company focused on ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes with the product or service, aiming to maximize customer satisfaction and retention.
Customer Service: The department responsible for handling customer inquiries, resolving problems, and providing support, with a focus on customer satisfaction.
Product Development: The product team maintains existing products competitively and are responsible for developing the next generations of products that will ensure long term success of the company. A close collaboration with sales and customers is needed.
“Production” teams: I will use the term production team here to engage any teams that have to build and/or deliver a product to the customers. It could be a manufacturing team, a software development team if you produce custom developments or any technical team that has to configure a product for a specific customer. In SAAS companies there are usually less of that aspect since the customer buys a license and that’s it. Still some other business models require a production team. Production teams have to be close to the sales team and their forecasts to plan for adequate capacity.
