As a sales rep, either Sales Development or Account Executive, you can run the gamut on tips and tricks to become a better rep. You can try training, test months and months of process methods, practice demo run-throughs, read every sales book in the world — but when it comes to building your skillset as a sales rep, the most effective tool is right next to you. The strongest reps in the world practice sales team collaboration.
Whether it’s a shared document with teammates, a tool that promotes teamwide best practice sharing, or just communication by text (or simply turning your chair around), sales team collaboration doesn’t have to be complicated. All it takes is one rep on the team to start promoting and encouraging the behavior, and you’ll be surprised by how quickly it catches on.
Stephen Gladney, Salesloft Account Executive and sales team collaboration expert, is that rep for our closer team. Watch this weeks edition of SDR TV’s Sales Tips to learn more about how Stephen has become a stronger rep through collaborating with his team, and how you can implement the same sales team collaboration within your team:
Stephen’s Tips on Sales Team Collaboration:
Hey guys, my name’s Stephen Gladney. I’m an Account Executive here at Salesloft, and I wanted to talk to you today about sales team collaboration.
For me personally, this is a big deal coming here because I came from a completely different industry and had a huge learning curve. One of the things that really helped me was working with my teammates and collaborating on things like best practices.
So, one of the things you can do is to promote and encourage sales team collaboration within your organization. This might sound like common sense, but you’d really be surprised about how much more participation you’ll get when you actively promote it and encourage it.
So for me, when I first got here, I had a huge learning curve. I had no idea what marketing automation was, but luckily, two of the guys on our team had sold that platform before working here, and they were basically huge helps to me to how to understand how that piece of technology works and how it influences our product.
Another great thing to do is to provide a common channel for collaboration. So two things that we’ve used a lot here are Google Docs and group text messaging. So, for example, we have a Google Doc of common objections that we hear, and all of our team members can suggest different responses. So when I respond to a client I can talk with a lot more confidence now.
We also use group texts. I might be emailing with a client after hours and have a question for my team members. We have a group text going all the time where I can ask them questions and get their advice to again, talk with more confidence when I provide a solution to a client.
And finally, make sure you choose sales tools that make collaboration easier for you. There’s actually a study recently that came out that showed that 54% of Best in Class sales organizations choose tools that help empower their team for collaboration.
So for example, I recently copied a cadence from one of my teammates that he uses for post-meeting follow-up, so I can be pleasantly persistent without overdoing it. And I know that it works from day one because it’s been vetted by my teammate ahead of time.
So I can say from personal experience today, collaboration has been pivotal to my success. I came into this job really not knowing anything and the help and advice from team members was the biggest contributing factor to my success here.
And make sure you check out our blog. We have a new e-book out, for example, that has a lot of advice and tips like this. Hope it provides value for you guys, along with this video, and thanks for watching.
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