The Art of Sales Leadership
Inspiring Your Team to Success
As the leader of your business, your behaviors, tactics, style, and methods, are the guide for the entire organization toward success in a world of uncontrollable, external variables. In the following, we’ll delve into the art of sales leadership, understanding the dynamics of your style, and how your style directly influences the performance and morale of your sales team. As the leader, your role extends beyond your office and the boardroom; it's about inspiring and guiding your sales force.
Art vs. Science
Often, the topic of sales being 50% art and 50% science comes up in discussions with leaders. It bears mentioning that overusing the 50% art is a common trap that founders, owners, and leaders fall into. The reason it’s a trap is because there is not enough structure to support others selling and closing the way the leader can because the leaders have unchecked power over pricing, scope, resource allocation and margin management. To rebalance this equation and ratios the first step is in the science area of leadership; creating a defined sales process. Inside this process you can leverage the art and so can others on your sales team.
Leadership Style – It’s Not Your Clothes
The qualities and strategies you leverage inside your organization can transform your sales leadership practices into a beacon of inspiration, steering your team toward unprecedented success. Your teams are mimicking your style, approach, and process. Your style is either a summary of the learned behaviors you are carrying forward from your experiences and reading, or it’s the direct opposite behaviors of the experiences you have ‘endured’. So, is your team learning from you or enduring your leadership style?
Methods = Process and Systems
I’ve had the great fortune to work for many good and great leaders and the common thread among them is the ability to get the most out of their teams consistently. Not only are those teams a joy to be a part of; winning feels good, but they attract talent, clients, and bring others along on the success journey. Combining the two previous topics of Art & Style are components of how these high-performing leaders is certainly part of the winning mix but being able to repeat the success is dependent on the leader having a system, a methodology, and discipline to the process of building great teams. Drawing from a sports analogy: championship teams win one season; a championship dynasty wins many seasons over and in close succession. To build a high-performance sales organization, we are attempting to build dynasties. The components are now expanded beyond art and style to the process, group training, uniform processes, leading and lagging measures, alignment across departments, creating responsive and nimble solutions that are aligned to ever changing customer expectations, and individual coaching.
Without a method or sales leadership process, it is far too difficult to manage, hire, coach, and measure people. But, with the process, a leader can do all those things effectively based on the proven standards in the defined process. The art of leadership starts with a well-designed process.
Wrapping the process is an inspiration component, tying back to the art and style components, that allows a leader to be creative in the process steps and leverage unique individual qualities that complement the process and result in significant performance improvement gains. Consider your best sales leader or most influential mentor, the qualities they possessed on an interpersonal level were backed by a process that supported their ability to use those qualities in their leadership style. Those leadership building blocks are the ones to emulate, carry forward and instill in our teams. Building more successful teams largely starts with a thoughtful approach to the process, system, and method by which you will lead your organization.