The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer Driven World

9 Implementing the Collaborative Sale

Our instant gratification mind-set society likes immediate improvements in productivity. Many sales executives often look for so-called silver bullets, such as a new technology, a new compensation and reward system, a new training program, and so forth, to make an immediate and positive improvement in their team's performance. Unfortunately, the results of these kinds of tactical fixes are inevitably lackluster, because they individually fail to address all obstacles to sales growth and success.

Successful implementation of the Collaborative Sale is based on a holistic approach, which includes people, process, methods, and tools to enable individual sellers and entire organizations to achieve sustainable improvement in performance, now and into the future. This implementation approach makes it possible to accelerate time to improved results, such as:

• Improved customer satisfaction, as a result of better collaboration
• More sales revenues, as a result of higher win rates
• Larger opportunities, as sellers develop broader visions of solutions with buyers
• More opportunities, as sellers learn to find and develop latent buyers
• Better margins, as a result of quantifying and proving value throughout the buying process—proven value that translates into lower price discounts and other concessions

In 2013, AberdeenGroup studied more than 300 global companies to learn about their deployments of sales performance improvement training.¹ They discovered that ...