Perhaps the greatest barrier that limits the growth potential of a company is the lack of great sales leadership. Sales and leadership can tremendously impact each other, often fueling a virtuous cycle. But the reverse is also true – when leadership falters, so do sales.
One of the bigger challenges is getting the right person to lead sales. This is critical because
Sales leadership requires more than being a good seller. It happens quite often – a top salesperson gets promoted to sales manager, often with little training, only for the organization to realize that the skill set that made them excellent at their previous job is of little help in this new role.
Many companies have been through this – promoting their top salesperson into a sales leadership role, before promptly watching them fail. This is because sales leadership is a fundamentally different job, and companies that prioritize selling as the key skill for sales leadership roles are missing out on a wonderful opportunity to boost performance.
And it’s not sales management either – although the two terms are often incorrectly used interchangeably. And while it’s true that leaders have to manage, and managers have to lead, the actual role these two play is quite different in an organization. A sales manager handles the day-to-day operations of a sales team, including providing support, training, and hiring – but they rely on the precise vision of a sales leader, who sets the tone for the sales culture and strategy of the company.
As you can see from this report from Hubspot, sales leaders spend the majority of their time either managing the sales process or setting the right culture for engagement and performance.
World-class sales leadership is about embracing both of these roles.
They realize that even for top performers, the sales environment can be highly turbulent with big ups and downs – win a big order one day and lose a client the next. They recognize that a part of their responsibility as a leader is to create the right environment to deal with this emotional rollercoaster. They deal with emotional turbulence with focus, clarity, decisiveness, and resolve.
They also realize that leaders can manage without trying to take control. As such, they keep abreast of the status of all sales opportunities and guide through all the steps of the sales process.
Here are 3 vital skills that every sales leader should have.
Technology Proficiency and Data-driven Mentality
The world of sales is rife with new technological innovations that enable salespeople to be more organized and productive. As a sales leader, not only must you have an informed opinion on the most important technology trends in the sales world, you must constantly strive to iterate and upgrade your technology stack where appropriate.
Most sales leaders have great instincts, but also understand that they need to back up their strategy with hard data. Data that offers a clear window into the buying habits of their core audience is a key pillar in the technology stack of a successful sales team. This can include customer behavior data, sales funnel data, social selling analytics, etc.
Building the Right Sales and People Capability
Building the right capability when it comes to selling goes two ways – you have to train and coach your sales team, and you have to augment this team with further capabilities through tactical hiring. While sales leaders are often not directly involved in hiring, they do set the strategy for how to build the sales team and define the sales culture of the organization, and thus play a pivotal role in building this capability.
A good leader leads through inspiration, not fear and threats. The best sales leaders know both how to lead, and when to lead. The latter is critical. They’re also great listeners, and take feedback with an open mind. They realize that feedback from their team, especially around sales strategy, is critical as it’s one of their most valuable resources.
Coaching is one of the most important components of sales leadership, because at its core, as Forbes puts it, “selling solutions is a communication strategy employing a set of flexible practices”. Without coaching, it is almost impossible to pick up the subtleties of the selling process – even for the most intuitive. The best sales leaders understand that sales are strategy, and strategy can be coached.
Crafting the right sales strategy
Every day, sales professionals meet potential prospects and customers and make critical decisions on what products, services, or specific feature sets they will highlight in their meetings. Effective sales leaders can craft strategies that salespeople align with.
They put their salespeople in positions where they can discuss issues of mutual strategic importance and execute on aligning the value you provide to your clients with their needs.
This is why effective sales leaders narrow down on both the sales strategy, and the sales experience, so the process of sales is just like strategy execution.
Bottom line: Today’s complex organizational hierarchy means that most organizations have multiple roles for sales managers. But the role of a sales leader is more crucial and necessary than ever before. With the very thin line between sales enablement and sales prevention, it is the quality of leadership that will decide which side you will be on.
(The author is Mr. Rajat Vohra, Chief Sales Officer, Redington Limited and the views expressed in this article are his own)
