Guest Blog: Customer Service Begins With Teamwork At the Point of the Sale

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Tim Sanders introduces us to the concept of dealstorming, a secret weapon that can solve your greatest sales challenges. It’s important to listen to every member of your team, from every department, to provide excellent customer service which helps boost sales. – Shep Hyken

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been helping companies solve big sales challenges of all types: Winning new business, renewing accounts and retaining them when there is a crisis. My method of operation was always to create cross-departmental teams that harnessed the power of “group genius” through collaboration.

More than ever, it’s critical to put together what I call Dealstorm teams to answer the complexity of today’s business-to-business sale. Often there are many decision-makers and influencers weighing in on the decision. Our products and services are laced with all kinds of technology, leading to a high learning curve and risk-of-failure.

In too many situations, sales organizations are insular: Conducting the entire sales process without conferring with service, marketing, operations, finance, etc., unless they need to have a question answered or gain permission for an exception to the rule. But this is not the way to win! Research by MHI Global found that the world-class organization (which sells 20% more than their competition) have the habit of conscious collaboration across departments in pursuit of quality business deals.

When we put together a dealstorming team, we invited everyone who had a stake in the outcome or expertise about the problem we were facing. And in many situations, we invited the delivery and service team to help us frame the situation as well as the proposal. Not only did this approach triple our closing ration and reduce the sales cycle by 25%…it lifted long-term customer satisfaction.

You see, when sales brings in the operations and service team early on, they gain better insights about what the company can really do for the customer. By involving them in collaboration, it increases their engagement level, which can only lead to a more satisfied customer!

In several of my consulting arrangements, I was brought in to the company by the leaders in marketing, operations and customer service to use a stuck-deal or an account-in-danger as a crucible moment to reshape the corporate culture into true teamwork and not just silo-by-silo work. For many of them, it would take a game-changing victory to help everyone in the organization learn that true sales genius is a team sport!

Tim Sanders is the author of the newly published, Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Greatest Sales Challenges. 

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Love Your Customers, Hug Your Haters