(Shared) Sales Force Not Selling (all of) Your Products? Use the “Shared Salesforce Checklist” to Uncover the Issue (Part 2 of Series)

Last week I talked about challenges tech organizations encounter when they use a shared sales force to sell multiple product groups. The organization may indeed recognize increased sales efficiency, but also may see a drop in sales and profits derived from some products. Which of these effects is larger depends on your business – but beware of adopting a shared sales force, without taking a hard look at the potential negative impacts on some parts of your business.

(Shared) Sales Force Not Selling (all of) Your Products?

• Maybe the Benefits are an Illusion (for you) – Part 1

In Part 2 of the series, we will talk about the variables that make a shared sales force across products a success, and when the benefits are an illusion.

When does using a shared sales force work well?

At a high level, it can work well when the products or the business model for the products being sold fit together in some way. In this weeks’ post I will explore this fit in more detail and talk about a tool that I have developed and have used over the years to help companies think through when a shared sales force approach makes sense for an organization. I call this tool, “The Shared Sales Force Checklist”, and the checklist is shown in Figure 1 below.

A good way to get started is to complete the checklist yourself, and then get additional perspectives from customers, and folks within your sales, marketing and product organizations. You will notice that while the questions are Yes/No, you need to think about the underlying question before you decide if the answer is the same for both products. For example, to answer, “Sold to Same Customer”, you need to define target customer for each product. You can use the “Description” column on the right to fill in these details. By comparing the answers from customers and your internal staff, you can make a lot of progress determining how well your products fit together for a shared sales force. 

Figure 1: The “Shared Sales Force Checklist”

 

 Let’s take a look at the questions in the Checklist in more detail. A single shared sales force selling multiple product groups can work well when:

• They are Targeted to the Same Organization
  • If you are selling to different types of organizations, you may not be able to get sufficient customer intimacy to sell both product groups For example, problems can arise if one product is sold mainly to Healthcare and another is sold as a horizontal sale across industries.

• They are Sold to the Same Buying Group and Decision-Makers
  • If you must sell to very different buying groups within an organization – like Line of Business for one product and IT Operations team for another, you may find that it requires a completely separate set of sales calls and account relationships.

• They Solve Related Problems and are Part of Complementary Solutions
  • If two products are part of the same solution, like two components of the corporate network, you may find that both projects are part of some of the same projects – and therefore get solution synergy.

• There is “Shared Learning” Across Products
  • If two product groups have a different set of baseline technology and industry learning needed to sell them effectively, training can be difficult and the sales team may resist requirements for hours of enablement training.
  • For example, it may be difficult to sell one product that fits into the network and another product that optimizes storage with one sales force. Your sales team would need to be educated on technology, industry trends, problems and competitors for two separate ecosystems of vendors – a lot to ask for a group of employees who are supposed to be spending their time with customers…

There are also some other significant elements of the GTM for Products that can accelerate or sabotage efforts to share a sales force, and in my experience, organizations tend to overlook or discount their importance.  A single shared sales force selling multiple product groups can work well when:

• They Have a Similar Sales Process
  • For example, if one product is sold transactionally based on price, and another is a consultative ROI-based sale, they will be very hard to sell with one sales force.
  • I saw this in one client where they had two similar products, but one was sold directly to developer teams and the other was an Enterprise sale. The Product Marketing folks that sold to developers kept expecting the sales team to carve out part of their time to sell their product, but were consistently disappointed…

• They Have a Similar Route-to-Market
  • For example, if one product is sold by a group of Enterprise Sales Reps on Global Accounts and another is sold by System Integrators who build the product into their solutions, they will be hard to sell with one sales force

In next week’s post, I will talk about the 3 main tools that Technology vendors use to prevent issues with using a shared using force, when these tools are effective (and when they don’t have the intended consequences…)

I welcome any comments below — And make sure you “Follow” our blog (look for the “Follow” link on the upper left) and have your say. I’m also available as a public speaker, to support local and global events in Silicon Valley, or the rest of the flattening world…

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