Establishing Collaboration Within Your Sales Team: 5 Focus Areas

Are you focused on establishing collaboration within your sales team?

One of the best benefits of having a sales team is their ability to collaborate. In small businesses with just one or two salespeople, it’s hard for them to effectively collaborate. But even a small team of 4-5 salespeople provides an excellent opportunity to collaborate.

So if you want to establish collaboration within your team, here are 5 areas to focus on.

1. Brainstorm solutions to sales challenges in your sales team meetings.

Your sales team meetings are an incredible opportunity to get your sales team working together to solve problems.

Instead of marching through the whole pipeline, ask reps to share their challenges. Maybe they’re finding it difficult to penetrate a new target, or they don’t know how to respond to an objection. Instead of providing the solution yourself, create space for the sales team to share their own ideas and best practices.

2. Work together to engage targets.

Getting prospects interested in your solution can be an incredibly frustrating activity. Your sales reps are likely making a lot of calls and sending a lot of emails without getting any interest.

Establishing collaboration in engaging targets can save a lot of time and frustration.

When your team members build their target lists, meet to review the lists and share any ideas for engagement. Maybe one of your reps used to work with someone at their colleague’s target account. Or another rep is friends with a key center of influence.

Even if you can’t get together in person, make sure your team is using LinkedIn to see which of their colleagues and connections may be able to make warm introductions to targets.

(And if you’re interested in developing a strategy for engaging targets using LinkedIn, check out our eBook.)

3. Get more value from networking events and conferences.

I’m often surprised at how many companies spend thousands to send their salespeople to conferences and other events without establishing collaboration around the event.

If you’re investing in attending an event, spend some time before it to plan how the team will work together.

Collaboration at an event can be both strategic and tactical. Reps should know who they need to talk to, and multiple salespeople can work together to work the room and contact those targets.

At a tactical level, train your reps to help get each other into and out of conversations. They can work together to make valuable connections, but they can also keep an eye out for each other and make strategic extractions. How many times have you been at an event praying someone would help you out of a long and pointless conversation?

4. Work together to develop Prospecting Action Plans.

Prospecting action plans are a simple way to help your team plan their proactive sales growth activities. They align revenue goals with monthly targets, assets to leverage, pitfalls to avoid, and behaviors to implement.

Rather than just having each of your sales reps develop their own plan, this can be a great opportunity for establishing collaboration.

One great approach is to have everyone draft their plans, then get together in small groups (3-5 people). The groups will then take turns reviewing each plan and providing suggestions for improvement. They’ll all learn from each other!

5. Build a Sales PlayBook.

I often like to save the best for last. And a Sales PlayBook is the best tool you can use for establishing collaboration within your team!

A good Sales PlayBook should be a tool built both by and for your team. They should be involved in determining what to include in the PlayBook and work together to develop best practices.

When you get your team involved in developing the PlayBook, they’ll be more invested in the tool and more likely to use it. And you’ll end up with better content if the whole team is involved. So it’s a win/win!

Did this spark some ideas for encouraging collaboration within your sales organization?

I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions in the comments!

And if you want more ideas for collaboration, don’t forget to check out our eBook.