Managing Internal Conflict in the sales teams

Abstract

For any organization, the sales persons are the soldiers on the front lines of business. Certainly, if anyone can claim the title of “company warrior”, it would be the members of the sales force. After all, developing new client relationships - and managing existing ones - is an uphill battle. It is interesting, though, that many of the battles that sales persons choose to fight are with the people on their own side - that is, those individuals within their own organizations who are also selling but to different channels or customer groups. My experience has been that, in most companies where alternate distribution channels operate in parallel, the sales team managing one type of channel often has a poor, even contentious, relationship with the other teams. Most of this friction is avoidable and has its roots in the different perceptions that sales teams carry about their counterparts. In this article, the effort has been to explore the sources of these conflicts based on my experience and discussion with sales persons in some companies. The article also tries to suggest some measures to avoid the conflict within the sales department.