A Salesperson’s guide to

teamwork in a dysfunctional culture

Salespeople need to build internal teamwork even when other departments don’t want to.

It’s March and most of the agribusiness trade shows are winding down.  You did a great job setting up booths and displaying your latest and greatest products, and you networked.  Oh, how you networked.  You went to the breakfasts, lunches, snack breaks, and evening socials. You met great contacts and agreed to follow up with them soon.  You met prospective customers and promised to follow up.

Planting season is at hand for those in the crop production business.  Now, it’s time to get out into the market and follow up.  In other words, deliver on all those promises. 

Before you do, I want you to accomplish one more networking event.  I want you to do an authentic round of internal networking.  Many of us who sell in agribusiness feel like we are on an island.  We work remotely and seldom see our support teams:  accounting, customer service, delivery, or production teams.  However, we need them in today’s market.

With multiple suppliers of sometimes the very same products we sell, our teamwork and go-to-market strategy might be the only differentiation we have when selling to farmers and Ag buyers.

Most of us are all for teamwork.  And it’s a great thing when everyone gets along.

However, many of our teammates act like kings and queens of their own little silos.  They don’t play nice with others.  I have worked with numerous teams where some or whole departments were not only disengaged, difficult, and detrimental, but downright destructive.  Chalk it up to resentment, lack of accountability, nepotism, poor leadership, or disorganization.  All of these played various parts in those teams’ levels of dysfunction.

Important note:  If you are a salesperson, this is your problem to champion.  Why?  Because the dysfunction takes its toll on the customer.  They are the ones on the receiving end of poor customer service, late or no deliveries, invoicing errors, etc.  And you will bear the brunt of their dissatisfaction.  Either through the loss of them as a customer  or when you get chewed out the next time you call on them.

My advice is to get in front of this situation, even if your team is more functional than dysfunctional. 

When working with sales teams on this issue, typically, they are working hard, but results are not where they need to be.  When the sales manager begins discussing the need to increase sales and market share, the fangs and claws come out.  Blame, excuses, and anger fill the room.  We squander the next 90 minutes discussing who was at fault and how impossible progress is with the current internal climate.

After decades of listening and relistening to communication training concepts and implementing them in multiple sales teams, it hit me that we needed to blend all these concepts into one powerful communication exercise.

Some of the best teamwork and relationship-building material is covered in Stephen Covey’s, The 7 Habits.  Pat Lencioni wrote about the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.  While, hundreds of years ago, the four DISC styles were created.  To top it all off, we know that getting cooperation from everyone will take Crucial Conversations with some of the most difficult people we know.

Each time I have recommended these to a team, it seemed that they only used one of them to work on their problem.  And that’s when it hit me, what if you used all four of them?

Starting with DISC, we can learn how we are wired as well as how others on our team are wired.  This is the basis of communication.  Knowing whether or not they need time to analyze and think or if they can jump into change quickly.  Gaining that understanding is powerful when we realize they aren’t being difficult, they are just prone to analyzing a lot of data before they make a change.

Next, bring in habit #4 of the 7 Habits:  Seek to Understand.  How powerful is this habit when applied to difficult people?  You can see their tough demeanor soften as you begin to ask questions and sit with them in their workspace to understand their challenges.  More importantly, you understand how you might be able to easily help them in their role.  Then you can try to explain your needs.

Functional versus dysfunctional teams is not a yes or no answer.  Every team has some level of both.  Even the dynasty teams in the NFL have dysfunction:  Green Bay in the 60’s the Steelers in the 70’s, and even the Patriots in the 2000s.  Every one of those teams had their share of dysfunction.  It may take a little longer to go through, but a quick study of Pat Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team is a great way to assess the most pressing problems on your team.  Whether it’s lack of trust, accountability, or inattention to results, you know the base of the pyramid he uses is the most critical skills to develop first.

Last but not least, it falls on someone’s shoulders to have those difficult conversations.  These Crucial Conversations are defined as moments when the stakes are high, emotions are running high and opinions differ. 

Think about some of your greatest challenges:

• Same day orders
• Long distance deliveries
• The boom-and-bust seasons in agribusiness when you are under or over-staffed
• Recently, the lack of service workers to keep equipment running

The stakes are high as you risk losing valuable customers and/or valuable employees.  Emotions run high as we begin to tell the three stories:  the victim story, the villain story, and the helpless story. 

Have you recognized yourself or someone on your team using these stories as an excuse or crutch to allow for poor behavior or performance?  If so, this is the moment to hold a crucial conversation.

You might be asking yourself, why am I preaching this to salespeople?  Aren’t we the ones with the pulse of the customer?  Don’t we know more about how to help customers?  Shouldn’t Greg be telling this to those “other” departments?  I get it.  I was in those exact same shoes.  I definitely struggled with poor-performing departments that didn’t seem to care that we were losing valuable customers if they didn’t improve.

However, I too was a big part of that problem.  I too promised products and services I probably shouldn’t have.  In those darkest of difficulties, I found the concepts explained above always were a better solution than heavy-handed tactics. 

As salespeople, we work hard to prospect new accounts, get them to buy, and then work with them on using or reselling our products.  So, it’s understandable that we are a bit angry when someone won’t process a document, make a return phone call to a customer, or check inventory levels.  We want an immediate solution. 

The next time you are in one of these situations or you are tempted to lose your composure, reread this article or look up the resources mentioned and see which one can be brought in to help you AND the team through it.