Authentic Sales Leadership … The Missing Link
1 December 2007
Have you even considered what constitutes an elite sales person? If so, you may have already come to the conclusion it can take a rare and perhaps unique personality type to excel at sales.
For a large number of businesses, finding, developing, and most importantly, retaining successful sales talent can be a costly challenge. However, when done right, the results can be the difference between profound success and mere survival.
In general, the psychodynamics and idiosyncratic behaviours inherent to ‘traditional’ salesmanship can be at times questionable. In fact, some sales stars could often be described as egotistical, disorganised, domineering, controlling, manipulating and downright difficult to manage. Sound like you? Perhaps not, most sales stars are often far too time poor to read articles on sales, they are just too busy doing deals!
Over the years, personal experience as a sales person, both running my own companies and others, has enlightened me to the many challenges a business can face in demonstrating effective sales leadership. In particular how costly getting it wrong can be when a business fails to nurture and provide its sales talent with an inspiring environment to thrive and prosper. Entrepreneurs, Directors and others who have handed over the sales management and development reins to a member of staff, who is not an equity partner, please take heed. History and the copious number of sales management books demonstrate it’s only a matter of time before unsatisfied sales managers and sales people will move on, in doing so, more often than not go straight to your competition. Ouch! In many cases business owners spend precious time, energy and resources training their competitor’s sales staff. Sounds crazy doesn’t it?! Well sadly it happens all too frequently in modern business.
To make matters worse, disgruntled and emotionally charged sales people after leaving a company will spread like rampant bees, fertilising and impregnating the competitors in the market place with your valuable intellectual property. To add insult to injury, in worst-case scenarios, these IP bees may even take your clients and business potential with them. This raises another legally contentious issue surrounding well drafted confidentiality and restriction contracts. From talking to many different people and organisations these restrictions are often difficult and expensive to enforce. In this scenario prevention is always better than cure. This article is offered to help you as an entrepreneur or manager address this situation well before things get to the exit phase.
All this sounds rather daunting doesn’t it? So are we safe to assume having exceptional sales talent can come at a cost? The answer is yes… Hell Yes! However it doesn’t always have to be the case. Today progressive and innovative business leaders are using new and insightful methods to significantly reduce attrition rates and exit damages from losing sales stars, whilst also maximising the potential of the sales team by creating a sales culture and sales leadership structure that supports and develops sales stars to shine, thrive and prosper.
I love the business axiom; ‘people don’t leave a company - they leave a manager’, as it reflects my experience that in today’s market there are far too many Directors or Sales Managers ill equipped with the required people leadership and sales management skills, behaviour and tools necessary to grow and develop sales people to the required success levels.
In business I am an advocate of outsourcing all non- core functions to an expert, such as legal and accounting services etc. However, outsourcing the success of your sales model by hiring a sales person, sales manager or BDM, in the hope this person will make sales and grow the business is ambitious, at worst, - simply bad business. Many business owners often choose to take this route because they either find selling their products or services challenging themselves, or don’t feel they have the required sales experience or background, or simply do not enjoy the sales process. In particular rejection, and we all know rejection is indeed part of selling. It’s often said in sales parlance, it’s not how many Yes’ you receive, but how many No’s that determine a sales person’s success. However an entrepreneur, who in his or her mind has developed a great business idea, generally doesn’t like hearing the idea is unacceptable to others, more often than not, numerous times a day. This can in no uncertain terms be de-motivating to the uninitiated. So one of the best ways to over come this, they believe, is to send someone else out sell their idea for them. This notion has its merits, however in many cases business owners are far too whiling and eager to hand-over the success of their business to a sales person or BDM without having first defined a sales culture and sales leadership structure to guide, support and develop them.
Usually in the above scenario, when the sales person [not surprisingly fails to perform] through a lack of clarity, structure and support, the owner or manager then becomes frustrated or disenchanted with the sales person, and as a result, more often than not, the connection between manager and sales person diminishes. Thus instead of passionately prospecting and bringing in business, the sales person is on seek.com.au looking for a new job. This can be equally frustrating for both manager and sales person. Sound familiar? I hope not. But if it does, then let’s explore, how to create a successful sales culture and sales leadership model to support and develop sales talent.
Business owners and managers that have created a successful sales culture and sales leadership structure do so to ensure that their product or service is passionately delivered to their customers in line with the unique selling proposition. They also ensure that the purpose of the sales model is broken into what we call ‘value components’. A value component is a core sales function usually performed by one person in a predetermined manner. Example functions include: target market research, prospect generation and appointment setting, presenting and conversion, project and account management, and customer replication etc and so forth. To maximise the potential and output of a value component a specialist usually performs a small number of value components only, and they do so at a more advanced and effective level than anyone could achieve by performing multiple value components concurrently.
A sales person’s time is best spent on core activities that promote the most value per time spent to achieve maximum output.
Value x Time = Output [V x T = O]
My experience and research over many years has found that contrary to conventional sales management wisdom, multi tasking dilutes and reduces sales performance, in such critical areas as: skills and behaviour development, quality, process, efficiency and of course output.
The traditional Business Development Manager (BDM) role inherent in many sales models often turns out as a ‘Bad Decision by Management’. An unstructured BDM role promotes multi-tasking and de- specialisation. A BDM, by nature, requires a broader range of basic skill sets and a significant dilution of elite skills. I often liken a BDM to a person who is a doctor, dentist and brain surgeon. The odds of such a hybrid performing successfully are at best remote. The scenario is simply not feasible in time, skills, mind set, required level of training or experience. And with all do respect who wants their brain tumour removed by a dentist? Sorry give me the best damn brain surgeon in town, my life is a stake and I want the best person for the job. The best person is always a specialist.
In all seriousness, I have seen some BDM models run on the modus operandi; Bring in business or you can look for a new job, here are you business cards and a yellow pages, now hop to it! How inspiring! Is it any wonder most of these sales models promote disloyalty? Surprisingly this type of sales model is not uncommon, and even less surprising is that most just don’t work.
A multi dimensional sales person or BDM will ultimately result in sales entropy. As a BDM becomes busier, cold calling, prospect generating, proposal writing, project and account managing, acquiring new business, and nurturing and growing a client list, etc and so forth, they become less productive and efficient as less time is spent per value component, resulting in the role becoming difficult to manage and proportionately inefficient across multiple value components. On the flip side, the busier a specialist becomes, the more they develop best practices, as they hone their talents and behaviours, as more efficiencies and skill is created through repetition. After all repetition is the mother of skill. An effective sales person is most productive when focusing energy, time and resources on creating and converting opportunities and building relationships, so don’t complicate things, just let them do what they do best, which is to SHOW YOU THE MONEY!
I have known great sales people with the ability to literally close deals until the cows come home, but when it comes to combining and integrating multiple value components they really struggle. Whilst I understand there are some great BDM’s out there in the market place, (and to them I say congratulations on performing outside the odds) they are, in few and far between, and are often found to be have a clearly defined sales leadership structure, complimented with the appropriate support, sales tools and behaviours to develop and guide them.
Elite sales people, much like professional athletes, are usually specialists. If you look at the elite of the elite, the likes of Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, or David Beckham, to name a few. These super stars rarely step outside the realms of what they do best. Tiger drives, chips and putts, Federer serves and volleys and Beck’s bends. Pretty simple isn’t it, or is it? I don’t care what anyone says, it’s very hard to achieve an elite level in life multi-tasking. Superstar sales people, like athletes, are no different. In fact, I like to call anyone serious about selling a ‘sales athlete’. And to be an elite sales athlete you need focus, determination and an unwavering commitment to self improvement. Most elite athletes train, in some instances every day for several hours, they then rest, recover and rejuvenate, and then only compete at a very small percentage of the time in comparison.
Business people on the other hand do the exact opposite, they spend most of their time competing and little if any time training and developing skills. Can you imagine a professional athlete competing 40 – 50 hours a week for 48 weeks of the year? This is what the average business person does. This scenario in athletic terms would lead to exhaustion, fatigue and injury, not to mention more than likely a mental break down.
Training and development is fundamental to a sales team and businesses success. As an example: I religiously take my sales team through weekly role playing and training sessions to get them in the customer sales zone, in these sessions we collaboratively explore and overcome objections and obstacles, using real life scenarios to establish best practices and hone and develop skills and behaviours. Each sales person is regularly trained and developed to understand our company’s, and their own personal, unique selling proposition, and why it connects to the customers, and how to deliver it with passion and conviction. A new sales person will be allocated a senior mentor during their initial training and development phases, and a buddy will be allocated post training to continually develop skills. This ensures best practices are integrated and past down from generation to generation with very little if any dilution of our USP. One of the best ways to learn - is to teach, so both student and mentor benefit. I also have a library of books I lend out to sales people, not only books on sales but also self development to spirituality to quantum physics to business. Knowledge is power, and the more knowledge your sales people have combined with action and a clear direction the better they will perform.
I have always taken great pride in developing my staff and sales team members. I want them to develop into better people and I also want them to be and have more in life. If that means competing less and training more, then so be it. Most sales people work 5 days a week, and many struggle to find the physical and mental energy and motivation necessary to be on their A game every day. This is a real challenge for business owners and sales leaders to overcome. A great question to ask your sales manager is; if their sales team worked/competed 4 days a week, trained and developed skills 1 day a week, and had a 3 day weekend once a month, would the sales people perform better? Many respond with a curious and somewhat confused answer, along the lines of; ‘hmm… we have never thought of dong things that way, so the answer is we don’t know’. This way of doing things, may or may not work for your business, however this type of creative thinking is what builds exceptional businesses. In the new economy competition if fierce and businesses need to come up with new and exciting way to gain a competitive edge, one of the most effective methods is to have your sales team on their A game every day, or at the very least as much as possible.
Life is essentially about expressing yourself creatively and being happy and fulfilled. One of my roles as a business owner and sales leader is to create that for my sales people. Happy and fulfilled staff will generally flow into the business and out the other end into the customers. Taking a genuine interest in the well being and development of your sales staff is not only important it’s fundamental to knowing and understanding them. You may also be surprised to learn that not all sales people are solely motivated by money, some of the best sales people I have known have been fierce competitors, but they also desired to be respected and appreciated, to the point of taking a pay cut if it meant the respect and recognition for what hey were creating. Taking the time to learn and understand what really inspires and motivates your sales people will go along way to keeping them fulfilled in their roles.
Business leaders that effectively demonstrate a clearly thought-out and well structured sales leadership strategy that guides, directs, supports and encourages your sales stars to thrive and prosper, will shave years off their path to profitability. Doing so will also protect the integrity of your brand and intellectual property, and provide your sales people with the necessary skills and behaviours they need to build strong connections, both internally with team members, and externally with customers. These connections form the foundations of a BOOMing sales model.
Inspire,
Trent Leyshan
Founder