Your Lean Sales and Marketing Teams

When I use the SALES PDCA approach in Lean Marketing, I emphasize the use of sales and marketing teams. It is one of the underlying principles that is needed. Sales has operated for so many years based on the idea of the individual salesperson calling on “his” accounts and the organization reinforcing this structure through individual commissions that it is very difficult to consider another way even working. A preliminary description of all of the roles can be found in this post: Lean Sales and Marketing Roles

I am creating a series of blog posts to add more insight into developing sales and marketing teams and there are some basic team development structures that need to be identified at the very beginning. One of these areas is the basic consideration of objectives. I prefer the method established way back in 1989 by Larson and LaFasto and later emphasized in the book, Rapid Development . They state that you first consider the kind of team needed: Problem Resolution, Creativity or Tactical execution.

Once you established the objectives you choose a team structure to match it. Without this process you may have creative teams working on tactical execution or on the other hand a problem solving team working on a creative solution. In the SALES PDCA framework we emphasize before starting the PDCA IMPROVEMENT LOOP is locate the people who understand the process. An abbreviated definition of that step is:

Locate the people who understand the process: One of the key considerations in developing a team is to determine the objective of the cycle. Is it primarily problem-resolution, creativity, or tactical execution? Team structure needs to be considered as well as the participants. You will find a variety of structures will work for you but the typical model in sales and marketing is one of a business team that has a team leader and all others are on equal footing. Many times the team leader is really just a participant but has the administrative work as an added responsibility.

Kinds of Teams: Once you’ve identified the team’s broadest objective—problem resolution, creativity, or tactical execution—then you set up a team structure that emphasizes the characteristic that is most important for that kind of team. For a problem-resolution team, you emphasize trust for a creativity team, autonomy for a tactical-execution team, clarity. Listed below is an outline identifying the team structures.

Adapted from Teamwork and the Rapid Development books:

Problem-resolution team:

Objective: Focuses on solving a complex, poorly defined problems.
Dominant Feature: Trust
Sales Process Example: Sales inquiry for proposal
Process emphasis: Focus on issues
Lifecycle Models: Try and Fix, spiral
Team Members: Intelligent, street-smart, people sensitive, high integrity
Team Models: Business team, professional athletic team, search and rescue, swat

Creativity Team:

Objective: Explore possibilities and alternatives.
Dominant Feature: Autonomy
Sales Process Example: Creating a new advertising program
Process emphasis: Explore possibilities and alternatives
Lifecycle Models: Evolutionary prototyping, evolutionary delivery, staged delivery, spiral, design-to-schedule
Team Members: Cerebral, independent thinkers, self-starters, tenacious
Team Models: Business team. feature team, skunk-works team, theater team

Tactical-Execution Team

Objective: Focuses on carrying out a well-defined plan.
Dominant Feature: Clarity
Sales Process Example: Upgrade to an existing product
Process emphasis: Highly focused task with clear roles
Lifecycle Models: Waterfall, design to schedule, spiral, staged delivery
Team Members: Loyal, committed, action-orientated, sense of urgency, responsiveness
Team Models: Business team. feature team, swat

Do you identify your sales and marketing teams differently?