Dear Sales and Marketing, Here’s How to Maximise Your Competitive Edge

Want to get an edge on your competition? Here’s a readily available, on brand resource you could be missing that’s right under your nose.

It’s an exciting time for marketers, salespeople and business owners. We have multiple forms of intelligent and effective communication at our fingertips and many being automation tools that help us streamline that communication. Plus the many tools to help us narrow down the who/what/where/hows of our target audience. We even have access to extraordinary amounts of learning, knowledge and experience from small time bloggers to industry masters like Seth Godin or Neil Patel.

But what we want to talk to you about is the knowledge and experience many of you aren’t accessing, something your competitors don’t have: YOUR TEAM!

Team Intelligence: The Single Most Untapped Competitive Advantage

“Teamwork is the single most untapped competitive advantage”. This quote by best-selling business author, Patrick Lencioni, is, unfortunately, true for many sales and marketing teams we have worked with.

At What’s Your Edge? we prefer to say:

Team Intelligence is the single most untapped competitive advantage.

A Common Problem

What we experience in many sales and marketing teams is that much, if not all, of the focus is fixed on people outside of the company ie the client (who they are/what influences them/what their buying behaviours are, etc) and very little, if any, focus is on the equally as important target sitting within the business.

And look, we get it, focussing on the end user and excellence in customer service is extremely important even the number one success strategy for names like Tesla, Apple, Amazon and Salesforce.  But there is a missed financial, mental and cultural gain by not using Team Intelligence to improve sales and revenue.

What is Team Intelligence and What Has it got to Do with Sales and Marketing?

Team Intelligence is about teams working together intelligently for outstanding performance, outcomes and standards of work by maximising the quality of working lives both individually and as a collective.

The value of this for a salesperson or marketer is almost immeasurable once you see that each person on your team from sales to dispatch will have a unique view and understanding of your business/product/service. This means they will also have a unique perspective on how to approach such problems (like how to increase revenue or improve a customer’s experience).

A fantastic example of using Team Intelligence on a big scale to align an organisation and increase sales is how the Dubai Airports team not only invested in a customer-service training program for 43,000 employees but also for over 39,000 people outside of the organisation with the aim of ensuring consistency in the customer experience at every possible touch point. This three-year project saw every person, from customers and employees to suppliers, shareholders and the wider community get on board for success.

How to Access Team Intelligence to Increase Sales

Start communicating to the team! If you are a marketer reading this you know you have a particularly unique opportunity to make use of the internal communication channels to push through a message and encourage change. You have the opportunity to:

• Share and help to understand of the common goals and values - because defining the right core values is one of the best ways to bring a team together.
• Create opportunities for the people in your organisation to understand each other’s personal values - because it is from this space Team Intelligence? can work on improving client management, customer service and sales.

Here are some ideas taken from our highly successful article on 6 Steps to Team Innovation on how to do just that:

• Break the mould and brainstorm! Let everyone be open to speak freely and share their ideas. Break the mould of the environment, order pizza for lunch, sit around with big sheets of paper, markers, post-its and start talking. In brainstorming, no idea is a bad idea so reward them all.
• Ask for the opinions and ideas of everyone in your team, and if you can, ask them in the presence of each other. Get them understanding each other’s unique perspective.
• Encourage team breakouts and match unlikely colleagues in order to draw out each other’s team intelligence. Get your engineers together with the customer service team or match the marketing team with finance or dispatch.

Final Word - An Insight into Your Target Audience (Your Team).

The people in your organisation need to feel like they are part of something, that they matter and belong. Research shows that much of human behaviour, thoughts and emotion stems from our psychological need to belong and for safety.

If you want to maximise your marketing efforts externally and increase sales, then start creating a culture of success. Invest time in communication internally to draw out Team Intelligence.

Is there break down in Team Intelligence and culture in your organisation?

Book me for a one on one discovery session or to conduct Pulse Surveys with your senior leadership teams today.

Recommended Reading and Resources

• Dear CEO, Are You Investing in Your Organisation’s Downfall?
• What is Team Intelligence?
• When Customer Service Drives Company Success Culture
• The Productivity Journal
• Seth Godin - This is Marketing (our current Business Book Club read!)