The Collaborative Selling Handbook

Introduction

To say that sales is evolving is as obvious as saying the earth is going through a metamorphosis. Of course it’s evolving—and it’s going to keep changing its course along with other things in the cosmos.

The buyer behaviour in today’s rapidly changing digital world is not the same as the buying behaviour of consumers in the 30s or the 80s.

Today, consumers have access to a wealth of information right at their fingertips. If you are in B2B sales, you know this from experience—buyers these days come to the negotiation table more prepared than ever. In recent years, the role of sales has dramatically shifted from being suave solicitors to facilitators of useful information—like a consultant or an advisor.

That said, sales now needs new collaborators—to complement the new sources of information besides marketing and sales. Selling can no longer be a function revolving around AEs, BDRs, or SDRs.

Make no mistake—sales is still the front person who puts on the show for the customers. But to influence the informed customers today, they need to form a flawless ensemble of collaborators from all functions like product, marketing, customer success, and customer service.

And that’s exactly what this book is going to teach you.

Chapter 1: What Is Collaborative Selling?

Collaborative selling is a fairly young concept. And yet, there are already differences in opinions about what it actually means.

The popular definition of collaborative selling maintains that:

“Collaborative selling is an approach that encourages collaboration not just between salespeople, but between customers and the salespeople.”

As much as we would like to view this definition as a true expression of collaborative selling, it is incomplete without mentioning the other collaborators of the selling process.

Yes, customers are equally an integral part of collaborative selling. But so are people from the marketing, product, customer success, customer service, legal, and even HR team who rally behind the sales team to help them get through each deal.

Taking this into consideration, we would like to propose a more inclusive, all-encompassing definition of collaborative selling:

“Collaborative selling is a process of working with collaborators on both sides of the fence to identify the optimal solution for the customers.”

Sales is not a single-player game. It’s a multiplayer universe where collaboration is the key to unlock the next level of growth.

1.1 It Takes A Village To Close A Deal

Collaborative selling goes beyond the traditional norms of limiting sales to the sales team. Even if you ignore the idea of collaborative selling as a sales approach, it’s a gross miscalculation to attribute the success of successful deals solely to the sales team.

That’s because a successful deal needs contribution from all quarters. The expectation of a quota-carrying sales rep closing a deal on their own is far from reality especially in B2B SaaS.

Sales is never going to be limited to a transactional handshake between the sales team and the prospects. It’s a process where multiple teams have multiple conversations and collaborative iterations with the prospects and also among themselves.

And those collaborative activities pan across the customer lifecycle—i.e., before, during, and after a deal goes through.

Collaborative selling isn’t merely about acknowledging the contribution of other functions in the sales process—it insists that you keep them in the loop across the deal stages, and actively involve them wherever needed.

For example, involving Customer Success Managers (CSMs) right from the get-go ensures that they have enough context about the customer and also makes the account handoff process from sales to customer success seamless.

And let’s not forget the ultimate heroes of the whole story. Collaborative selling can’t happen without the active involvement of customers—the biggest beneficiaries of the collaborative process—in the fold.

But what actually does collaboration look like in the context of collaborative selling? And how does the said collaboration happen across the board? Let’s find out.

1.2 Collaborating With Prospects

Collaborative selling is an evolved state of solution selling—targeted at the modern, hyper-aware buyers. Collaborative selling takes the consultative slant of solution selling while admitting the fact that today’s prospects don’t need an elementary sermon on what’s best for them.

In recent years, prospects are increasingly known to make more than 60% of the purchase decision even before they reach out to the sales team. And that number is 90%—according to Forrester research.

It’s easier to understand the decision-making complexity on the buyer side once you realize that the prospects also go through a purchase funnel—similar to the sales funnel—to evaluate a new purchase.

Selling to new customers is like managing a mini-project between you and the prospects. They first identify a problem that persists in their organization, research all the options available for them, shortlist the possible vendors, and go with the one that meets all of their criteria.

The collaboration begins when the prospects volunteer their contact information on one of your demand generation channels such as a landing page or ‘schedule demo’ form.

Traditionally, this interaction happened exclusively between the prospects and the frontline sales reps. With collaborative selling, the sales team takes a more inclusive approach to involve other stakeholders not just from their organization but from the prospects side as well.

For instance, it’s no news that B2B buyers usually have multi-layered buying committees. They usually have a point of contact who runs the initial research or reaches out to your  sales team. Then there are decision-makers who call the shots. Occasionally, the purchase is done on behalf of end users who might not have an active role in the buying process.

And that is exactly why you need more hands on deck when selling to modern consumers. Involving your peers from the marketing, product, and customer success functions helps you address the pain points of your prospect along their buying journey.

Think of it like the man-marking in football (soccer)—you need a corresponding player to match and respond to the action of each player in the opposing team. However, the difference here is—you are playing for each other (not against).

1.3 Collaborating With Peers, Managers, And Leaders in Sales

Collaboration within the sales team is a time-tested principle that helps them better strategize their sales approach. High-performing sales teams have a tight collaboration among the AEs, BDRs, SDRs, and the sales leadership on pretty much everything.

Team-wide sales collaboration is often known as “team selling”—an approach where salespeople work together to achieve the common goal of closing a sale. Depending on the size and organization maturity—team selling can extend to partners, advisors, and other stakeholders involved in the sales process.

Peer collaboration in sales gives everyone a common goal to fight for. Collaborative tools have a large part to play in facilitating this tight-knit collaboration.

For instance—CRMs, conferencing tools, collaboration tools, and conversation intelligence platforms work as connective tissues to help geographically dispersed remote sales teams experiment, exchange their learnings, and collectively offer a cohesive customer experience.

And it’s not only about customer experience—peer collaboration in sales is also about creating a safe atmosphere of mutual trust where you exchange what’s working for you with your peers.

If a salesperson has a winning cold email sequence that converts at the rate of 11% on average, there’s no reason for them to keep it a secret if it begets more customers for the organization. Who knows…perhaps another sales rep can borrow the formula and add new angles to improve the conversion by 20%?

Or say, you have a huge deal on the line, and your prospect has a litany of objections—it makes a lot of sense to bring in your seasoned colleague to help you handle the objections, and help you get the deal across the line.

Sales managers and leaders have an important role in setting up the collaborative culture. They ensure the adoption of collaborative tools and empower the team to have a 360° view of the sales pipeline, understand the customer context, provide specific feedback and guidance to improve the deal close rate.

1.4 Collaborating With Marketing

Sales and marketing are two peas in a pod—both of them are important go-to-market (GTM) functions that help your brand reach out to, engage with, and convert new customers.

Sales and marketing collaboration is often cyclic in nature. Sales teams are at the forefront, talking frequently to customers. So they have a better feel of the customers’ pulses. They feed this data to their colleagues from marketing in the form of voice of customers—for instance—or oft-cited objections.

The marketing team synthesizes the data and comes up with corresponding solutions—usually in the form plugging the buyer journey gaps, building relevant content assets, and a lot more.

There is, however, a stark difference between the way sales and marketing perform that makes their collaboration even more complementary.

Before the pandemic, the modus operandi of sales was largely unchanged for many decades.

Until COVID-19, field sales or face-to-face selling made up 55% of all sales across industries and 71% in large enterprises.

But a lot has changed since 2019. Given that everything is online and remote now, the need for marketing and sales feeding into each other and being tightly knit has accelerated.

Without marketing’s support, sales is like flying a twin-engine aircraft on a single engine capacity. It’s risky and non-scalable to say the least.

The collaboration between the two teams helps sales leverage new channels like social selling and influencer marketing to draw the attention of the right audience and educate them instead of trying to push your products into their lives.

Simply put, sales and marketing alignment helps your brand rise above the noise, offer a unified brand experience, and build long-term client relationships.

1.5 Collaborating With Product And Engineering

Unlike marketing, product and engineering teams don’t work hand in gloves with the sales teams in most companies. They also have distinctly different roles: the product and engineering folks are the backend architects of the product, while the salespeople are messengers who go far and wide to inspire people to use the finished product.

Selling is the function of communicating the possibilities of your product, while product and engineering are the ones that actually deliver what customers need. When they aren’t in sync, it creates problems for all parties—sales, product, engineering, and the customers.

Case in point—the sales team are the ones that face customers on a daily basis. They are responsible not just to increase your company’s sales volume but also to paint the accurate picture of your product’s capabilities to the customers.

On the other hand, the product and engineering teams often tend to build the product in silos—working on assumptions based on their conversations with a limited sample size of potential users. Most of their decisions to improve the product or add new features to it happen in isolation because, in most companies, there is no formal workflow between sales, product, or the engineering team.

The tools they use are also at the opposite ends of the spectrum—the product and engineering teams are deeply engrossed in product intelligence and analytics platforms like Amplitude or MixPanel.

Meanwhile, the sales get almost all their insights from their trusted workhorse—the CRM. At an organization level, the sales doesn’t have visibility about the precious data that the product and engineering teams hold and vice versa.

Conversation intelligence platforms can help plug this gap by letting product managers and engineers listen to sales conversations, and more importantly—offering them the ability to asynchronously collaborate on these conversations.

A conversation intelligence tool like Avoma gives product teams insights on the pain points of prospects, how customers use the product, their most commonly requested features, and a lot more.

Alignment between sales, product, and engineering can help you increase sales volume and accelerate deal closure.

1.6 Collaborating With Customer Success

Acquiring new customers is relatively easy—compared to retaining them. And that’s where collaboration between sales and customer success becomes extremely important. The biggest culprit that contributes to customer churn is the lack of alignment between sales and customer success.

In the past, the sales team just had one large target—to acquire new customers in order to meet or exceed your company’s revenue goals. In the subscription economy, such a plan would fall flat on its face if you don’t factor in recurring revenue in your sales strategy.

No matter what your goals are—revenue, expansion, or maximizing customer lifetime value (LTV)—a better relationship between sales and customer success is an absolute must to achieve it.

If you think about it, customer success is a deeper-level extension of sales. While the sales team is responsible for acquiring new customers, the success team ensures that customers buy your product repeatedly so that you can maximize the lifetime value. Therefore, a lot of principles that apply to SDRs and AEs also apply to CSMs.

Think of sales like the ground staff at the airport who usher passengers inside the plane. Once onboard, a different set of crew from the same airline greets them, helps them settle in, makes them offers on the go (usually through an upselling tactic), ultimately helping them make the most out of our in-flight experience. The job of customer success begins where sales end—and customers expect nothing short of a royal treatment once they are on board with your brand.

It’s also why sales and customer success should have a smooth customer hand-off between them. Sales is often the first point of contact for your customers. They build excitement in prospects about your brand, give them confidence about your product, and convert them into paying customers.

But if your customer success team doesn’t give them a matching experience they perceived during the sales stage—customers will soon opt out of your brand. Without a proper setup to help the sales and customer success transition, the customer experience takes a hit and leads to customer churn.

On the other hand, good collaboration between the two teams can help customer success identify the early signals of customer churn and stop the bleeding. Collaboration between sales and customer success can happen through several means like setting common goals, sharing customer insights, documenting the best practices, and using the same collaborative tools.

A good sales-to-customer success handoff process doesn’t happen by accident. It takes both teams working together—and developing a well thought out process.

1.7 Collaborating with AI & Tools

Good collaboration often leads to innovation—especially if you are employing a set of smart tools to make your job easier. To that end, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as the biggest ally to help people in every industry disrupt the status quo and innovate new ways to do business.

Today, every industry has AI working alongside to help them maximize human potential and push the envelope on innovation. Just look at the huge advancements we are making in the field of smartphones, self-driving cars, Internet of Things, and robotics.

Companies that use AI for sales increase their leads by more than 50%, reduce call time by 60-70%, and realize cost reductions of 40-60%.

Sales and marketing are perhaps among the biggest beneficiaries of AI. Experts call this the rise of collaborative intelligence, i.e.—the augmentation of human intelligence and artificial intelligence to solve problems that were traditionally either impossible or took a humongous amount of time and effort.

Artificial Intelligence + Human Intelligence = Collaborative Intelligence

If you are in sales, you probably are already leveraging AI’s help to:

● Automate repetitive tasks scheduling meetings, taking notes, or forecasting demand

● Personalize customer interactions through chatbots, email marketing, or ads

● Understand important patterns in customer behaviour through analytics and reporting

We are also witnessing the huge advantages AI technologies offer to sales in the form of conversation intelligence, outreach automation, and analytics. Collaborating with AI as an agent of progress will only help sales enrich their pipeline and improve operational efficiency. It also means recalibrating the old processes, reinventing the sales principles, and making room for the human-machine interface for better efficiency.

1.8 Collaborating With Customers

Collaborating with customers is different from all the other forms of collaboration discussed above because it’s both—the means and the end. All other types of collaboration lead to this—because collaboration with customers is where they all converge.

There are many layers to collaborating with customers. The new buyer behaviour dictates that you can’t have the same kind of conversations with consumers that you had in the past.

Consumers today are more well-researched, better informed, and they have perhaps already decided the product they want to buy. They might approach sales as part of their due diligence before making a purchase.

Author Keith M. Eades and Timothy T. Sullivan in their book The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer Driven World, calls the modern customers Buyer 2.0.

Here’s how they describe a few traits that define Buyer 2.0:

● They specifically want to talk and do business with sellers who understand buyers' business, situations, challenges, and opportunities.

● They don’t have time for overly aggressive or excessively friendly sellers who are only interested in selling them something.

● They want sellers to collaborate with them, to act more like consultants, and to provide useful expertise.

In collaborating with your existing customers, sales (along with other internal collaborators) should also be willing to shift their mindset. It’s not about upselling to customers anymore, but collaborating with them on a partner level.

This demands a seismic shift in the sales’ attitude to work with buyers in a way that’s radically different and transparent. When this collaboration becomes an integral part of your sales culture, it will open new doors of opportunities for the customers as well as for you.

They will reciprocate by not just staying loyal to your brand but offering organic benefits such as referrals, word of mouth advertising, voluntary recommendations, and rave testimonials about your brand.

As the collaboration dovetails further and begets new customers, you work alongside them to repeat the same formula—making your customers the ultimate hero of the entire process.

Chapter 2: Principles Of Collaborative Selling

The problem with mainstream sales right now isn’t that there is no collaboration—but that the collaboration is fundamentally broken. Sales teams often get caught up in the thinking that their deals aren’t going through because of the kind of customer they are dealing with.

“They didn’t meet the BANT criteria,” you might hear a SDR saying to their colleagues.

Very few sales people realize that the biggest roadblock to closing a deal has little to do with the deal itself and everything to do with the chaotic collaboration they have within the team—or across the organization.

Between generating a new lead and talking to them as a potential customer, sales teams often have a slew of customer information scattered around them—endless email threads, 20 different Slack messages, a couple on one-liners about the account in the CRM, and a few half-finished slide decks that never saw the light of the day.

The funny thing is—almost every team outside of the sales regularly contributes to this mess, albeit unwittingly. The intention is certainly to collaborate, but the process ends up being a jumbled spaghetti of information flowing in all directions.

The principles of collaborative selling demands that there be frictionless collaboration between the teams and the tools that they use. You need a process—perhaps one that runs in parallel to the sales cycle—that can unify all the teams and their individual data.

It should be a process that is intrinsically designed to have a company-wide customer feedback loop—be it real-time or asynchronous. Instead of other teams “pushing” data to the sales to have better context or vice versa, the process should flow naturally wherein everyone involved in the sales cycle (i.e., all the teams) can “pull” important information at their discretion.

Imagine this process to be like a lazy Susan rotating tray on a dining table. Each person can view the entire assortment on the turntable and take what they like—in full transparency with other stakeholders.

If you can design it well by putting a robust system in place, such a frictionless collaboration is not impossible to achieve. Take deal intelligence for example.

Deal intelligence extends the power of conversation intelligence to enhance revenue operations. With deal intelligence, you don’t stop at analysing customer meetings and calls across functions such as sales and customer success.

Instead, you get a 360° view of the health of all deals in your sales pipeline. You can then drill down into what’s happening with each account, know the stakeholders involved in the deal from both parties, understand potential risks in time, and take action to ensure you don’t let any deal slip through the cracks.

The best part is—deal intelligence democratizes information across all the involved teams. People across functions get a clear idea of the amount of engagement across channels, with a prospect. These deeper-level insights keep everyone on the same page so that they can chime in when their expertise is required.

Deal intelligence is thus an example of a truly frictionless, transparent, all-inclusive process that helps everyone get on board to help get deals across the line.

2.1 Future Of Work: System Of Collaboration

Businesses are evolving from the organizational model of working together over rough patches of data to collaborating virtually as if the involved teams were in the same room. Here’s how it has evolved:

System of Records ---> System of Engagement — > System of Intelligence — > System of Collaboration

Let’s look at each of these to understand it further.

2.1.1 System Of Records

Can you imagine sales without the use of a CRM software? That’s like asking if you can go for a deep sea expedition without an oxygen tank. It’s impossible.

Ever since the 1990s—along with the Internet’s boom—the CRM software has seen an indomitable rise on the world stage. Not just in sales, companies invest heavily in procuring CRM platforms for all kinds of use cases to the extent that most large tech companies now extend their CRM products with marketing automation, operations and finance suites.

And yet, despite their gigantic popularity in the last 30+ years, traditional CRM systems haven’t really made an impression that we all can rally for. Here are some stats that highlight this problem:

● When CSO Insights surveyed 1337 companies to understand the contribution of CRM systems on their sales force, only 25% responded to significant improvement in their sales performance. [Source]

● Another survey from Gartner found that about 70% of all CRM projects either result in losses or fail to yield bottom line results. [Source]

So what went wrong? Why haven’t CRM been able to live up to the expectations of the changing dynamics in sales?

Principally speaking, CRMs were never supposed to take off given that they are merely a system of record—i.e. they help teams document customer data in a central repository. At its bare bones, a CRM tool is a data entry software. It lets you categorize customer data based on customer profile, manage the customer communication, record all instances of customer engagement. All this—are within the confines of the sales team in most companies.

They neither give a 360° view of the customers nor enable smooth communication with other teams who are involved in the sales process. If an industrious sales rep were to collaborate with a colleague from another team, they either had to copy+ paste the customer data in an email or walk across the hall with their laptop to ask help on certain aspects of the deal.

Plain and simple—CRM data has lacked transparency, visibility, and collaboration, defeating its original purpose. Then came the next stage of evolution—system of engagement.

2.1.2 System Of Engagement

These are tools that help businesses deliver more personalized, frictionless interactions to customers across various interfaces. Think of social media platforms, email automation platforms, mobile apps, content management systems, live chat tools, etc. as good examples of tools that help you “engage” customers.

Systems of engagement are also known to engage employees—such as in the case of workplace wikis to facilitate social networking and learning.

Systems of engagement also capture data such as customer behaviour, demographic information, interaction history, or transaction history. But at the core, they are not as good as systems of record when it comes to documenting customer data. Instead, their forte lies in developing longitudinal engagement with customers while integrating with systems of record to document data as the single source of truth.

What this means is that systems of engagement don’t replace the system of records. They just augment the data entry that systems of record do by adding a new layer of customer engagement. Systems of engagement are deployed wherever customers are known to engage with your brand, giving other teams the opportunity to interact with customers.

When Geoffrey Moore first came up with the concept of system of engagement in his 2011 white paper, he prophesied that the systems were the next step in the evolution of IT-enabled consumer experience.

He also warned that for systems of engagement to work, it required "empowering the middle of the enterprise to communicate and collaborate across business boundaries, global time zones, and language and culture barriers."

And therein lies the next roadblock in the future of work. Instead of enabling collaboration, systems of engagement depend heavily on collaboration across business units to work.

Although systems of engagement offer a slightly wider threshold for collaboration because of its decentralized nature, the collaborative is still largely a missing piece of the puzzle in it.

That’s where a system of intelligence offers a sliver of hope—with a plot twist.

2.1.3 System Of Intelligence

System of intelligence adds a layer of collaboration—but with AI. It focuses on generating data that transcends beyond recording or engagement and offers granular insights and actionable data to help you improve your sales performance. Like the system of engagement, the system of intelligence also sits on top of your system of records to extract, aggregate, and analyse data. The upshot of using a system of intelligence is that you have better access to coherent business data and can make informed decisions to improve organizational processes.

System of intelligence has helped product companies like Google, Apple, or Amazon build an impregnable business moats around them.

If you use tools like Clari or Databox to analyse your sales and marketing efforts—you are leveraging a system of intelligence to improve your sales performance.

These platforms pull customer data from across your tech stack into a single dashboard and help you calculate cross-platform metrics like conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), ARPU (average revenue per user), CAC (customer acquisition cost), customer lifetime value (CLTV), or return on ad spend (ROAS).

While the idea behind the system of intelligence is to democratize customer intelligence for everyone—it requires users to know how to read and what to do with the data insights. Therefore, systems of intelligence are as democratic—and collaborative—as a person’s literacy in interpreting cold hard analytics.

But, of course, there’s a way out of all these problems—a solution that doesn’t make collaboration look like finding a unicorn.

2.1.4 System Of Collaboration: Team Collaboration, AI Assistance

System of collaboration is the panacea for all the problems that surround the modern workplace—including sales. Take conversation intelligence platforms for example.

Traditional conversation intelligence platforms are built in a way that's exclusive to customer-facing teams like sales or customer success. But modern day solutions like Avoma take an inclusive approach, making customer intelligence democratized across the organization along with a collaborative workflow.  

Think about it—it’s a huge loss to keep the leverage of conversation intelligence confined to a few teams and their use cases like note-taking or sales coaching. A modern workplace needs tools—and systems—that democratize the access to conversation intelligence across the board.

Systems of collaboration assumes the role of a command centre for all teams in motion and facilitates the documentation, exchange, analysis, and synthesis of critical information at a centralized location. Each person and team have direct access to systems of collaboration whenever they need an insight to move ahead in their mission or land their goals.

But how do systems of collaboration make this process so efficient? Because—there is no need to push for collaboration from anyone—it just happens because intelligence sharing and feedback loop is an integral part of the operational workflow for everyone involved.

Chapter 3: Pillars for System of Collaboration

Workplace collaboration is a prized possession that sits on a tripod—each leg symbolizing the three pillars that share the burden of collaboration among each other.

● People

● Processes

● Tools

The symbiotic relationship between people, processes, and tools determines the success or failure of not just collaborative selling—but anything that requires active participation from all quarters of the organization to be successful.

Let’s get to know each of these pillars of the system of collaboration in more detail.

3.1 People

Collaborative enterprises are built by the people, for the people, and off the back of people. People are the beginning and end of every collaborative project—be it sales or launch of SpaceX to Mars.

For a system of collaboration to work, it’s important that people generously contribute their energies into it. Principally speaking, there are two types of people who help systems of collaboration run smoothly—the information creators and the information organizers.

Information Creators

The information creators are people who hold the genesis of a collaborative effort. They are the ones that come up with radical ideas, share it with their peers, and spearhead the chain of collaboration process.

Think of your best sales reps, ace marketers, or well-rounded CSMs who are good at connecting the dots and unearthing interesting data points in the sales process.

The information creators are not necessarily more hardworking or talented than their colleagues. However, they are constantly driven by their curiosity to come up with content that can help them and their teams start a new campaign, close a sales deal, or convince the leadership to take a decision.

In fact, they are a reflection of how the dissemination of information works within our organization or on social media.

Consider the 1-9-90 rule, for instance. The 1-9-90 rule is a framework to help you understand your social media audience by their engagement levels.

According to the rule:

● Information creators make up just 1% of the audience who actively create content.

● The 9% of the audience either advocate or react to the information by the 1%.

● The 99% of the audience are the silent majority who consume the information created by the 1% and the reaction added by the 9%.

If you were to consider the example of this ebook in the context of collaboration, the authors are the 1%, the people who share the book with their colleagues are the 9%, and the people who read the ebook without a direct response are the 99%.

It’s the same story when it comes to information shared within the organization. By virtue of their vocal participation, information creators rule the roost because they control the narrative in a collaborative setup. And it’s not necessarily a good thing.

The quality of a system of collaboration depends on how democratic the flow of information is in a given environment.

If your deal negotiation is dominated by a few sales reps or AEs, you are risking cognitive biases and monopoly of information to creep into your sales process.

To make your sales processes truly collaborative, you should have a system of collaboration that removes communication frictions across teams and invites everyone to actively contribute to the sales outcome. It should be a truly democratic platform that facilitates seamless exchange of information in a way that is natural to your organizational workflows.

For instance, it can be something as simple as an asynchronous feedback or suggestion about a sales pitch.

Information Organizers

The other half of the pillar of collaboration are information organizers—the people who pass the right information to the right people at the right time.

Data, in its rawest form, is incomprehensible strands of information that doesn’t mean anything on its own. The data becomes knowledge and the knowledge becomes wisdom only when people—the information organizers—take the pain to assemble the information into coherent communication.

Think of marketing analysts, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts, or sales engineers as the prime examples of information organizers. Their everyday roles require them to look at dozens of spreadsheets and scattered pieces of data and collate them into cohesive information that tells a story.

It’s a tough job—to synthesize raw data and turn it into layman-friendly literature—to say the least. It’s the reason why businesses delegate data-driven roles to highly diligent and detail-oriented professionals to make the collaboration work well.

Information organizers sometimes have to wade through the rough terrain of manual and tedious work processes (e.g., data entry) to organize information. It’s fine to have some level of friction at least towards the beginning of the process because it helps them build a powerful intuition about data patterns.

Thankfully, information organizers these days have a host of AI-capable tools to make their data gathering, processing, and analysing tasks easier.

3. 2 Tools

Like cavemen in the stone age depended on spears and axes to make their hunting expeditions more productive, modern professionals depend on a set of tools to make the most of their collaborative work.

Without tools, most projects that need collaboration will turn into a never-ending shouting match without much outcome. And with the right set of tools, collaboration becomes almost utopian where everything flows like water—adaptable to the vessel it is poured into, without any ego or friction.

Tools like Gmail, Zoom, or Avoma are the reason why most of the world didn’t lose its marbles even during the coronavirus pandemic—a force that could have estranged human relationships further apart had it not been for these tools.

But instead of geographical chasms, we had the luxury of using video conferencing software to collaborate on an ongoing sales deal with your colleagues from across the seven seas like you were sitting in the same meeting room.

In the ever-increasing remote world, video plays a vital role facilitating team collaboration. Take a look at these stats, for instance.

● 94% of businesses that use group video chats say it fuels productivity.

● 96% of business leaders believe that video conferencing breaks geographical and cultural barriers.

● About 90% of remote employees say that video helps them feel more connected to colleagues.

Live chat software is yet another system of collaboration that helps remote sales teams work alongside each other, exchange valuable information in real-time, and provide great customer experience.

High-impact collaborative teams rely heavily on chat tools to assign roles, maintain transparency, and route important customer messages to the right experts in the team without dropping the ball.

Out of all the tools that aid collaboration, meetings are perhaps the most crucial and time-tested weapon in a business’ arsenal. That’s because meetings permeate through all aspects of an organization—be it customer-facing conversations, internal business meetings, or relevant vendor interactions.

Meetings are also the common ground where all other tools converge and consolidate. Emails, phones, chats, and videos are all meeting communication in one form or another.

But the sad thing about meetings in the modern workplace is that it’s fundamentally broken. The modern office has contributed to mutating meetings into this accidental monster that gobbles up our precious time and smashes productivity into irreconcilable pieces of rubble.

● About 55 million meetings happen every single day in the US alone.

● A typical manager attends 12 times per week on average.

● An individual contributor attends eight meetings per week.

● Most of us spend 6 hours per week (or 15% of your workweek) planning meeting activities—not attending the actual meetings.

What was supposed to be a vehicle for collaboration has essentially turned into an ineffective improvising tool. The usual suspects behind meeting evolving into a productivity killer are:

● Context switching across different apps

● Information being lost across disparate systems

● Meetings are siloed and not collaborative

● Valuable time is wasted in grunt work

But there’s hope to revive meetings as the glorious collaboration tool. All we need is a thorough and comprehensive system that controls all aspects of a meeting lifecycle from the same place.

In other words, we would need a meeting lifecycle assistant to bring meetings back from the dead.

A meeting lifecycle assistant, in plain terms, is a tool that helps you manage the end-to-end meeting process starting from preparing for your meetings (using agenda templates) to automatically transcribing meeting notes or from automating low-value manual tasks to converting a meeting’s content into actionable intelligence.

A meeting lifecycle assistant offers a single solution for all your meeting requirements across the organization. Instead of making you use a dozen tools to manage different stages of a meeting, a meeting lifecycle assistant works as a single command centre to let you control all aspects of your meeting and break silos between different departments.

It does have four different components to control different stages of a meeting lifecycle, all of which have their control levers under the same roof.

Meeting Management—for instance—helps you prepare, collaborate, and search across all meetings in one central place. It enables you to create and share templates that get automatically assigned to your meetings, ensures that AI automatically captures meeting notes for you, and also lets you collaborate with your colleagues in real-time to take notes.

Meeting Assistant—on the other hand—helps you automatically record the audio and video content of the meeting and transcribe it into easily scannable text that you can refer to in the future.

With Meeting Collaboration—you can scan, search, share information, and offer feedback (creating an asynchronous feedback loop without the need for more meetings) to help you convert all your meetings into a powerful searchable knowledge base.

Finally, Meeting Intelligence lets you mine meaningful insights out of raw data, synthesizing them into actionable decisions across organizational functions.

All of these components packed together in a software suite makes it a killer combination that can enhance the quality of your meeting conversations when you apply it in the context of collaborative sales.

3.3 Processes

The confluence of collaboration is complete only when people and tools meet with processes—standard protocols that give collaboration its speed and direction. Processes are important because they establish how things are supposed to be done and provide feedback for improving the existing scheme of things.

In a collaborative enterprise—people fit the “who” and tools answer the “what” pieces of the puzzle. In the same vein, processes define “how” the collaboration should happen. When you focus on the right processes at the right time, success becomes a matter of when and not how.

Let’s look at some key process that you may want to have in place.

3.3.1 Documentation

A key part about setting the right processes in your organization is to introduce a method to document relevant information in a neat and organized manner. In the context of collaborative selling, this means explaining the importance of processes to all the teams involved and enforcing the documentation of processes in a central location.

In addition to establishing a single source of truth, this technique discourages the use of different documentation apps to store different pieces of information—which often leads to communication gaps across teams. Teams that commit to the discipline of documenting their processes also build affinity and credibility between themselves—paving the way to stronger collaboration.

A typical sales cycle, for example, is a common process that can benefit a lot from documentation. The act of documenting the sales cycle also establishes the process as a reference point for your new recruits to pick up important insights about how to seal a deal more effectively.

The same can be said for setting up and running a marketing campaign, prioritizing features in your product roadmap, or regularly checking in with your customers. Documenting every possible detail about these processes turns them into a well-oiled machine that runs smoothly without any hiccups. The point is—you really have to commit to the process.

From establishing the file naming convention to defining the best practices to interacting with customers—you have to be absolutely clear about what a certain process entails at each stage of its journey. Setting up processes might sound like an average thing to do, but being consistent is what transforms the average into excellent.

But be warned, don’t attach yourself to perfection in the name of sticking to processes. Processes are supposed to enable collaboration and not pose a roadblock. Protocols can suffocate collaboration if you enforce too many rules around your processes. Instead, make processes standard operating procedures (SOPs) that people should follow using their best judgement.

After all, there’s no such thing as a perfect process. You should always keep iterating every process and recalibrating it until you get the desired outcomes.

3.3.2 Check-Ins

Monthly, quarterly, and annual check-ins are important processes for organizations to enhance collaboration between cross-functional teams, identify potential issues early on, and adjust their sails as and when needed.

Check-in meetings also play a critical role within micro teams. A few years back, Gallup surveyed over 8,000 employees about their relationship with their managers regarding the importance of employee check-in meetings.

The result reinforced the role of check-in meetings as a catalyst to collaboration:

● When managers knew the projects employees were working on, employees were found 7 times more engaged.

● When employees felt their managers weren’t checking with them as regularly, they expressed being 15 times more disengaged.

If we extrapolate and apply this type of study to a larger organization-wide setting, you will likely get similar results. That’s because regular check-ins help different teams align and prioritize their common goals, become involved in each other’s work lives, and hold each other accountable for their performance.

Customer check-ins are another very crucial process in the realm of collaborative selling that helps businesses improve their overall performance. Regular check-ins with your customers are critical in helping your business deepen your customer relationships, align better to the workflow and goals of your customer, and identify potential growth opportunities.

Sometimes, customer success is about offering a high-touch engagement to selected accounts. Many SaaS companies offer an executive sponsorship program or quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to key accounts in order to demonstrate the value they are getting out of using your product.

As part of the account enrichment strategy—QBRs can help you offer a white-glove service that can set you apart from your closest competitor and deepen your relationships with big-ticket clients especially if you are planning to move upmarket.

While it’s the responsibility of the customer success team to run customer check-ins at regular intervals, the content of the meeting should be made available to all other stakeholders involved in the collaborative selling process.

For instance, you can start with a clearly defined customer success check-in template, which can be used by CSMs across your organization.

A great way to make the most out of check-ins is to blend internal team meetings and customer check-ins using a collaborative intelligence platform.

For instance, customer success can lead monthly customer check-ins while keeping the sales, marketing, and the product team in the conversation loop to encourage their participation.

Sales can do the same with their discovery calls, product demos, or post-mortem discussions. The reins are still with the sales to run these meetings, but they can share the insights with the marketing, customer success, and product teams to keep everyone on the same page.

Marketing-led internal check-ins can also extend its outcomes to product, sales, and customer success so that there is complete alignment between all the teams.

Finally, the product-led check-ins—either with customers or within the team—can lend its insights to other check-in meetings across the organization to help each team draw smart patterns out of all conversations.

What’s important to remember when running these check-in meetings is that they are recurring and can turn into perfunctory formalities. To keep the spirit of active collaboration alive during these check-ins, remember the following tips:

● Encourage lively participation from every member, but record and transcribe each check-in meeting without fail (possibly take one-pager summarized notes for quick skimming).

● Keep the meetings short and to the point. Check-in meetings that are 40-45 minutes are everyone’s favourite.

● Don't waste time discussing obvious data and information that’s already accessible to everyone.

Processes can bottleneck when they don’t have a proper structure. To help processes flow freely across different teams, assign them the 4P format:

1. Progress: Use this to discuss key wins, make announcements, or talk about new feature launches

2. Problems: Set out this portion of the process to talk about any changes in ongoing plans, recalibrating project timelines, etc.

3. Plans: Spend some time to discuss the upcoming strategies, set new metrics, or introduce new people into the processes

4. Participation: Make room for brainstorming new ideas, holding Q&A sessions, and spontaneous interactions among all collaborators

If you can blend in the check-in meetings along with the 4Ps into your collaborative selling process, you can expect all teams to naturally and proactively take part in projects that warrants their expertise.

3.3.3 Frameworks

Process frameworks are time- and cost-efficient when you are looking to define, manage, or benchmark certain business operations towards their goals. Frameworks are a set of key processes in an organization that are grouped together to see how they fare in comparison with each other.

Using a framework will help you keep your eyes on the company’s long-term goals and strategies instead of being intrigued by a flashy idea. It will also force your teams—product teams, in particular—to align themselves with other stakeholders in the process of collaborative selling.

Product-centric frameworks

● Product Roadmap Prioritization Framework

Product roadmap prioritization framework, for instance, includes several processes within and outside of the product team that eventually helps your organization determine the best features to roll out to your users.

Prioritizing product features is the complex act of juggling insights and opinions from several stakeholders like the sales, customer success, marketing, and your product users. The process of zeroing in on the most viable features is a continuous sprint within the product team that demands active contribution from other quarters as well.

To prioritize the right features in the development cycle—you must first collaborate with cross-functional teams to evaluate the cost of the requests, analyse the competitive landscape, and gather available resources while keeping your business goals in mind.

Many times, product teams employ frameworks such as the effort impact matrix to identify which among the most-sought features offer the highest value both for the customers as well as the organization.

The effort impact matrix decision-making technique uses a 2x2 grid, where each square represents a different degree of work put into developing the feature and its possible impact.

● The Kano Model

The Kano model is another alternative framework to help you build product features according to their potential to please and excite your end users. The Kano technique compares the "cost" of introducing a new feature against the anticipated consumer happiness.

These techniques help you focus on prioritizing “must-have” features that elicit a “wow” response from your users—instead of building “also-ran” features that are of little value to your customers as well as for your business.

Regardless of what technique you choose to prioritize your product features, two things will always dictate your product roadmap planning:

i. Your business strategy, and

ii. Your customers’ needs

The alignment of these two factors will always be at the front and center of your product roadmap overarching the entire process of narrowing down the best features to release.

● Jobs to be Done Framework

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a process framework that helps you identify the core job that your customers “hire” your product to do for them. In the context of collaborative selling, a “job” is a metaphorical representation of what a customer wants to accomplish through a product.

Product teams use the JTBD framework as part of their user research interviews to understand the customers better, build features that meet their expectations, or pivot the product to a direction that yields good outcomes.

There are five steps to running an effective JTBD interview:

i. Select users who want to accomplish a job.

ii. Identify the “job steps” they go through to finish a job.

iii. Ask them who they want to hire for the job—and why.

iv. Note down or record your JTBD interview data.

v. Analyse and implement the data.

The interviews’ results help the product teams gain valuable insights about the customer behaviour and build features that the users will love and enjoy. Obviously, the process is incomplete without the product team democratizing the data to other stakeholders which will help the entire organization align on the customer insights and deliver a consistent customer experience.

Process-centric frameworks

● Account-Based Selling

Account-based selling—is actually the truest form of collaborative selling because it strongly demands alignment between all teams in an organization. It is, however, is often mistaken for requiring alignment only between sales and marketing. Of course, that’s half-truth.

60% of companies that use account-based selling for at least a year experience an increase in revenue.

At its very core, account-based selling (ABS) demands extensive research about key customer accounts who display a high degree of likelihood in converting as paid customers. It’s risky and preposterous to leave sales and marketing out in the cold to carry out an arduous project for a hyper-targeted sales strategy like ABS.

Each team involved in the sales process has a special role to play in the ABS strategy. For example, the marketing team does the initial market research and shares the intelligence to other teams to devise a common strategy exclusive to an account. It then starts designing uber-personalized marketing campaigns to draw the prospects’ attention to the brand.

The sales, on the other hand, prepares itself to deliver a white glove service when the prospect account is ready to interact with the brand. It calls upon the customer success team early on in the negotiation process to add the extra oomph in the customer journey and to convey a powerful brand promise.

Likewise, the product and support team will likely be attuned to the entire process to offer an outstanding product and service experience when the account is ready to try the product.

Like any other framework, ABS follows a set of process to ensure a strong execution:

➔ Planning the ideal customer profile (ICP)

➔ Defining key metrics and benchmarks

➔ Identifying the target accounts

➔ Gathering the required resources

➔ Executing account specific marketing campaigns

➔ Seamless customer success account handoff

➔ Measuring and optimizing the campaign

Over time—the closer the teams are aligned on sharing key customer insights, the better their chances of carrying out hyper-specific ABS campaigns and converting big-ticket prospects into customers.

● Intent-Based Selling

A surprisingly large number of successful businesses employ very generic, cookie-cutter forms of marketing and sales techniques that don't give them the desired results.

Intent-based selling is an approach that provides a way for businesses to cut through the noise and accelerate their revenue growth using “intent data” as a competitive tactic.

Done well, intent-based selling can turn around your marketing and sales and inspire customers to spend more time and money with your brand. But of course, intent-based selling doesn’t work if you just focus on improving your sales and marketing operations.

As a definite prerequisite, you would first need to bring together all other teams for the common cause of expanding the revenue goal. That’s because intent-based selling also demands a fair degree of research to discover prospects with high purchase intent. Like ABS, intent-based selling relies heavily on personalized selling backed by intent data.

Intent-based selling leverages the fact that the majority of B2B buyers are already 67% of the way into the purchasing journey even before they contact the sales team.

Circle this back to the earlier discussion that we had about consumers today being more informed than ever—and you will know why intent-based selling is a high-octane selling strategy.

The missing piece between resourceful customers looking for a solution and brands offering matching services is a system that connects the two—a platform that bridges the gap between the two.

For brands, this could be a conversation intelligence platform that can help them capture:

● What language, keywords, or phrases are they using to define their problems?

● What are the most sought-after features your target audience are looking for?

● Which other alternative brands of solutions are the prospects talking about?

● What are the must-have factors in a product that will make them say “yes”?

As a framework, intent-based selling benefits when you follow a set of processes to derive meaningful conclusions:

● Identify the target audience

● Collect intent data

● Develop relevant content

● Qualify and score the leads

● Runn ABM campaigns

● Track customer data

● Refine the process

Intent data is perhaps the most valuable currency a brand can have to cash out revenue benefits. It is, however, not an easy task to collate intent signals from the sea of data noise that’s out there in any given domain.

Collecting intent data works best when you combine it with other channels like conversation intelligence to capture relevant customer information. Once you have the right data, intent-based selling can open new doors of opportunities for your brand that are otherwise invisible or unavailable to brands who are unable to tap into the customer insights.

Chapter 4: Tips To Get Going With Collaborative Selling

Now that you have a good understanding of what collaborative selling is, its underlying principles and the processes around it—let’s look at some tips to put it to action.

4.1 Foster A Culture Of Collaboration

To be fair, it’s easier said than done. Given the competitive nature of sales teams, it takes a lot to cultivate a mindset and peer group that believes in sharing what works and what doesn’t. Remember—collaborative selling goes beyond collaborating with peers and prospects. It’s about collaborating with prospects, peers, managers, sales leaders, marketing team, engineering team, customer success, and existing customers.

Conversation intelligence tools like Avoma make collaborative selling easier as it enables visibility into sales conversations across the organization and helps you build a winning playbook to create A Players.

4.2 Set Up A Process For Collaboration And Knowledge Sharing

As we discussed in chapter 3, it all comes down to people, technology, and processes. Once you have the people aspect sorted, the next one to tackle is—process.

● Set up standard protocols that give collaboration its speed and direction.

● Standardize a clear workflow for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and feedback loops. Keep it asynchronous as much as possible to keep it productive.

● Identify the right individuals and assign them responsibilities to ensure process hygiene.

● Centralize all your external and internal communication using tools like Avoma so there’s just one place to search for critical info, ask for help, and get things done.

● Have all your stakeholders, conversations, files, meetings, and tasks together on one platform to keep transparency.

● Automate processes wherever possible—for example—automate note-taking, and updating information on your CRM so that customer intelligence becomes democratized across the organization.

4.3 Give Your Team The Right Tools To collaborate

Without the right tools, processes don’t scale. When you have right set of tools to enable collaborative selling, you can:

● Increase your close rates

● Shorten sales cycles

● Boost your sales team’s productivity

● Clone the performance of your top reps across the board

● Onboard new reps faster

● Attain your quota every time

4.4 Track Progress And Celebrate Wins Together

Have periodic check-ins where everyone across the board can share updates, discuss blockers, and find solutions. It helps you ensure that all stakeholders are committed and are on the same page. Finally, make sure you celebrate wins—big and small—with the wider team. Encourage sales leaders to give these wins a public shoutout in company-wide channels alongside learnings across the sales cycle to inspire everyone.

Chapter 5: Final Thoughts

Encouraging sales collaboration across functions within your organization, as well as with prospects, customers, and partners—is your ticket to improving sales productivity and converting more leads into customers than ever before.

Building a collaborative culture in an intensely competitive environment is easier said than done. But sales now needs new collaborators more than ever to complement the new sources of information besides marketing and sales. Selling can no longer be a function revolving around AEs, BDRs, or SDRs.

Take the lead, drive the changes and processes discussed in the book by giving your sales engine the right tools and process. And remember to influence the informed customers today—you need a flawless ensemble of collaborators across all functions like product, marketing, customer success, and customer service.

Foster a culture of collaborative selling across your organization.