Building a Culture of Team Selling: Lessons from Steve Matas, President of Advanced Clinical
In sales organizations, chaos often masquerades as flexibility. Reps operate with their own selling styles, different teams call on the same accounts with no coordination, and leaders struggle to track performance in a way that drives real growth. Sound familiar?
Here’s how Advanced Clinical, under the leadership of Steve Matas and with support from Next Level, tackled this challenge and how you can apply these lessons to your own sales organization.
Uniting a Sales Organization
When Steve Matas first engaged with Next Level in 2008, he was leading multiple sales teams at a national IT services firm that had just undergone a major acquisition. The company was experiencing a common post-merger challenge: two different organizations with conflicting sales approaches, client engagement strategies, and operational models.
Without a unified go-to-market strategy, sales teams competed against each other, messaging was inconsistent, and opportunities for cross-selling were lost.
“We had really no continuity across how we did business, how we sold types of customers, ideal client profiles, hiring profiles,” Matas explained. “It was pretty much two very different companies that we were trying to bring together and standardize a lot of things.”
A decade later, Matas found himself in a similar situation when he joined Advanced Clinical, a global clinical research organization. With multiple business lines, contract research services, functional service outsourcing, and strategic resourcing, the company had three separate sales teams, often calling on the same accounts but without coordination. Instead of collaborating, these teams were unintentionally working against each other.
“One of the challenges when I got here eight years ago is those teams didn’t really work real well together. They were almost competing. We could have the same customer, same biotech company, for example, and we’d have two different sellers calling on that customer, but they were almost competing with one another.”
Creating a Scalable, Repeatable Sales Process
The core challenge both organizations faced was a lack of standardization in sales processes and methodologies. Without a unified approach to:
Ideal Client Profiles: Sales teams were unclear about which prospects fit best and often chased unqualified leads.
Sales Messaging & Strategy: Different teams presented different value propositions, leading to confusion and inefficiency.
Collaboration & Cross-Selling: Sellers weren’t incentivized or equipped to introduce other service lines to their customers.
Accountability & Sales Culture: There was no shared language or process for coaching, deal reviews, or performance tracking.
At Advanced Clinical, these challenges were even more pressing given their long, complex sales cycles and the consultative nature of selling services in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.
Matas saw an opportunity to bring structure and alignment to the sales organization. Having experienced firsthand how Next Level’s approach helped his previous company grow from $400M to nearly $1B in revenue, he knew that embedding a proven, repeatable sales methodology could be a game-changer.
He re-engaged with Next Level to:
Implement a unified sales methodology that every seller, manager, and leader would use.
Align sales strategy with business objectives, ensuring all teams were targeting the right opportunities.
Embed a sales coaching culture where managers could support and develop their teams more effectively.
Increase cross-selling and team selling by breaking down silos and incentivizing collaboration.
Next Level’s Sales Transformation Framework
Next Level deployed a multi-layered approach that included leadership coaching, sales training, and ongoing reinforcement to ensure long-term impact.
1. Sales Leadership First: The Foundation of Culture Change
One of the biggest lessons from Matas’ past experience was the importance of starting with sales leadership before rolling out training to the full team. If managers weren’t aligned, training the sales force would be ineffective.
“We could have trained the salespeople all we wanted, but if they went back to their manager and the manager wasn’t bought in on it, it was going to flop.”
Next Level worked closely with Advanced Clinical’s sales leaders to define the company’s ideal sales process, from prospecting and qualifying to deal execution and account management. Leaders learned how to coach and hold their teams accountable using tools like the Pre-Call Planner and Call Debrief Tool.
2. A Common Sales Language & Methodology
The team adopted Next Level’s psychology-driven sales approach, built on the Sandler Selling System. This created a common framework for engaging with clients, ensuring every seller followed the same structure:
Up-Front Contracts: Setting clear expectations for every client conversation.
Pain Funnel: Asking the right questions to uncover deep business challenges.
Decision-Making Process: Understanding how each client makes buying decisions to shorten sales cycles.
Post-Sale Strategy: Ensuring client success and creating upsell opportunities.
This shifted the team from reactive, transactional sales to proactive, consultative selling—a crucial adjustment for selling high-value services.
“Really getting one clear language that we used... what’s your up-front contract for this call? What were the key takeaways? What are the key learnings from that conversation? What’s our clear next step?”
3. Breaking Down Silos & Driving Collaboration
To solve the issue of competing sales teams, Next Level implemented strategies to encourage joint sales calls and shared account planning. This allowed sellers to:
Work together on key accounts instead of operating in silos.
Leverage different service lines to provide a more holistic solution to clients.
Utilize referral incentives so sales reps are motivated to introduce other teams.
“Once we had salespeople doing joint meetings, and they started seeing the benefit... they started realizing, ‘Oh well, if I bring this person in with me, I have a better chance of winning.’”
4. Tracking & Reinforcement for Continuous Improvement
Next Level didn’t just deliver training and leave; they built a system for reinforcement to ensure lasting impact.
Sales leaders used Sandler’s KARE tool to categorize accounts into Keep, Attain, Recapture, and Expand, ensuring strategic focus.
Sales teams conducted post-call debriefs to extract lessons and refine their approach.
The company tracked cross-selling success to measure how many clients were engaging with multiple service lines.
Coaching Never Stops: Even Tiger Woods had a coach throughout his career. Ongoing development is critical to staying sharp and growing revenue.
“Tiger Woods had a coach his whole career, right? It’s not like he got so good at golf that he just stopped having a coach.”
The Results: A Unified Sales Force Driving Growth
70% of Advanced Clinical’s clients now use more than one service line, compared to just a handful when Matas first joined.
A $53M deal, the largest in company history, was closed using Sandler methodologies.
Sales collaboration increased with reps actively working together on accounts.
Sales leaders became true coaches, reinforcing skills and behaviors daily.
Lessons Learned & Takeaways for Sales Leaders
If your sales team is facing inconsistency, lack of collaboration, or stalled growth, it’s time to standardize your process and build a culture of team selling.
How to Get Started:
Align Sales Leadership First – If your managers aren’t bought in, your reps won’t be either.
Create a Standardized Sales Process – Adopt a repeatable, structured methodology that everyone follows.
Break Down Silos with Joint Selling – Encourage cross-team collaboration and incentive sharing.
Embed Reinforcement & Coaching – Sales isn’t a one-time training event; it’s an ongoing process.
At Advanced Clinical, these strategies transformed chaos into consistency and turned internal competitors into high-performing teams.
For Matas, the decision to work with Next Level—twice—was simple:
“They really get to know your business and industry... they tailor the methodology to how your customers buy.”
If your company is facing sales inconsistency, lack of collaboration, or stalled growth, Next Level’s sales transformation framework can help.
Next Level can help you build a scalable, high-performance sales culture that drives real revenue growth. Let’s talk.
