Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman

15.1. What Is a Sales Team?

By definition, a team is a group of people working together for a common purpose, but it's really much more than that. A team is an entity with diverse skills, talents, and personalities. It is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It enables each individual to accomplish more than he or she would be able to do alone. A team's diversity makes it more capable of meeting challenges, and its flexibility enables the team to quickly adapt to changing conditions.

Although every sales team is unique, most start out as a simple two-person team: the salesperson and his or her assistant. The salesperson does what he or she is best at and performs the most dollar-productive activities—activities that drive business and generate revenue. The assistant plays a supporting role: scheduling, processing paperwork, and performing other tasks to free up the salesperson's time and resources so the salesperson can focus on dollar-productive activities. This two-person team arrangement is covered in Chapter 6.

Sales teams can become much more complex. For example, you can add salespeople who focus on particular markets, such as minority markets, or specialize in selling only a subset of your entire product line. You can add a marketing coordinator, someone to process transactions and produce reports, someone to develop your sales presentations, and much more.