Salesforce Opportunity Teams:

 

Opportunity teams, new-logo teams, or however you identify the people responsible for winning new or expansion business in Salesforce are powerful features that allow sales reps to collaborate and share information about sales opportunities. The opportunity team in Salesforce typically consists opportunity team of a variety of different roles, such as sales reps, sales engineers, managers, and director/VP-level stakeholders. Each member usually has their own responsibilities that contribute to the progression and success of the sales cycle.

 

Benefits:

One of the key benefits of opportunity teams is the ability to align closely with others and bring different ideas, strategies, and tactics to continue developing the deal. This allows for more efficient and effective collaboration, as team members can focus on their specific areas of expertise. We laid out a few more benefits below:

Improved coverage of the account

When you have sales leaders, technical experts, and others involved in the sale, you’re more likely to provide value to different members of the buying committee who have questions. Your experiences will overlap, and their needs, challenges, and concerns are less likely to be missed or overlooked. Ensure you document who each member of the team needs to engage with from the prospective customer, for example, a C-Suite leader may reach out to their VP or C-Suite peer depending on the size of the company. A Solution Engineer may engage their counterpart, etc.

Higher win rates

Prolifiq has data that our win rate was over 30% higher when we had multiple internal team members actively assisting with the opportunity. Adding Solution Engineers has proven to be very effective with building trust with the buying committee and more technical evaluators.

Shorter sales cycles

As you engage more decision-makers in multiple business units with a prospective customer, you’re generally able to accelerate the process of understanding whether your product or solution is a good fit. Having a team behind you to help move things forward is critical in moving the opportunity along.

 

Prolifiq’s Process:

At Prolifiq, our sales team is responsible for building out a relationship map with the key stakeholders once an opportunity is created. Opportunity plans inside of Salesforce are a requirement for any deal over our average deal size, with critical information documented to help everyone involved get up to speed quickly. You can see our step-by-step guide here. The opportunity team sets a meeting cadence depending on three criteria:

1. Deal Size
2. Timing
3. Number of stakeholders to engage

Salesforce:

In order to truly enable team selling, you have to have a process that brings reps into your CRM consistently. For our company, that is Salesforce. In our case, the team member (Account Executive) creates an opportunity plan that turns into a living, breathing document that the entire opportunity team works off of. If your company has reps that put information in places outside your CRM, start by incentivizing and sharing a vision of how their colleagues will provide more value when the general information is centralized.

 

Salesforce Team Selling:

However, it’s important to note that team selling is challenging. Our sales team went through growing pains as our process evolved. Reps each had their own way of handling their pipeline and using Salesforce, and it took a few quick wins and a clear future state for us to get to where we are today.

In some situations, a more individualized approach may be more effective. It’s important for sales leaders to consider the specific needs of each opportunity and the strengths of their team members when deciding whether to use a team selling approach.

 

Summary:

In summary, opportunity teams in Salesforce are a powerful tool that can help sales reps and teams collaborate more effectively and close more sales. Salesforce team selling won’t always be the perfect answer, but as you’re working through bigger pursuits, having support from other team members will increase your chances of landing the big fish!