Most businesses understand that an effective sales and/or service team is the greatest asset they can have. Those who can field effective teams are often miles ahead of their competition who cannot. Building and managing a good team is not easy, but with the right training and understanding, it can become more do-able.
A team must obviously be working towards the same goals and have the support staff and common training needed to make and surpass those goals. Often, training is focused on the team itself and does not include support staff. This leaves a vital component of a successful team out of the loop.
Building a Team’s Focus
Teams are usually comprised of several individuals with multiple talents and specialties, but effective teams will have specialists who are proficient in other team members’ specialties as well. This is the ‘A-Team’ approach, getting its name from the U.S. military reference to Army special operations squads.
Assessing, expanding, and perfecting each team member’s skills and specializations lays the groundwork for assembling an A-Team. Once the team is organized, each individual is given the tools to perfect their specialization and as that progresses, progress reports and self-assessments to the team then teach the other team members the value of individual member’s skills. This builds camaraderie and unity, which leads to better goal setting and achievement.
Bringing In Support
Management and support staff should also be included in overall assessment and goal-setting, helping them to understand the team’s needs so that they can be more intuitively supplied. Every person on the staff, whether inside the team or not, should be considered vital to the team’s success. This means that the core team is just one unit of a much larger, entity-wide team of players who should all be working towards a common goal.
Goals are often set and missed because one facet of the support team was not brought on board or was ignored along the way. Support teams should be organized in a way similar to sales and service teams, with their focus being helping the S&S teams in any way possible.
Full Service Assessments
Periodically, the entire group (including management, support, and core teams) should come together to assess and discuss how operations are commencing, identify the customers and clientele they serve so they can better focus on providing better services, and address opportunities and challenges.
Organizations which do this on a regular basis often find that these group events improve morale, smooth teamwork, and make for better cooperation and collaboration overall. When sales and service teams, who’re on the front lines, can connect with their support teams, they can work together more closely. When management is involved and sees and helps direct this collaboration, they can look for weaknesses that require addressing and form new policies to better facilitate need fulfillment.
Bringing This Together With Training
All of this begins with the core training needed to professionally assess and begin the team building process. Once team building is underway, continued consultation from those who specialize in team building will further speed up the process and make it more effective. Periodic assessments from a trusted and objective third party can help keep teams moving forward and meeting goals.