Team selling continues to be on the rise. We’ve heard this from clients and colleagues—and now from the research front. According to a recent Corporate Executive Board (CEB) study, the individual salesperson “no longer reigns supreme.”

As the CEB authors noted: “On the most effective sales teams, particularly B2B, the individual no longer reigns supreme. Strong sellers must not merely execute their day-to-day tasks well; they also must engage with their colleagues to marshal resources, wrangle involvement, and coordinate people’s capabilities. They now rely on collective, even crowd-sourcing skills, in ways that weren’t possible just a few short years ago.”

Why is this team selling collaborative approach emerging to the forefront today? There are a number of reasons. Let’s explore three. 

Transformational market change 

Several markets are undergoing a transformational change in which the customer is demanding that salespeople bring a broader and deeper level of knowledge to the sales process.

Consider how the Affordable Care Act and other social and economic trends are transforming the health care landscape. Hospitals now expect suppliers to become partners who can help them deal with significant challenges related to reduction in reimbursements and changes in their care delivery models. This means to sell successfully, the salesperson must know more about knowledge areas such as hospital economics, payment models, disease states and end-to-end supply chain costs. This sort of engagement and support clearly requires a team—a single sales person cannot do it alone.

Availability of technology 

Today, salespeople have available to them easy-to-use and powerful CRM systems and software applications that enable them to share information and insights to a degree that was hard to image even five years ago. Simply put, the technology helps salespeople to collaborate more effectively than ever before. So, not only is there more of a need for team selling; there is also a way to do so. 

Sales management support 

The frontline sales manager has always been the pivotal job for achieving sales excellence. According to the CEB authors, today’s sales managers are operating differently.  Among market leaders, sales managers expect and support their salespeople to leverage all the personnel resources that are available. They facilitate idea exchange across their sales teams and use collective brainstorming to complete stuck deals.

More important, they borrow effective approaches to talent management and sales rep development from other areas of the business. Sales managers are fostering relationships with personnel outside their divisions, such as marketing, manufacturing, tech support, and customer service, as well as, with counterparts in other sales divisions when multiple divisions inside a company sell to the same customer.

Bottom line

Customers expect sales people to know more—and know it at a higher level of proficiency than in times past. The higher up in the customer organization, the truer the proposition. 

Senior executives expect the salesperson to bring fresh perspectives to help them frame their challenges and offer new insights to generative alternative solutions. In other words, these senior execs want help to know more about what they don’t know—not product presentations. If this trend continues, so will a shift to team selling.