Assessing Your Team’s Sales Collaboration Maturity

A maturity model helps organizations understand how sophisticated their strategy and processes are for governing a particular organizational muscle, or capability. 

Maturity models can be especially useful in a sales context because they can serve multiple functions at the same time:  

• Maturity models can be a reference for understanding an organization’s possibilities
• Maturity models are a self-evaluation tool to understand where the team stands today
• Maturity models can be a road map for prioritizing multiple performance improvement initiatives.

At Clari, we created this sales collaboration maturity model to help sales leaders understand the key aspects of rep-to-prospect collaboration. Ideally, proceeding through the model’s five stages can foster revenue collaboration and lift sales team performance.

Sales managers who want to understand where the greatest gains can be made across their team can use this model to evaluate individual contributors, their revenue-critical employees as a whole, and their technology stack.

As an organization’s collaboration capability increases, two things happen:

• The sales team becomes more successful at closing existing business. In a way, you become a bigger fish in your current pond.
• The organization moves upmarket, winning larger, more complex deals because they have the additional skills required to be competitive. In this way, you move up to a bigger pond.

The exact percentage improvement in close rate will depend on the industry’s overall sophistication level versus your particular team.

Let’s look at the five steps involved in evaluating your team’s collaboration maturity. 

1. Evaluate your team’s current maturity level

The first step in this maturity model is to evaluate where you are today. Then, look at which channels would yield the most capability gains for your organization.

Evaluate your reps

Ideally, you can evaluate each of your reps based on where they rank for the top three channels. Sales reps may not be adept or accurate in assessing their own performance.  

With this in mind, you can use some of the questions below to evaluate their collaboration maturity.

What channels should you prioritize?

Once you’ve evaluated your team’s current performance level, look at each channel and prioritize where to focus your performance improvement efforts.

In general, moving all channels in tandem from left to right will yield a greater performance boost than focusing on one channel at the expense of the others. For example, looking at the graphic above, moving all five channels from Ad Hoc to Managed is more effective than moving a single channel, such as Buyer Journey, from Ad Hoc to Optimized, setting aside the other channels.

Not every channel carries the same weight in every industry. If you’re selling a commodity in a mid-sized market, and there’s plenty of room to grow, then improving Data Gathering and the Buyer Journey will have a greater impact on sales than investing resources developing your People channel, from rapport-based reps to industry influencers.

2. The Tech Stack: Thinking from the Prospect’s Perspective

Technology alone can’t drive positive change in process, but we include a Tech Stack channel because technology can help, or hinder, your ability to govern the revenue process.

Our maturity model assumes a minimum baseline of email, some kind of web conference software, and a CRM.

Collaboration is a two-way endeavor, so think about the sales cycle from your prospects’ perspective when evaluating your tech stack.

Your prospects already have a full-time job, with problems and priorities of their own. Your sales rep is asking them to carve out time to consider your solution. But the rep’s full ask is even bigger—calling upon them to leverage their precious political capital inside their organization, and getting key decision makers’ support.

As collaboration capability improves, the technology stack should be more and more supportive of both the rep and the prospect.

Adding file sharing is a basic improvement over emailing everything. A more substantial improvement is offering dedicated collaboration tools for prospects’ use. This tool can start as a simple deal room, growing with more automation and integrations as the model matures.

We suggest using a Mutual Action Plan with Clari Align to assure sellers are in complete lockstep with the entire buying committee.

3. Forecasting and coaching

The number one cause of sales manager terminations is failure to provide an accurate sales forecast.

With a well-defined collaboration process, the sales operation team ingests forecast indicators not only from the reps’ actions, but from the buying teams as well. With better collaboration, reps are able to penetrate deeper into the buying team and use their engagement as a buying signal. These signals improve forecast accuracy and unlock greater revenue precision.

Likewise, managers can use historical collaboration data to benchmark deal performance at a more granular level, and then use those trend lines to coach reps or proactively identify and save blocked deals. This way, you avoid revenue leak—the revenue you’ve earned but haven’t captured.

4. People: Charm only gets so far

The most basic Ad Hoc collaborator relies on individual sales talent to move a deal forward. Individual skills of persuasion and closing are a perfectly acceptable way to hit quota, but these skills aren’t reliable for organizations that need to scale, nor do they work in complex environments where the rep may never meet higher-level decision makers.

More sophisticated collaborators plan first on establishing trust and credibility in a reliable and consistent manner, and they have a mechanism in place to transfer that credibility deep inside the buyer’s organization.

Credible educators can share good insights with their buyers. These insights don’t have to be created by the rep, but they should be well-curated and accessible to the prospect and, by extension, the entire buying team.

As reps become better at collaboration, they are able to give more and at a higher level of value. Eventually, instead of negotiating price with a procurement team, they’ll be discussing strategy with the CEO—and the sale will close won as a natural by-product of a shared best practice.

5. Buyer Journey and Sales Methodology: Real life vs. training theory

Collaboration is the core of solution selling, and most sales frameworks emphasize collaboration with the customer. Successful collaboration is characterized by two key features: framework implementation and awareness of key players and their respective roles. Let’s look at each of these in turn. 

Framework implementation. If a sales leader imposes a top-down framework on a team that does not have sufficient collaboration maturity to actually adopt the framework into their daily process, the result will be failure.

Make sure that your coaching, playbook (Buyer Journey), and tech stack are all ready to support the methodology, each being at least defined, and preferably standardized and governed, before seeking to implement a new system.

Key players and their roles

Most reps understand that the more complex the deal, the more stakeholders on the buying team. Reps also realize they should engage with as many of those decision makers as possible.

It’s less common, however, to have a revenue collaboration process that accounts for multiple buyers.

Reps should also recognize that collaboration means they are part of a larger selling team. They should make it easier for the buying team to know their sales team counterparts.

This many-to-many relationship can be hard to manage, especially for the buying team, whose members have other priorities. A team with a more mature collaboration capability recognizes this and makes it easy for the buying team to see the extended selling team.

Achieving clarity about key players and their roles has a side benefit of enhancing your overall team credibility, especially if a competitor is in the running.

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