Below are 15 practical steps to help your sales team develop the ability to pursue complex opportunities. This training session should take approximately 90 minutes.

(As seen in SellingPower magazine. This article is based on a conversation with AchieveGlobal's President and CEO, Sharon Daniels, and Jim Wilcox, regional training manager of AchieveGlobal.)

Prior to Your Sales Meeting

1. Obtain the support of your own management to set up a strategic-account team that will pursue complex opportunities. Explain that you want to provide some structure to that activity so that it has a more manageable impact on the company and better overall results.

2. Determine which members of your sales team have leadership skills and sufficient business acumen to coordinate a complex sales opportunity. Speak with each person individually and recruit him or her to become members of your strategic-sales team.

3. Speak with the managers of the different groups inside your company who are needed in complex opportunities.

Get a commitment from them that they will appoint liaisons who will work with the strategic sales team to better manage communication among the various groups.

4. Meet privately with each of these liaisons in order to explain why you're setting up a strategic sales team and how he or she can help it to be successful without adversely impacting his or her own organization. Obtain each liaison's commitment to attend the initial meeting of the strategic- sales team.

5. Select from your current pipeline an opportunity that looks likely to be complex and will involve many organizations in order to develop and close. Sufficiently research the opportunity, and create a summary slide.

At Your Sales Meeting

6. Begin the meeting with enthusiasm. Explain to your team members and the liaisons that the purpose of this meeting is to establish better communication between the various groups and brainstorm ways to ensure that resources are appropriately applied toward the opportunity to be discussed.

7. Introduce the opportunity. Explain why it is important to your own organization to win the deal. Discuss resources that you think will be needed, i.e including customer service excellence. Describe the outcomes the customer wants to accomplish. Focusing on the opportunity at hand gets team members engaged quickly and focused on how to win the business.

8. Using the slide that you prepared in step 5, summarize the sample complex opportunity. If the sales rep responsible for that account is present, ask him or her to provide any additional details that he or she thinks are pertinent.

9. Open the floor for discussion and brainstorming of how to handle the various customer organizations that will need to be convinced.

Encourage the liaisons to contribute their perspectives about the concerns and interests of their counterparts in the customer organization.

10. Use a flip chart to record the suggestions that are made. As you fill the pages, tape them to the wall so that the team can conveniently refer to them during the remainder of the meeting. Spend approximately 45 minutes on this step. You should now be about an hour into the meeting.

11. Open the floor for discussion and brainstorming of how your firm can use its internal resources, including best practice sales training and particular customer service skills, to address the challenges that the opportunity is likely to present. When a suggestion or idea involves another group, ask the liaison to provide advice on how best to secure that resource without disrupting current work.

12. Continue to use a flip chart to record specific suggestions and ideas. When you've gathered approximately 10 suggestions, explain that working any further would simply create information overload. Make a commitment to work with the responsible sales rep, perhaps a person with excellent leadership skills, on this opportunity to come up with a specific plan to pursue it.

13. Thank the attendees, and end the meeting with enthusiasm. After Your Sales Meeting

14. Work with the sales rep on the specific opportunity to produce an action plan with schedules and milestones. Help develop that opportunity while keeping other members of the team informed on your progress.

15. In subsequent meetings, work with other members of the strategic-sales team on developing a limited number of similar opportunities.

Important: Do not pursue more complex opportunities than your firm can reasonably handle.

Ask your liaisons for a reality check; can your firm provide the resources you're requesting?