VIDEO: The History of Selling
Take a quick trip through the evolution of selling and how salespeople are evolving.
Account Teaming Success Tips
Teaming well in accounts is crucial for achieving business objectives, improving customer service, and ensuring customer satisfaction. It also allows for better communication, decision-making, flexibility, and motivation, leading to better performance, individually and collectively. Teaming well in accounts is vital for several reasons:
- Increased efficiency: When a team works well together, they can accomplish more in less time. This is because team members can divide and conquer tasks, share information and resources, and provide support and feedback to one another.
- Improved communication: Effective teaming allows for better communication between team members, leading to more accurate and timely information sharing and better decision-making.
- Greater flexibility: A well-functioning team can quickly adapt to changes and respond to new challenges and opportunities.
- Increased motivation and job satisfaction: When team members feel valued and supported by one another, they are more likely to be motivated and satisfied with their jobs.
- Better customer service: A well-functioning team is better able to understand and respond to the needs of their customers, which can lead to improved customer service and increased customer satisfaction.
- Increased competitiveness: A well-functioning team can take on more complex and challenging projects, which can lead to increased competitiveness in the marketplace
- Better decision-making: A team can bring different perspectives, skills, and expertise to the table, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving.
- Greater success in hitting goals and targets: Teams that can collaborate effectively are more likely to achieve their goals and targets, leading to increased success and profitability for the organization.
Best Practices
Here are the best practices when teaming in accounts:
1) Communicate regularly
- Open and honest communication is the foundation of a successful account team. This is true, face-to-face or virtually, as it helps us build the interpersonal skills necessary for effective teamwork. In addition, sharing ideas, points of view, information, and expertise helps to keep everyone informed and in the loop.
- For account teams, this means communicating what needs to be done, the latest successes, and which areas need focus and attention. Communication is also about giving and receiving feedback, brainstorming ideas, and listening to one another.
- Touching base with those around you helps establish connections. Doing so can help build relationships and means everyone can express themselves and their ideas.
2) Regular Check-Ins
- A laissez-faire approach to teamwork isn’t always the best solution. It can be tempting to let people get on with their daily tasks and only check in with others when a crisis hits. Although micromanagement isn’t fun for anyone, regular catch-ups can be beneficial. Progress meetings for projects, as well as personal development, can help to keep everyone on the same page.
- It’s a two-way process as well – account team members should ensure the team has access to regular and scheduled support and feedback, and everyone should take an active role in their development.
- You should also mentally check in with yourself now and then. Trying to tune in to yourself and how you’re doing can make expressing your needs and ideas easier when the time comes. Again, practices like mindfulness can be beneficial in identifying and assessing your inner feelings and experiences.
3) Seek Perspectives by Being Inclusive
- If you’re trying to support the account team, there is likely a diverse range of people you’ve got to appeal to. Although this range of personalities, mannerisms, and approaches can seem intimidating, these differences must be celebrated.
- It can be easy to dismiss or tune out ideas that don’t align with your own. However, doing so can lead to losing sight of what matters most or leave others feeling unheard or disregarded. In the account team, you can support others by remembering the importance of growth. Personal growth, account growth, and company growth.
- Differing opinions and disagreements should be acknowledged and dealt with respectfully. Often, these can be learning opportunities and a chance for favorable compromise and understanding. Everyone should be confident to be heard, and everyone can make an effort to be inclusive.
4) Learn to prioritize
- Planning out the essential tasks can make it easier to manage your work environment. Whether you’re prioritizing your work or your entire team, the process contributes to the overall functioning of the group.
- Account teams bring together a wide range of specializations and knowledge. Often, the success of one area of the business relies on a host of other people completing their work. So, by prioritizing your work, you’re making sure that someone else can prioritize theirs. It’s also a helpful way of keeping productive and making decisions.
- You can assist those around you by helping them prioritize their workload. This can make their workload seem more manageable and helps to support your team at work.
5) Ask for help
- Asking for help from the account team is a necessary skill. When you rest for others’ use, you allow others to share what works for them to help make decisions and take action based on your judgment.
- It’s a somewhat nuanced way of supporting others, but there are several steps you can take to ask for help. Delegation is often a crucial part of it, as it shows trust and faith in them. Similarly, you’ll want to define boundaries and expectations for how much freedom they have.
- A crucial part of asking for help is giving appropriate and constructive feedback, ensuring the full impact of decisions and actions is discussed. Everyone on the account team can contribute to an environment where others feel empowered. Supporting discussions, ideas, and a positive work environment all contribute.
6) Work on your emotional intelligence
- Emotional intelligence is one of the most in-demand soft skills employers are looking for now. It’s not hard to see why. This skill is understanding, using, and managing your emotions and recognizing how other people do the same. It’s often linked with empathy and social awareness and can help with collaboration and motivation in the workplace.
- A recent study found that those with high levels of emotional intelligence ‘exhibit higher teamwork effectiveness (and subsequent job performance). This is one of those people skills that bring all sorts of benefits. It’s characterized by self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
- To work on your emotional intelligence, you can observe how you react to people and try putting yourself in their place. You can also think about your work environment and how you respond to it. For example, how do you react to stressful situations? And how can you take responsibility for your actions? This is a skill that can help support your team at work no matter what level of authority you hold.
7) Set reasonable goals
- People like to know what their purpose is. In the workplace, collaboration relies on everyone having a shared set of goals and expectations. Working towards a common aim can unite people, engage them with the task at hand, and add enthusiasm to the process. This becomes particularly important when it comes to things like remote working.
- Too much pressure to hit targets can have the opposite effect, leaving people feeling burned out and frustrated. It’s, therefore, essential to have reasonable goals that the team can work towards. Similarly, each member should take responsibility for setting personal goals, leading to accountability, growth, and career development.
8) Promote growth
- The workplace should be a place where everyone has the opportunity to improve themselves and grow professionally. To support your team at work, try cultivating an atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable learning and developing.
- From a professional development perspective, this could mean creating time for mentoring, training, or learning on the job. In addition, by promoting the spreading of skills among the account team, you can encourage them to learn from each other, solve problems together, and become a model team for others to emulate.
- No matter your level of responsibility, you can help create a working environment where account team members are willing to learn and teach. So whether it’s through asking questions, helping others understand, or taking on further training, you can continue to grow.