Yesterday, I delivered another one-hour tele-seminar hosted by Sales Training Camp (www.salestrainingcamp.com). These programs are an incredible value when you consider for one low price multiple sales people at one location can listen to a program. In addition, your sales team will receive notes to follow along with each speaker, and an audio CD recording of the online sales seminar. Yesterday’s topic was directed to sales managers to help them better understand how to align their teams for Major Account Selling.
Here’s part of the introduction:
What is Major Account Selling
Major account selling is the assigning of a salesperson or sales team to uncover and manage sales opportunities within high-potential accounts.
The Many Parts of Major Account Selling
Major account selling isn’t about “how-to-sell” (sales tactics); it’s about “who” to sell to (sales strategy). It’s also about developing key accounts and managing sales opportunities within those accounts.
In major account selling, it’s common for the salesperson to be given the title of account manager and this is done for good reason. An account manager has to do more than just sell, he or she must “manage” the sale within the account. A misunderstanding between these two functions–selling and managing–causes many salespeople to fail at the job. A key aspect of major account selling is learning how to manage a sale within an account.
Major or key account selling usually involves assigning a specific account to an individual salesperson (account manager) or sales team. It’s common for these individuals or teams to have several key accounts assigned to them. The concept works best where you are selling high-priced or high-volume products or services to industry or wholesaling consumer products through distribution and major retail channels.
The intent of team selling is to coordinate 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 customer. Salespeople are highly individualistic and often fail to capitalize on their team leadership skills, preferring to work alone. To successfully implement the team-selling concept, the account manager must have leadership and management abilities as well as selling skills.
Team selling is not for every type of company. It won’t work if your customers make their buying decisions based only on price because forming relationships is a major part of the team-selling concept.
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