The idea of co-selling is for you to deploy your resources so that you can effectively sell more. It’s a fantastic way for you to achieve the sales goals that you have set, and it also helps you to build a very agile organisation. A lot of people think about co-selling as being a software feature, but in reality, there’s so much more to it. As a sales leader, it’s more than possible for you to take co-selling from being a good idea to being an absolute game-changer. Want to find out more? Take a look below.
The Importance of First Impressions
If you are a sales professional, then you will certainly know how important it is to make a quality first impression. When you work in a collaborative setting, your first impression is the one you are going to be making on your peers and your sales reps. If you can automate some degree of collaborative selling, then this will help you to engage your sales team even more. Let’s face the facts. Everyone hates having to fill out reports and nobody likes tedious paperwork either. If you can share the value that comes with collaborative selling, then you will soon find that you can highlight a lot of the rewards. You can do all of the math and you can also share the numbers. Think about it, how much time could your sales team actually save by simply making warm introductions with your prospects? Especially if they are actively seeking solutions.
Making an Impression
When you have made a good impression and you have gained some buy-in, you then need to carry on emphasising the importance of selling on a collaborative basis. In a lot of companies, win-events are ideal if you want to try and spread the word about the rewards of being involved with co-selling. A lot of teams do this on a somewhat impromptu basis as it is a way for them to inspire their sales representatives with data.
If you want to take a page out of the win-event playbook, you may even find that you want to create weekly win events. In this kind of environment, you can share the rewards that you might have gained from co-selling. You can share the excitement by encouraging your sales representatives to tell the stories that they have to other representatives.
What’s the Best Way to Motivate People when it comes to Collaborative Selling?
So what is the best motivation when it comes to collaborative selling? Ideally, you need to make sure that you provide exceptional service and you also need to make sure that you are actively meeting the needs of your customers. At the end of the day, sales leaders know that if they have the right tools or the right mindset that their representatives can then respond in a personalised way. This helps them to meet the growth prospects of the customers that they work with.
Win-Win Motivation
Of course, win-win motivation is ideal because it helps you to look out for growth opportunities with other companies. The reality of the situation is that there may be thousands of companies out there who can probably help you in the same way that you can help them. It’s a win-win for either side. When you have your customer value as your main indicator of success, you can then encourage way more direct introductions and you may even find that your team have a higher level of engagement as a result. In the realm of school and work, a lot of sales experts tend to learn skills that will help them with their individual achievements. You may be able to get good at the skills required to win but this leads to people being much more aggressive and competitive. It also makes people much more goal-focused. According to Forbes, impulse control and curiosity breed adaptive thinking too.
This is one of the many reasons why training is so vitally important for those who want to learn how to sell collaboratively. If you train, then you can develop skills that will help you to engage and interact with other people. Co-selling gives you a fresh approach and it also radically transforms the art of selling. When you undergo targeted training, you may even find that this helps you to foster a much more genuine working environment.
A lot of sales professionals tend to learn through things such as mentoring and modeling too. Sales leaders often tell people personal stories of what they may have learnt from their boss or even their mentor. Mentoring has really helped them to shape their performance as well as helping them with their career too.
It’s Your Turn
So right now, it’s your turn. If you are a sales leader then you have to make sure that you look out for as many opportunities as you can so that you can mentor your team. Ideally, you need to try and put motion mentoring into place so that your new hires can get the help they need.
The best part about all of this is that you can model co-selling from beginning to end. How do you do this? You have to make sure that you make it part of your day-to-day communications. You have to make sure that you are setting up new policies and that you are also focusing your programs so that they reward co-selling. If you can be yourself and if you can be natural, then you can easily model all of your best practices.