Innovative Team Selling
How to Leverage Your Resources and Make Team Selling Work

Sales teams have the potential to do great work.

Most sales teams do not devote enough energy to meeting dynamics and process awareness.  The skills related to this are critical components of effective teamwork, collaboration and innovation, both internally and externally. Innovative Team Selling places the focus squarely on what will actually make team selling work within organizations large and small. It outlines how to help your teams master new skills in five specific categories: interpersonal, communication, presentation, problem solving, and facilitation. Author Eric Baron also explores the challenging issue of leveraging resources to develop innovative solutions for clients in order to compete effectively in a globalized economy.

• Offers actionable strategies and techniques to improve collaboration, innovation and team processes
• Demonstrates how to put the right members on the sales call, and how to leverage their expertise before, during and after the call
• Explores in depth how teams can work effectively on a day-day-day basis to outperform their competition
• Author Eric Baron is founder of The Baron Group and is a highly acclaimed public speaker and has spoken to hundreds of organizations, trade associations and industry groups throughout his career; he is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School where he teaches his very popular course, Entrepreneurial Selling Skills to second year MBAs

Innovative Team Selling shows you how to lead and participate in teams that work together effectively; strategize prior to the client meetings; make successful team sales calls; and debrief honestly to determine  how to learn and grow from the experience.

Introduction xi

1 The Celebration, or Why We Need Sales Teams 1

2 Meetings, Bloody Meetings 13

3 Easy to Say; Hard to Do . . . Very Hard 25

4 So Who Does What and When? 39

5 Now, Let’s Get Creative 53

6 Adding Structure to the Process 65

7 Getting Our Acts Together 79

8 It’s All About Connecting 89

9 You Mean We Have to Sell, Too? 103

10 Positioning . . . A Key Ingredient in Understanding Needs 119

11 Just One More Question (or Ten), If You Will, Please 131

12 Are They Sales Teams or Needs Development Teams? 145

13 Is Anybody Listening? 159

14 The Big Day 173

15 Okay, So How Do We Do All That? 185

16 What Do You Mean You Don’t Like It? 201

17 Bringing Home the Bacon 217

18 One Last Time: It’s All About Differentiation 229

About the Author 241

About the Baron Group 243

Acknowledgments 245

Index 247

ERIC BARON is a highly acclaimed public speaker and founder of The Baron Group. He has been training business professionals in creative problem solving, innovation, consultative selling, team selling, and sales management for more than thirty-five years. His clients include Fortune 500 companies, the largest financial institutions, and many major insurance companies, consulting firms, and universities. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University Business School where his popular Entrepreneurial Selling course was twice voted by marketing students as the most applicable course offered.