Give me just one more post on football (two in total, that’s not bad for a college football freak, is it?). In watching the bowl games, I was continually reminded of just how focused the players are as individuals. Repeatedly, announcers would talk about the drive, the work ethic the players have in order to be a successful quarterback…or lineman…or receiver. But once these individuals get out on the field, it’s no longer about themselves as individuals – it’s about the team. If you watched The Orange Bowl on Monday night, you witnessed exactly that. You saw a bunch of Stanford individuals come together to create a mighty force that won them their first bowl victory since 1996.
I think the idea of individuals working together to create a successful team is just as important in business as it is in sports. In sales and account development, where individuals are typically held to individual quotas, it’s pretty easy to forget the team. In customer servicing, where individuals are interacting with customers on a one-on-one basis, team dynamics don’t tend to play into the strategy all that often.
But what if they did? What if the team’s success was deemed as important as the individual’s success? What if individual sales, development, and servicing people viewed their ability to be successful as critical for the team’s success, not just their own success? And – hold on – what if each of these individuals also saw themselves as members of their prospects’ and customers’ teams, critical to helping them succeed? How would that change the energy, the – forgive the pun – teamwork of your sales and servicing processes? I think it would radically change every one of these.
If you listen to the interviews of the MVPs of the bowl games, you rarely hear an individual talk about his own stellar performance. Rather, he gives credit to his teammates for holding a strong offensive line, for making great passes or catching those passes, for being aggressive defenders.
In sales, development, and servicing it should be the same. If sales and account development individuals relied on their teammates to back them up, if service people were quick to help their colleagues, if, heaven forbid, these all played nicely in the collective sandbox to make their customers successful, you’d be well on the way to a highly-functioning and highly-productive team. And think how much advantage you’d have over your “opponents.”
Teamwork – it’s not the answer to everything, but it sure makes you a stronger competitor.
jkl
