What Makes a Great Sales Leader?
by John Crowder for LTEN’s Focus on Training Magazine
Effective sales leaders offer latitude, support and training
In sales, we tend to promote people into leadership roles based heavily on their success as an individual contributor, yet sales success doesn’t automatically translate into effective leadership. Being a great sales leader requires an entirely different skillset and mindset.
Yet even though managers are the leading cause of employee turnover and have the biggest impact on productivity and employee engagement, most companies don’t provide sales leaders with leadership training. Too often we’re failing these new leaders — and their teams.
A sales leader is primarily responsible for growing and developing their people, because their success comes through the success of others. This is a major shift in mindset for most new leaders, but even those who embrace the mission don’t always understand what’s required to make it happen.
Many sales leaders believe the way to help others succeed is to turn them into Mini-Mes: “This worked for me, so you should do it, too.”
This presumes, incorrectly, that everyone will be successful using the same approach. The bigger issue is that telling people what to do is not the way to motivate or bring out the best in high-achieving salespeople.
Much of this problem is rooted in how we train salespeople. In life sciences, most training centers around product and disease state knowledge, so people become conditioned to believe that the value they bring is the information they provide.
When reps get promoted, they perpetuate this mentality as leaders, coaching to and rewarding activity focused on number of calls made, delivery of key marketing messages, customer relationship management entries and other activities. These are important of course, but this isn’t coaching; it’s managing.
Leadership and the Human Side of Selling
One of the most important roles a sales leader plays is that of coach. Plenty has been written about the connection between coaching and sales performance, and leaders say they believe it’s essential for sales success. The question is, why aren’t more managers doing it?
Most say it’s because they don’t have time. When we dug deeper into that question, we discovered some other factors that point to the real reasons managers aren’t coaching. In our study of more than 200 sales leaders, 63% of companies said they have no agreed-upon definition of coaching (managers are left to determine “what counts as coaching”), and half of the firms said they provide no training on coaching for their managers.
Senior leaders complain that sales managers try to lead their teams from “behind the desk,” yet they’re not equipping them with the skills or tools to do much more than tell people what to do. And because most managers are more comfortable with the business side of selling — managing activity and numbers — that’s where they spend their time.
Coaching is about the human side of selling. It’s about bringing out the best in people by seeing more in them than they may even see in themselves. It involves enhancing self-awareness, building confidence and supporting the rep as they progress toward their goals.
None of this is intuitive. It must be developed.
The What, How and Why of Successful Sales Leadership
Being an effective sales leader means giving someone the training, latitude and support to succeed in their job. There are three components of this: the what, the how and the why.
New managers tend to be good at telling people what to do. The problem is, when they’ve done this repeatedly, they have little value left to offer. Many of them resort to micromanaging their team by repeating the same instructions over and over. Or, if they sense the lack of value this brings, many resort to leading from behind a desk.
When you want people to develop new skills, overcome challenges and break through plateaus, you have to help them understand how they’re going to get better. The how is coaching.
The coach’s job is NOT to tell the person what to do but to help them think through their plan and what they’re going to do to achieve it. This involves listening more than talking and asking questions like, how are you going to get there? What are the next steps? What’s in the way? How can I help?
The person may not have a complete picture of what they need to do to improve, so an effective leader continues to coach from a seek-to-understand position: What if we do this? Would it be helpful to…? This creates a dialogue while keeping the ownership and accountability with the sales rep.
The why is the third component, and may be the most critical: Why does this matter? Why are you doing this? Why is it important to you, your patients, your team, the organization?
People will buy in to goals they’ve set for themselves and that are personally meaningful. When they have the why, they’ll figure out the how. Without the why, the person may be compliant but will often lack commitment.
Developing Highly Engaged, High-Performing Sales Teams
Gallup research shows that only about one-third of U.S. employees are engaged, and only 21% strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization. The good news is managers have tremendous influence over employee engagement. The same interpersonal skills that help great salespeople earn trust and create mutually valuable customer relationships enable great sales leaders to develop motivated, confident and high-performing sales teams.
The leader’s responsibility is to help their people grow, step outside their comfort zones and advance their skills and careers, not do their job for them.
As salespeople advance to leadership roles, make sure you’re setting them up for success:
- Define coaching so everyone knows what it means and what the expectation is. Sales leaders need help redefining their role.
- Provide training that addresses both the mindset and skillset of sales leadership.
- Give your managers a sales playbook, common language and a shared definition of “what good looks like” so that they have (and can set) clear expectations for their teams.
In Conclusion
A sales leader who adds value and isn’t just an administrator behind the desk will find that their salespeople trust them and come to them for the big opportunities —because they know the leader has their back and will help them bring out their best.
