In an interview about his new book Dealstorming, sales expert Tim Sanders defines the term that titles his bestseller as follows: “Dealstorming is when you, as an Account Executive, put together a solution team that involves everyone who has a stake in the outcome (or expertise about your problem when you’re stuck in a sales challenge.)”
Tim sees Dealstorming as a tool used to get yourself unstuck from a sticky or standstill sales situation. He coined the term, a spinoff of “brainstorming,” when an executive at a previous job encouraged the sales team to partner in their sales efforts and processes with other departments in a business. What if different departments within a business got together to collaborate on improving or supporting or championing one another’s efforts? This team-centered, collaborative approach to sales revolutionized Tim’s perspective.
Additionally, this strategy is becoming more relevant as the sales process becomes more complex—people aren’t just buying the product, but are buying the metrics, the financial analysis, the researched data. Larger and more complex sales deals require a great amount of knowledge, so the salesperson must be well-versed in the complexities surrounding the product being sold as they are being called to manage what are extensive sales projects, not just sales accounts and deals.
As members of different departments come together to dealstorm, to collaboratively address a problematic sales situation, Tim Sanders suggests that they consider the scenario by asking questions about three categories:
- Is there a market issue that’s causing us to be stuck that we haven’t thought of?
- Is there a people issue on this account that we haven’t thought of?
- Is there an information deficiency in this account situation that we haven’t thought of?”
With better inter-departmental collaboration, there can be greater flows of creativity and perspective which can dislodge the parts of a sales deal which are currently “stuck” or uncompromising.
Ref: http://www.jillkonrath.com/sales-blog/dealstorming-the-secret-weapon-for-stuck-deals
BoweryJE22