Defining the cross-functional sales team

- The days of having only the traditional sales team responsible for revenue growth are a long past. Now, there must be a collaborative effort across various functions within an organization to achieve success. A cross-functional team is typically a work group made up of employees from different functional areas within an organization who collaborate to reach a stated objective. A software company, for example, could create a cross-functional team with workers from, let's say, engineering, sales, marketing, customer service, all working as equal stakeholders to produce and deliver a new application. Now, in some cases, a cross-functional team will also include customers or other outside stakeholders in the project. Organizations often create cross-functional teams on a temporary basis to function as a unit for the duration of a specific project existing from the start of that project until, ideally, the project's successful completion. However, some companies organize their workforce in permanent cross-functional teams instead of a more traditional hierarchical structure that includes clear divisions of professional disciplines. Cross-functional teams can be used in organizations of all sizes. A cross-functional team places less emphasis on the member-specific roles within the organization, and more emphasis on communication and working together to accomplish organizational goals. Companies use cross-functional teams to help them produce better results more quickly. As such, companies expect these teams to be high-performance teams. The strategy behind cross-functional teams is by bringing together workers from the different business divisions with a stake in a project, the team can more effectively and efficiently address what needs to get done. And by collaborating together in a single unit with a common objective, the workers don't waste time passing a project from one department to the next as they would in a more traditional team arrangement. Now, as such, cross-functional teams reduce the repetition and need for revisions that may typically arise in more traditional team or project management arrangements where a project tends to move through these various departments for input and review, and input and review in a more linear fashion. Now, for our course, we will be focusing on cross-functional sales teams, where the overarching objectives are to help work collaboratively across functional areas in order to identify, specify, and move a prospect from merely potential to a buying customer in as little time as necessary. After all, the old adage is still true: nothing consequential happens in a company until somebody sells something. Now with that in mind, all of us are smarter than one of us, so working together should allow us to all be more successful faster. Having the right members assembled in the right way will help you increase the effectiveness of your selling efforts and drive your revenue growth even faster.