Value-added selling is a business philosophy that transcends a sales training course. It is a course of action for the entire company. It is an integrated sales and operations model for delivering on the great promise of your value proposition. The sales force may sell the first experience with your company, but it is the total experience with your company that brings customers back. What good is promising without delivering?

This partnership of sales and operations is the power of "we." And "we" is greater than "me." This synergy is the opposite of companies where silos exist and each department views other departments as the enemy. Sales is not the enemy. Management is not the enemy. Customer service is not the enemy. Parts and service are not the enemy. Credit is not the enemy. The factory is not the enemy.

Companies that permit and encourage silos waste a tremendous amount of competitive energy opening their doors in the morning. And with all the competition you have in your market, do you really need competitors inside your own walls? Silos exist because someone in management thinks it's a good idea for departments to battle each other. Well, it's not a good idea. If you're a manager, owner, or executive in this type of company, show some leadership and tear down the silos.

Silos are nothing new. They've been around since people started competing with each other. Cain and Abel. Oedipus and his father. Even Lincoln addressed this early in his political career in his famous "House Divided" speech: "...a house divided against itself cannot stand..." Of course, he wasn't the first to say this; he was quoting from the Bible.

Later, in his first inaugural address, painfully aware of the gathering storm, he said: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies." Then, he appealed to the union, "by the better angels of our nature." He saw the power of "we" and the potential destructiveness of "me."

To maximize the value you deliver, you must concentrate and direct all of your resources at delivering this value, not fighting each other. It's not my customer or your customer; it's our customer. This is the attitude of "we."

Jack Welch wrote that, "None of us are as strong individually as we are collectively." He understood the power of "we." Walter Wriston, former CEO of Citibank, once said, "Diversity is a fact of contemporary organizational life and will become increasingly so in the future. The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of the people in his or her organization is going to blow the competition away."

We may have diverse goals, but they need not be disparate goals. We may have different objectives but the same mission—to serve customers. That is the power of "we"—all of us moving in the same direction, organized around a simple idea...serving customers. To realize the full power of your organization, you must tear down the silos that interfere with your company's mission.