August 2, 2018 | 1 minute read

The role content plays in team selling - a lesson from Dave Govan at Hitachi Vantara

Passle

In another excellent podcast by Bowery Capital, Dave Govan who is VP Sales at Hitachi Vantara explains the importance of 'team selling' when it comes to enterprise selling.

This is certainly a topic that resonates with me and how you can include content creation by your team as part of the plan to manage and win the opportunity. At 8 minutes 45 seconds Dave describes what I believe is the true value of executing team selling, as it demonstrates to the buyer:

The vendor really cares about my business
A demonstration to the buyer of the range of experts within the business

Dave talks about the need to ‘map the power base’ and understand who the stakeholders are before assigning your own team to man-mark these individuals (my colleague, Freddy in Client Success, has put together a very intuitive stakeholder mapping template here).

As the quarterback, running the plays, you can then work with each colleague to look at influencing these key individuals. This might be through physical events, mutual connections, emails or phone calls. Another suggestion and process I see work well for me and with our clients (like Hitachi) is to create a relevant, personalised, value add piece of content that is then shared with them in the most appropriate manner.

This how we see this working at scale (more information here):

Team selling is the practice of identifying the various stakeholders involved on the buyer’s side, better understanding what or who from the selling organization may be able to influence them in the right way, then involving those individuals from your own team within the sales process. For example, in certain instances, a head of product, engineering lead, or even CEO or a board member may be best suited to speak to their respective counterparts on the customer side, given their insightful perspective of the role and any considerations that come with it. Not only does this allow these team members to specify value adds of the product that sales representatives may not be able to otherwise articulate, but also this enables the selling team to show the importance it will give the account by involving key management from day one.