248: Selling As A Team

<p>When we think of team selling, we imagine a room with the buyers on one side of the table and we are lined up on the other.  There is another type of team selling and that is taking place before we get anywhere near the client.  It might be working together as a Sales Mastermind panel to brainstorm potential clients to target or strategising campaigns or plotting the approach to adopt with a buyer.  Salespeople earn their remuneration through a combination of base salary and commission or bonus in Japan.  There are very few jobs here in sales, which are 100% commission, simply because salespeople don’t have to accept that model.  There is always a demand here for salespeople and in fact the declining population is keeping a lot of dud salespeople afloat.</p> <p> </p> <p>Given there is not much 100% commission selling going on, there is also not so much salesperson competition going on with each other.  There is competition, but the losers usually don’t get fired, as they might in some Western business environments.  So the opportunity is there to collaborate more on approaches to the client and generating more business.  What often happens though is, salespeople tend to operate from within their own little castles.  They have their moat around their existing clients, which they serve and they spend their time trying to find new clients by themselves.  They may have sales managers, but in these modern times, sales managers are expected to produce revenues as well.  That means there isn't a lot of coaching going on.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we have one person looking at the client through the prism of their own experience, things get a bit thin quickly, if that person doesn’t have such a wealth of experience.  It would be more logical to gather a team of salespeople together and look at the best approach for that client, rather than relying on the best efforts of a single person.  But we don’t do this very often.  This tends to be because of a territorial concept, where each salesperson has their clients and they shou