Stop Selling Alone—It's a Team Sport

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Today’s prospects show up to meetings informed, opinionated, and ready to challenge your assumptions. If your team isn’t aligned, educated, and prepared to bring insights, you're just another vendor waiting to be told what to do. True consultative selling takes an agency-wide approach, which may require a shift in thinking, preparation, and collaboration.  

• It requires working differently with your internal team. In particular, your service team needs to be trained on the same sales system as your insurance producers and be ready to collaborate on the process.  

• It also requires a different approach to working with clients. Your sales team must have a process that allows them to get intellectually curious about the prospective client’s business and use the findings to craft programs that align with their goals and help them envision a brighter future with their employees.  

Sure, you can do all the work as an individual salesperson, but you won’t have the benefit of multiple inputs. And we all know that ideas always benefit from batting them around and bringing in different perspectives. 

It starts at the top 

It’s up to the leader to communicate, set the vision, and build a system that supports a collaborative mindset. Where does it start? With training staff, coaching salespeople, and reinforcing the message through regular conversations and accountability.  

The marketing team 

Make sure your marketing team knows the sales process as well as your salespeople do. Get them engaged and have them attend some meetings with the producers so they can move from theory to practical guidance.  

They need to create content that provokes, teaches, and positions your team as a guide through the complex employee benefits sales process. Your marketing and prospecting efforts should fill the pipeline with qualified, curious prospects. 

Research, research, research  

Deep research is non-negotiable for your ideal prospects. If you’re going to meet with someone you think would genuinely make a good client, pull out all the stops.  (A quick glance at a website before running into the meeting is not it.)

Real prep means digging in, analyzing, and brainstorming together. Multiple people looking and discussing what they find will always uncover more insights than doing it alone.  

Think like a business owner 

Not a great revelation, but if you want to talk business with your prospects and clients, you need to understand business. Grow that understanding from consuming content as a business owner would. A quick search will give you a treasure trove of publications, podcasts, videos, and books. You won’t go wrong; just engage with a few and find a style that you like.   

Set a goal for your team to read or watch something. It doesn’t have to be an hour-long video or a huge book. Start with an article or a short video and then have a team discussion to dissect, learn, and debate each other’s interpretations of the ideas. Make internal conversations about business strategy a part of your company collaboration so your client conversations are rooted in practical insights. 

The old way is fading fast 

One-on-one, transactional selling doesn’t stand a chance against prepared, insight-driven buyers. If your salespeople aren’t equipped to lead the conversation, they’ll be stuck reacting to it and losing out to advisors who can talk to owners at a peer-to-peer level.  

Turn selling into a team sport. Coach it. Practice it. Build your systems around it.