While sales managers love bragging about how their sales “teams” are doing, if we look a touch closer, we discover the total lack of teamwork in most sales “teams.” it’s really a beauty parade of individuals, and that’s the way they are expected to behave. And if necessary to increase their individual compensations, they are expected to stab their “team mates” in the back without hesitation.
I could contrast their sales team to a peak-performing sales team the same way author Victor Mallett contrasted mountain climbers against sailors in the Financial Times.
It seems that, while in the world of sailing there is real team work, in the world of mountain climbing it’s about the pursuit of individual glory even at the expense of other climbers’ lives. It seems that in mountain climbing it’s commonly accepted practice to leave others to die if the sacrifice leads the other person to personal glory.
And this is exactly how most business development departments work. Most companies are still looking for aggressive salespeople with a bulldog grip and unwavering ruthlessness to close, close and close. Instead of building great teams, most companies are looking for star individuals.
The main reason why teamwork is ruined is the individual compensation system. As a sales manager once told me, “I don’t care who participated in generating the new sale. I pay only the one person who actually closed the sale. You can’t expect me to pay all my people for each deal.” At the same time, when he was advertising for new sales staff (basically non-stop to deal with the 132% annual attrition rate) he was talking about a world-class sales team that works together like Swiss watch.
I can only imagine a $10 fake Chinese Rolex.
So, he was advertising a team of sailors that work together synergistically and achieve great results, but realistically all he had was a cutthroat mountaineer group who would cut each others ropes and throats with no second thought just to get to the summit first and be the salesperson of the month or the year.
Read the article and think about how you want to structure your own business development team. In my experience, “sailor” teams achieve much more than “mountaineer” “teams”.