With the tremendous growth of national and strategic account management it’s goodbye to the lone rangers who rode into town, bagged a big sale and rode on to conquer new lands. Today salespeople need and want the cooperation of sales support, service and other company staff. In fact, the concept of team selling is outpacing the predictions of its early proponents and is multiplying like chips on a hot roulette wheel. While the team approach has obvious strengths for major account sales, it has advantages that eclipse even big-ticket sales. It can improve success rates and profit margins for many customer types, building relationships that go beyond traditional transaction selling.

Moving beyond price-quality selling to true relationship selling, or ‘partnerships,’ is very trendy these days. But it is a lot tougher than it looks. “It’s a standard approach that you hear salespeople talk a lot about, but you don’t see a lot of execution,” says Gary Kunath, a founder of and trainer with The Summit Group, which conducts one- and two-day seminars for such clients as Marriott, 3M, Delta Air Lines and Cincinnati Bell. Kunath calls the new kind of selling “value generation.” Each seminar trains about 50 salespeople and other staff and costs from $9,500 to $18,500.

David Townshend, vice president of alliance account sales for Marriott International’s Lodging Division, agrees, adding that lodging chains have traditionally been transaction-focused rather than account-focused. As a result, he says, “national account management has not been developed as a strong competency within our industry. But account management and value-generation are becoming essential, even in traditional sectors like food and lodging. At Marriott, we don’t think of it in terms of just another challenge, it’s really our future. Our value proposition must go beyond a differentiated product and service, it must include all the resources within Marriott.” To make that happen, Marriott began several years ago to put its national sales staff through the “Summit approach.”

Enablers

To sell value regularly, “you need a repeatable sales process,” says Kunath. Salespeople must “look across their entire company” and pull together what Kunath calls the firm’s “organizational enablers.” Find the right enablers and you can “inject them into the deal,” in Kunath’s words. That boosts the odds of selling success dramatically. Suddenly, “your firm will increase its immunity to competition dramatically and the number of true competitive offers will shrink.” Your firm will then be playing on a level, but much higher, playing field.

What are these “organizational enablers”? They are simply the other things a selling firm can do for a customer that makes the overall offer more attractive or valuable. In a multibillion-dollar corporation, salespeople can find enablers anywhere, but they must know how to look and how to pull them together.

David Townshend gives an example: “While meeting with a customer from one of Marriott’s top accounts, I take a tour of the company’s 900-room conference center and training facility. Managing and operating this facility is the responsibility of the customer. He mentions that he needs to replace 2,000 conference chairs and replace 900 twin beds with double beds.” Marriott is a very large furniture procurement company and has “significant leverage” in this market, Townshend notes. So when Townshend suggests folding this leverage into Marriott’s value proposition, “the customer loves the idea.” The enabler – Marriott’s buying leverage in the furniture market – “has nothing to do with selling him guest rooms or meeting space.” But it may help make a major lodging offer successful and create a win-win situation for Marriott, the customer and the furniture vendor.

Internal selling

Summit’s seminars are brief but intense. Kunath says he teaches his techniques in two ways. First, his company can conduct a one-day seminar for top sales executives, salespeople and cross-functional sales teams. These one-day sessions, which can handle up to 70 people, teach the basic approach: understanding customer needs and pulling together organizational resources to serve them.

At the end of some sessions, Kunath will bring in a panel of executives representing top decision-makers at purchasing firms. Salespeople must try out the techniques they have learned on this panel. Kunath calls it “exposing them to the key people they must build relationships with.”

A second Summit training technique works with smaller groups of students who already have “live offers” to develop.

“We have two days to craft the offer,” Kunath says. These sessions handle up to 24 staff working on four separate offers with the aim of teaching the techniques and applying them to the current sales jobs, then letting the techniques “cascade” throughout the selling organization for later sales.

Salespeople have to know what to look for in their organization. So a first step is to put together what Kunath calls an “offer enabler matrix.” This forces the sales team to identify all the potential “value adds” that their firm could inject into the deal. The aim is the broadest possible thinking, and this step should produce a list of 20 to 25 items or services that are at least worth examining more closely.

The next step is to screen the big list by two criteria: value to customer and feasibility. After compiling the big list, Kunath forces his team to ask itself, “What’s the impact of each item on our customer’s value drivers?”

Feasibility is next. Salespeople must ask themselves the tough questions about internal commitments. Kunath lists these as “company politics, rate of return, resources, strategy, cycle time.” In other words, does committing the organization to a particular “value add” make sense measured by the standards top executives will apply? This double screening should yield the “two, three or four solid value adds you are going to inject into the deal.”

Next, Kunath says, “we teach them how to manage the internal sales job. Most deals die on the internal sell.” Forcing salespeople to think in management’s terms helps prepare them for this step. “If executives start asking, ‘Have you thought of ROI, resources and cycle time?’ and you say, ‘nope, nope and nope,’ they’re going to hit the eject button, just like a customer.”

One of Kunath’s seminar teams, for example, proposed offering a building to a customer as part of their offer. That requires a major decision from senior executives, with financial, tax and other considerations. Unless the team is prepared to speak in these terms with senior managers, they would have to screen that building out of the offer.

The collaboration of many nonselling executives in value selling is one reason that nonsales staff should be involved in the training. Doing the “internal sell” is much easier if a company’s senior managers have already been “dipped into” the new approach. The ultimate objective is organizational readiness to support value selling.

Virtual resources

To handle the customer side of value selling, Summit teaches the sales team how to build a “virtual resource alignment plan.” The team starts with the staff that would be involved in a buying decision at the customer’s organization. The team then figures out who, in their own company, would be the ideal contact for each. These are the selling company’s virtual resources.

The rule for picking your resources is, “experts want to talk to experts, not to salespeople. A logistics person wants to talk to a logistics person,” and so on down the line.

The sales team needs to look at each functional area in the buying organization, who heads that area and who they are going to activate in their organization to talk to them.

The selling firm’s staff should be talking to their counterparts at the customer firm well before preparing an offer. If the plan works, the advantages are obvious. Says Kunath, “If I can get my marketing staff to talk to their marketing staff, then when we say we can accelerate brand awareness by two months and they ask how do we know, we say , ‘Oh, we learned that from your vice president of marketing.'”

The overall aim of these expert-to-expert contacts is more than just having quick answers to customer questions. Kunath calls it building a relationship with the customer that is “higher, wider and deeper,” than the usual transaction selling.

Although the resources will vary by sales opportunity, the overall concept works on both complex and simple sales, Kunath argues. “It can work for a distributor relationship, a partner or alliance, or a single sales opportunity. We have done it for a billion-dollar telephone sale in Spain and for a $100,000 flooring sale in the U.S. The approach is a mindset, a way of thinking.”

The two critical elements of the mindset that Kunath emphasizes: “Know your customer’s business better than he knows it, and look for value areas in your company that you’ve never looked for before.”

Donut costs

In an era of downsizing, even nonsales staff are eager participants in the value-generation approach, Kunath notes. Throughout major companies, “people are dying to generate new value,” to hold onto their jobs and departments.

If the principles are so simple and so necessary, why can’t companies teach themselves how to implement them? Kunath has a simple answer. “If you are going to build a value-based offer for your customer, you are going to lock yourself up in a conference room for five days anyway. The donut costs alone will go though the roof.” Kunath offers an alternative to wasting time and gaining weight. “I’ll show you a structured plan for doing it in two days,” he promises. If he can deliver on that, he’s already offered value.