What we do | Sales Audience View | Build Better Sales Teams
Build Better Sales Teams
It is often said that the single largest untapped competitive advantage is teamwork. If sales organizations can get teaming and orchestration right, it amplifies their ability to retire market opportunity faster. Teamwork is what bridges the gap between achievement and excellence.
Our approach to teamwork is a blend of art, science, psychology, and politics. It does not separate the person from their motivation nor emotion from reason. It seeks to dissect the nuances of the conscious and unconscious mind to help people communicate and collaborate better.
Having worked with hundreds of organizations on building high performance teams, we have learnt a few principles that makes teams click. We have also discovered a few motivations that inspire teams to aspire for more.
There are the engagements we focus on that showcases potential to amplify your business results through the power of teaming:
The Art of Internal and External Stakeholder Management and Orchestration
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When the external environment is volatile, an organizations perception of risk becomes higher. This results in the multiplication of the number of stakeholders involved in any decision.
For sellers, the increased complexity of stakeholder identification and navigation can sometimes be daunting. To add to this mix, enterprise sales organizations have invested in several specialist sales roles that include technical sales, solution sales, industry sales, partner sales etc.
The ability to orchestrate internally, externally and across the eco-system becomes a vital capability for sales organizations to thrive in the new abnormal.
Our Approach
- With awareness comes choice and the clarity of choices drives focused action.
- The first step in stakeholder management is awareness and identification of who is involved but more importantly why are they involved.
- Every person is motivated by self-interest. They may talk about organizational outcomes, but their decision making is biased by self-interest.
- The art of stakeholder management lies in the seller’s ability to sequence their focus for stakeholder management.
- Time is the greatest leveler, so sales professionals need to understand how to best focus their time for maximum impact across stakeholders.
- The greatest problem assailing teamwork is the assumption of alignment. Therefore, the need to design a set of transparent deliverables and expectations becomes important in the journey towards internal orchestration.
- When sales professionals work in teams, a discussion on how they could become force multipliers among themselves could be the game changer that gains them a greater share of the addressable market.
Impact driven for customers
Most teaming engagements are custom designed and mostly involve critical internal and external stakeholders in the engagement. The best engagements are those that blend internal planning and orchestration with external strategy and execution.
In sales environments, either the account or the opportunity is kept at the center to allow for orchestration.
Teams who go through our exercises often share that this is the first time they have strategically come together to consciously plan for the customer.
They are surprised how much every person can contribute and how little they collaborate. Although global team orchestration guidance exists within large multinationals, there is no local orchestration agreement that is defined leading to suboptimal execution.
Our internal orchestration workshops expose the pleasures and pains of collaboration while also offering inspiration to synergize and achieve more.
Our orchestration workshops with customers sometimes exposes the lack of visibility with senior decision makers and a clear stakeholder management strategy that includes key stakeholders like mobilizers.
Typical results experienced by customers:
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Greater clarity and alignment with responsibility and accountability clearly defined, within the internal teams.
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A definition and strategy for customer stakeholder management with defined ownership to drive for results.
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An execution rhythm that involves constant communication and periodic collaboration to further the customer’s agenda.
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Greater awareness of competition and their activities
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A sense of collective ownership and pride, that defines their collective successes.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers to build multimillion-dollar pipelines for one of the largest enterprise business software companies.
The enterprise team of one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world discovered a need to significantly improve the quality of their pipeline. In addition, they needed their managers to improve their coaching skills so that they could drive sustenance within the business. These two requirements needed to be combined and they reached out to Tripura Multinational to fulfil these two goals.
As part of this engagement, we decided to use coaching as the fulcrum for change. We led by example on the first account plan as the entire team got together to be coached. All the sales managers observed this demonstration of coaching to understand the finer nuances of coaching, facilitation and project management. The art of asking hard questions in a soft way, structuring the conversation towards specific outcomes and facilitating everybody’s contribution and ownership to the process were key take-aways by the managers.
For the next account, one of the sales managers had to step up and replicate what they had observed earlier using their own style of facilitation and coaching. This dance of observation and application provided each manager with a tremendous opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and bring out the best in their account teams.
With this customer, around $125 Million dollars of net new revenue was identified (globally, the same methodology has been used to generate over $5Billion of net new potential opportunities world-wide). In addition to the discovery of the pipeline, the managers were also coached to stay accountable to the qualification, acceleration and closure of the pipeline as well. Within the first three months, this initiative yielded an additional $8 million of revenue which could not have happened without this engagement. Moreover, this methodology has been leveraged by each of the managers to coach each of their account teams to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of net new pipeline.
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Complex Deal Orchestration
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Larger the deal, greater its complexity. Large deals are defined as those deals that are at the top 1 percent of the deal pyramid. Depending upon the nature of the industry and the customer, these can range anywhere between a million dollars and a billion dollars.
For complex deals, pursuit teams are normally identified, and ownership assigned with the hope that they can collaborate and independently move the deal forward.
The definition, membership and ownership of pursuit teams does not guarantee its collaboration nor its ultimate success. The synthesis and sequencing or pursuit strategy is critical to make progress. Our engagements typically reside at the intersections and interfaces of these complex deal pursuit teams.
Our Approach
- The chain is as strong as its weakest link – it is important that the Account Executive possesses the gravitas and empowerment to carry the weight of the deal on their shoulders.
- Complex deals often involve investments that are approved at the executive layer of both organizations. This needs careful planning and sequencing.
- Complex deals involve the interplay of people, power, and politics. The ability of a pursuit team to understand the informal power matrix and navigate interests and position becomes important for deal progression.
- The partner ecosystem plays an important role in bringing complex deals to fruition. Dexterity and finesse are required to manage multiple partner expectations and demands.
- Complex deals often involve multiple swim lanes with varying velocities which requires careful planning and orchestration to move the deal forward.
Our engagements seek to bring together these principles and practices and is designed to maximize the probability of success in complex deals.
Impact driven for customers
Customers who have worked through us on their complex deals are sometimes surprised how a critical set of insights could be differentiators that could set them apart. They are also grateful that their blind spots get exposed through our engagements. Some of their incorrect assumptions on value are also brought to light, all of which help them define and refine a better winning strategy.
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Team Better Leveraging Psychology and Neuroscience
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Our Approach
- The unconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious (rational) mind – understanding how to steer the unconscious mind is crucial.
- We see things for what we like it to be than for what it actually is.
- The fundamental ability for teams to work together is their appreciation of multiple behavioral styles so that they can flex their behaviors for maximum impact.
- Understanding and appreciation of conflict orientation becomes important as teams grapple with important contentious issues.
- If every team member understood the neuroscience of relationships, then they can modify their behavior to maximize team output.
Outcomes driven for customers
With skilled facilitation, customers were surprised about how much they could achieve in a short period of time within the workshop. Some of the exercises helped them to open out better to their peers which increased their level of understanding and mutual trust.
Situational exercises helped them translate their newly acquired knowledge into specific behaviors that increased their level of connection and commitment, towards each other’s goals and aspirations.
The design of a give-gets matrix cleared the air for orchestration by building a specific set of expectations and deliverables that were signed off between multiple sales teams.
Overall customers have seen a greater level of integration and trust that is helping them to drive a higher order of business performance through transparent and accountable orchestration.
How do we engage?
Typical customer engagements evolve from their deep desire to achieve more from their multiple sales teams. They also articulate their frustration on how they could make this orchestration happen.
- We begin our engagements with teams defining their collective mission and goals and discovering that they have not been aligned at all.
- This simple discovery then spurs them to seek a higher order of aspiration as a foundation for alignment.
- We then get the teams to confront their dysfunctions and to evolve an environment of vulnerability-based trust.
- We spend time with teams to move away from artificial harmony and build a mindset of productive conflict. Being hard on the issue and soft on the person is much easier understood than consciously applied.
- We leverage behavioral styles for every person to build a vocabulary to describe how others are different, thereby building a culture of inclusion amid diversity.
- Teamwork does not become real without understanding the psychology behind people and engagement. We leverage principles of Transactional Analysis, Drama Triangles and Unconscious Ego Defense Mechanisms in addition to hidden beliefs and biases for every person to gain a deeper understanding of how psychology drives behavior.
With greater awareness comes better choices on how sales teams choose to work with each other. We get multiple sales teams to define a set of gives-gets that increases the level of clarity on expectations from both sides.
Customer Results - Case Study
Teams that optimize and transform
One of the largest Management Consulting Firms decided to merge two technology advisory teams to synergize their efforts as also ensure greater economies of scale, while also maximising revenue across the intersection of their customer base. While the economics of integration was very clear, the people and cultural integration was a challenge and they decided to bring us in to synergize the two teams.
When teams come together, there is often a sense of fear, uncertainty, doubt, scepticism, or inertia associated with the move. Without its identification, articulation and resolution, teamwork becomes impossible. We worked with both the teams to identify the dysfunctions that could potentially hold them back. Once a certain modicum of trust was established, we then helped them define a vocabulary to describe how every person was different and how they could sequence those differences to achieve more together. Given the intellectual capital within this customer, they embraced these different experiences with gusto and were able to reflect and learn on their significance and impact. Finally, allowing them to confront the risks that could collectively hold them back, gave them the opportunity to balance pragmatism with optimism to define a way forward towards their collective goals and aspirations.
With greater awareness comes clear choices – some team members of the newly combined team realized their cultural mismatch and resigned – others aligned better with the new normal and performed at a higher level on account of their greater clarity around their goals and aspirations. While the combined book of business and its achievement stays confidential, the continued existence of the newly merged group talks to its resilience and its ability to thrive into the future – all on account of its initial ability to define and focus on its people and productivity through the power of psychology and neuroscience.
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Synergizing Sales Partnerships to Deliver Greater Results Together
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Most organizations realize that their total addressable market can only be meaningfully penetrated through a network of partnerships.
Some customers typically have a partner segmentation model that includes strategic advisory partners, key system integrators, strategic custom solution providers as well as distributors and resellers as appropriate.
The best relationships start with clarity of intent and normally have relationship managers on both sides who have a joint business plan for the partnership. However, in most cases, these plans do not translate into meaningfully retiring joint market opportunity.
Organizations who believe that their partnerships have greater potential reach out to us to help them synergize their effort, to drive a higher order of results.
How do we engage?
Our engagements start with a discussion about your partner segmentation models and the business results your segmentation is driving for your channel partners. We have often discovered a mismatch between strategy and execution, and most fault lines exist in terms of channel engagement with Field Sales teams.
For the most important partnerships, we drive alignment across three distinct areas:
- Your Joint Vision
- Your joint strategies to achieve that vision
- Your joint execution to stay mutually accountable to results and milestones
As part of this alignment exercise, we have discovered that the bulk of partner enablement focuses on the “what” of selling and very little on the “how” to sell. We remedy this situation with a focus on sales foundations for success, which has received positive feedback from channel partners. These sales foundations cover the basic of account / territory planning, deal qualification, stakeholder mapping and engagement, negotiations and driving customer success together.
Some of the partner organizations have told us that this is the first time that anybody has invested in making them successful, outside of just providing them information and training around products and services.
In addition, our partnership with Alliancesphere opens the possibility for global engagement as well as access to a technology platform that can help track and measure partner effectiveness and impact.
Customer Results - Case Study
Synergizing Partnerships, Amplifying Joint Results
At one of the largest software companies, the realization dawned that the plans on paper were not translating into hard results on the field. While the intent to partner was high between the two partner organizations, there seemed to be something missing in their ability to gain results together. They roped in Tripura Multinational to address the blind spots in their relationship and results.
We designed an engagement that married the rational and emotional aspect of the partnership, while focusing on the behaviors that unify and those that divide. Getting both parties to speak openly about possibilities, aspirations and challenges helped them confront reality and come to a uniform view of the art of the possible within the relationship. Translating each of their respective learnings and actions helped build clarity, alignment and accountability to the partnership and its accelerated results.
Both parties, on account of this engagement understood each other at a deeper level with respect to each other’s constraints, vulnerabilities, and aspirations. Deepening their conversations on the gives and gets within the relationship and specific KPIs to track and measure their progress helped them raise the bar for the relationship. Action Plans to include appropriate stake holders in the execution plan and centering the execution around the customer also helped in cementing the relationship to deliver at a higher level.
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Drive Revenue Recapture through Customer Success and Loyalty
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The nature of customer relationships is shifting rapidly from transactional to transformational. This change has been accelerated by technology adoption and the reinvention of business models that now focusses on subscription and consumption.
Within the software industry, the challenge has moved away from license management to include life-cycle management. The customer now expects a virtuous cycle of continuous value addition that allows them to increasingly realize value and pay only for what they consume.
These two changes on the possibilities of technology and the business model change to consumption are driving a significant change in the design and engagement of sales models and sales organizations.
How do we engage?
Traditional sales cycles focus only on the stages between value proposition, value proof and value purchase. The new normal requires the extension of this model to include value realization by the customer.
This means the addition of a few more stages in the sales process that includes customer deployment, value realization, value acknowledgement and net new opportunity generation.
Teams that have traditionally focused on customer support and deployment are now asked to step up to generate new opportunities from customers. This transformation of mindset and skillset is where our expertise lies.
Traditional mindsets resist any sort of business development, incorrectly labelling it as an affront to the customer relationship. These and many such other biases and self-limiting beliefs need to be overcome for traditional services organizations to transform into customer success operations.
It is not just the transformation of the services organizations. It is also the orchestration of these organizations with the sales organization which translates into true value. This orchestration is often assumed to be present but is absent in reality. When the virtuous cycle of sales, services and customer orchestration happens, only then does revenue recapture become a reality.
We help sales organizations to connect the dots between sales, services and back to sales. We help sales organizations connect the virtual loop between value proposition, value proof, value purchase and value realization. Sometimes we even design the set of sales stages so that there is a seamless flow between value creation and value realization.
Impact driven for customers
Customers use a couple of simple measures to track customer success
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Customer loyalty
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Revenue recapture because of their loyalty.
In some cases, we have helped customer gain a 25 percent uplift on their existing renewals for an overall revenue recapture of 125 percent.
We work with our customers to structure their relationships to orient towards value realization and design compensation and reward structures to focus on loyalty and revenue recapture.
Customer Results - Case Study
Customer success driving incremental revenue outcomes
The customer success team of a large business applications company wanted to invest in their customer success organization, to help them transform their service and support orientation to include revenue maximization. Their aspiration was to provide an additional 20% uplift to traditional revenue through the quality of their customer success engagements.
We worked with the Asia customer engagement team to design a workshop that triangulated across customers, value, and monetization. With value as the fulcrum for conversation, we reframed customer success focus into value realization and value proposition / creation. This intersection and connection of value helped them articulate how much the customer could gain and how much more their organization can drive. Using live accounts and opportunities, every customer success executive understood how much more value they could drive for their customers.
The best part about this engagement is the realization by every customer success executive that their organizational expectation is well below the possibilities within every account in their territory. This realization helped them frame and re-prioritize their focus to drive better customer results. Customer surveys triggered every six months showed continuous improvement in their loyalty and internal business systems showcased the over-achievement of this team with respect to their desired outcomes for upselling and cross-selling.
