Why Do Sales Teams Win? – Create a “Dream Team” (4-10)

As mentioned, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

This article was written to help answer the ultimate sales question, “How can we win a lot more deals?” In order to find the answer, Ron started by addressing the questions, “Why do we win and why do we lose?” Each of these points were taken from a library of thousands of win loss sales debriefs and compiled into performance rankings.

4. Create a “Dream Team” for the account.

One of the important criteria mentioned by respondents was developing an early relationship with the entire support team. For strategic account managers, this meant introducing key technical personnel during the evaluation process. As one respondent explained, working with the people he would be relying upon for technical support made him more confident entering into a relationship:

“[Company 1] was more than willing to send out some of their best technical guys to work with my developers. [Company 2] would not. So, [Company 1] was much more responsive. It wasn’t price; it was the people.”

By embracing a “team approach” early in the account strategy, SAMs in these cases were able to demonstrate that the totality of their organizations were dedicated to serving the customers’ needs. As with the prior principles, this strategy is based on reducing the ambiguity of the business relationship for the customer. By introducing key members early in the interaction, customers can be assured that they aren’t getting Prince Charming in the negotiations and a bunch of frogs when it comes to ongoing or technical matters.