You must work together for success in business - Derek Carpenter

Inherently, I guess it’s a spirit of competition, often encouraged by senior management. It’s seen as a means of raising peoples determination – but the truth of it is its divisive and counter-productive. Let me try and illustrate why.

Ask a company who their most important staff are and they will often say our sales team. The sales team will quickly accept this and are never shy at repeating it. Often a sales team has no concept of what other departments do or how their actions, promises to customers or lack of knowledge impacts the efficiency of the business.

A sales team has the ability to be the most divisive part of a business. It’s for that reason that a business needs to ensure that sales people are fully equipped to act and think like they are running a business. Making decisions with a better understanding of what happens after a sale is taken – and that a sale is incomplete until it’s paid for and profit recovered should be a first lesson.

I recommend that a sales person be allocated two weeks every year to work in another department. When you come to learn the full process of invoicing, delivery and collecting payment it’s more than likely decision-making at a sale is carefully based on the whole process and avoiding difficulties. Its a good investment in training and creating a team mentality.

It produces a better bond with others in the business. Two departments that will struggle, if not combined, will be sales and marketing. They are not good bedfellows. I’ve never met a sales person who didn’t think they were also accomplished at understanding marketing. I was once one of them.

Marketers often see sales people getting the best rewards but lacking the ability to see the supportive value of marketing. So what’s the solution? Simply put they should be combined as one team. Set apart they think differently.

Put together their combined creativity leads to greater success. It’s easy to identify marketing tools that had no sales input and sales people who put little value on marketing and so don’t use it. What a waste.

Sales people need to see that quality marketing can achieve 70% of their work, enabling them to free up more sales time. Marketers need the feedback of sales people to understand the customers primary objectives in order to present what they need to hear and capture their attention.

This combination helps the customer be persuaded more quickly on what actually matters to him without consuming too much of his time. Sales people always argue that the biggest obstacle to a sale is price. In reality it’s likely its only true 30% of the time because some only ever buy on price.

Knowing who they are enables a business to leave them to their competitor since there will inevitably be no profit. The first ten minutes of a sales call are vital. By then the customers’ priorities should be clear and you only need to deal with those to persuade them to action. If you know your industry well you should know the common primary objectives.

When sales and marketing have worked together to produce strong and accurate arguments that your company should be a preferred choice – its a win for combined effort. Division disappears and harmony and heightened skills advance your customer base. Everyone celebrates.

In good times most people can run a business but in harder times some get very lost. When you create and use bad habits it’s hard to notice. Far too often people claim to be good at their job when the evidence says otherwise. All told its good to take a closer look.

However you think your business works, being involved and interested gains respect. After all even directors need to be team players. Learning never ends.

Derek Carpenter is a business solutions specialist