Innovative Team Selling: How to Leverage Your Resources and Make Team Selling Work

Book description

Sales teams have the potential to do great work.

Most sales teams do not devote enough energy to meeting dynamics and process awareness. The skills related to this are critical components of effective teamwork, collaboration and innovation, both internally and externally. Innovative Team Selling places the focus squarely on what will actually make team selling work within organizations large and small. It outlines how to help your teams master new skills in five specific categories: interpersonal, communication, presentation, problem solving, and facilitation. Author Eric Baron also explores the challenging issue of leveraging resources to develop innovative solutions for clients in order to compete effectively in a globalized economy.

  • Offers actionable strategies and techniques to improve collaboration, innovation and team processes

  • Demonstrates how to put the right members on the sales call, and how to leverage their expertise before, during and after the call

  • Explores in depth how teams can work effectively on a day-day-day basis to outperform their competition

  • Author Eric Baron is founder of The Baron Group and is a highly acclaimed public speaker and has spoken to hundreds of organizations, trade associations and industry groups throughout his career; he is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School where he teaches his very popular course, Entrepreneurial Selling Skills to second year MBAs

Innovative Team Selling shows you how to lead and participate in teams that work together effectively; strategize prior to the client meetings; make successful team sales calls; and debrief honestly to determine how to learn and grow from the experience.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Praise for Innovative Team Selling
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter 1: The Celebration, or Why We Need Sales Teams
    1. Why Sales Teams?
    2. The Human Factor
  8. Chapter 2: Meetings, Bloody Meetings
    1. So What's the Problem?
    2. The Interactive Meeting Model
  9. Chapter 3: Easy to Say; Hard to Do . . . Very Hard
    1. The Importance of Establishing an Agenda
    2. Setting the Ground Rules
    3. Intentions
    4. Treatment of Suggestions
    5. The Use of Questions
    6. Hidden Agendas
    7. Control
    8. Involving Team Members Remotely
    9. And Finally
  10. Chapter 4: So Who Does What and When?
    1. The Role of the Sales Function
    2. Content versus Process
    3. Meeting Roles and Responsibilities
    4. Enter the Facilitator
    5. The External Meeting
  11. Chapter 5: Now, Let's Get Creative
    1. The Task
    2. Let's Discuss It...but Not Too Much
    3. Let the Games Begin
    4. A Time to Judge
    5. Finally, the Solution
  12. Chapter 6: Adding Structure to the Process
    1. Position the Session
    2. Analyze the Problem
    3. Generate Alternatives
    4. Evaluate the Selected Ideas
    5. Ideation Techniques
    6. State the Solution
  13. Chapter 7: Getting Our Acts Together
    1. Roles and Responsibilities
    2. So Let's Rehearse
  14. Chapter 8: It's All About Connecting
    1. Credibility
    2. Sensitivity
    3. Empathy
    4. Before the Meeting
    5. During the Meeting
    6. After the Meeting
    7. Trust
    8. Visibility
  15. Chapter 9: You Mean We Have to Sell, Too?
    1. Doesn't Everybody Know This?
    2. The Value Pyramid
  16. Chapter 10: Positioning . . . A Key Ingredient in Understanding Needs
    1. You can't do it all at once
    2. Is It Happening Out There?
    3. Salespeople as Problem Solvers
    4. Turning Sales Teams into “Needs Development Teams”
    5. It All Starts with Positioning
  17. Chapter 11: Just One More Question (or Ten), If You Will, Please
    1. Preparing the Client for Questioning
    2. Asking the Appropriate Questions
    3. The Content Perspective
    4. The Process Component
    5. The Pre-Cluster Statement
  18. Chapter 12: Are They Sales Teams or Needs Development Teams?
    1. Listen for the Needs and Opportunities
    2. Another Way to Look at Needs
    3. Sales Teams and Needs
    4. So How Do You Do This?
  19. Chapter 13: Is Anybody Listening?
    1. The Problem
    2. A Historical Perspective
    3. Speed Kills
    4. Bringing It All Together: Reviewing What You Learned
  20. Chapter 14: The Big Day
    1. It's All about Differentiation
  21. Chapter 15: Okay, So How Do We Do All That?
    1. The Presentation Model
    2. The Specific Benefit
    3. Making Outstanding Presentations
    4. Airtime Distribution
    5. The Unsolicited Idea
    6. And in Conclusion...
  22. Chapter 16: What Do You Mean You Don't Like It?
    1. Acknowledge the Objection
    2. Elaboration
    3. Reframing
    4. Address the Need
    5. Invite Others
    6. It's Really Problem Solving
    7. Airtime Distribution—Again
    8. Sales Teams Rule
  23. Chapter 17: Bringing Home the Bacon
    1. The Assumptive Close
    2. Big “C” and little “c”
    3. Enter the Four W's
  24. Chapter 18: One Last Time: It's All About Differentiation
    1. Differentiating the Sales Team
    2. Some Parting Thoughts
  25. About the Author
  26. About the Baron Group
  27. Acknowledgments
  28. Index

Product information

  • Title: Innovative Team Selling: How to Leverage Your Resources and Make Team Selling Work
  • Author(s): Eric Baron
  • Release date: May 2013
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781118502259