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Picture a corporate salesperson and vou probably call up an image of an independent self-starter in a business suit with a briefcase or sample case in tow. As you sit across the desk. vou see him -- face creased by a smile and offering an outstretched hand -- as the sobtary representative of his large employer.
Appearances can be deceiving, however. It's ever more likely these days that the salesman is just one member of a team that's been assigned to serve your needs. He may be one part of a cross-functional group that includes people from departments such as research and development, customer service, engineering, training and maintenance. Or he might be a member of an international sales team whose leader coordinates sales calls by a myriad of salespeople on vour company's vast collection of worldwide locations.
The principle is called team selling. Its use has been rising in the last decade, driven primarily by the complexity and global nature of corporate business today. General Electric, for instance, organized a team of more than 50 salespeople in order to win an important contract with General Motors' Saturn subsidiary in 1987. That team was assembled from eight GE divisions, each representing different product lines, whose salespeople otherwise may have been calling on Saturn all at once. It made a lot more sense to coordinate the efforts of all those salespeople through one high-level executive.
That's one form of team selling. The intention is to synchronize the work of the people who sell the company's different product lines so the company gets the maximum benefit from selling to a large, diversified client. Individual salespeople intent on sefling their own small array of products aren't likely to spot a chance to fill a large corporations emerging need for a tangential product. That's the job of the head account executive, who typically schmoozes with high-level managers of the client organization.
Another type of team selfing is what some people call cross-functional selling. Here the team is made up of people from different departments within the organization, drawn together with the intention of providing superior customer service to large corporate chents. This is a typical arrangement for an organization such as a telecommunications company that is more likely to...