In 30 seconds
Aligning sales and service teams is vital to healthy client relationships and maximising sales opportunities. While marketing focuses on communicating to groups through branding and advertising, sales and customer service talk to individuals. Despite their interdependence, these teams often work in silos and have different key performance indicators. This separation can result in lost clients and hinder business success. To address this, organisations have to develop collaboration between sales and service teams. By working closely together, these teams can nurture client relationships and respond promptly to their needs. Selling in the team is equally important as selling the product, service, or solution.
In 3 minutes
You often hear talk about aligning marketing to sales with the buyer’s journey; however, you hear less about aligning sales to service and how to grow sales opportunities and keep buyers’ relationships healthy and ongoing once they’re on board.
Unlike marketing, which talks to groups via branding, advertising, and promotion – broadcasting over the brand promise- sales and customer service talk to individuals. It’s about human-to-human interactions and all the variables and conversations that can lead to the flourishing of prosperous relationships or not.
Sales and service are inextricably linked and can be a great team if done well.
Everyone in these roles can spot new sales opportunities as much as they can spot when things need addressing to ensure smooth customer experiences.
Yet sales and service departments are often separated from each other. They work in silos and sometimes have completely different KPIs which is just weird when you think about it.
Many businesses can be losing viable clients out the back door as fast as they are bringing in new clients in the front door. Igniting and keeping healthy client relationships is key to a successful business.
This is why we need to be looking much more closely at aligning sales and service seeing the value in both roles as essential to new and existing client retention.
Sales and services are human-to-human centric roles that require people to have, amongst many things, highly effective communication skills, empathy, understanding, problem solving and project management abilities, discernment, persistence, and patience, lots of patience.
Both teams need to be working closely with each other – ideally in the same team if you’re working on key accounts – and know what’s happening at any given time across the buyer-seller-service journey to help build and cultivate the various connections points in the client’s relationship with our organisation. Like any relationship, they can ebb and flow, come and go for a range of reasons and sales and service need to have their fingers on the pulse so they know what to do at any given moment. No one salesperson can be across all of their accounts and all the people involved but if introduced properly as part of the team, service people can stay in touch more easily and check in.
Selling in the team is as important as selling in the product, service, or solution.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
Stories from the field
“I FOUND THE FS!!!
I had a business case presentation this afternoon to take a pilot client to full roll out and I opened with WWW. The Director and Head of Retail paused, looked at each other and then spoke openly for the next 10 minutes while I took notes.
At the risk of turning it into TLDR, the result is a $84K deal being drawn up and a full roll out before Christmas.
Thanks for your session, wisdom and concepts – came at a perfect time for me and definitely is already being put to good use and helping me shut up and listen.”
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