Sales Leadership - A question of becoming a great sales leader

Hey, Jay here,

Recently I was asked a question by one of my contacts on Linked-In. I think it was a very brave and interesting question and I thought it was worthwhile adding it and my response to my my blog:

Question: "I hear all the time that to change how sales people do their work, I must sell the change in a way that shows my sales people 'What's in it for me' to help convince them that the change is a worthwhile one. The Sales people I'm trying to convince of change are the sales people who, as part of their standard work, have administration work to complete before the order move to next stage of the process. Where the traditional sales person would spend probably 95% of their time selling, nowadays (for us) this is probably only 50% of the time."

I would like to work with the Sales people to ensure that this administration work is done right the first time, so that the knock-on effect of the customer order is not impacted negatively by their work. For these Sales people, what is the 'What's in it for me' that will encourage them to be 'Right First Time' everytime? Please help. NOTE: I'm not looking for IT solutions, just trying to understand what makes a sales person tick."

Jay: This is a really interesting question and i'm sure many experts out there will weigh in with with advice and tips on how address this with your sales people from a process and systems standpoint or from a CRM solutions standpoint.

This though seems to me to be a question about leadership.

It seems to be a question of motivation and persuasion, more than being about the systems, processes and solutions that could be applied to help resolve the issues. It seems to me to be a question about "how do I lead my people to see for themselves that the administrative work they must engage in is not only necessary, but that it is integral to sales (and client service) process (and outcome) itself?"

The solution lies in facilitating staff buy-in to this work, and to the bigger frame at stake here - overall sales effectiveness.

This is the work of a leader.

There are many things that sales leaders must do and be to become great leaders, the most important of these are:

Clearly identify your own strengths (your personal branding)
Be authentic to who you are (use your strengths and accept your weaknesses)
Be consistent
Create trust through rapport
Have integrity in who you are and what you do (who you are when no one's looking!)
Create an inspiring vision and share that at every opportunity (to create buy-in)
Communicate with passion (find passion in everything you do and express it regularly)
Communicate effectively (listen carefully and practise summarising what you are hearing - back to your people)
Be open to feedback and use it to understand what is working and what is not

Finally, use stories to help people understand your perspective. Everyone loves stories and they can help people see things in a new and different way (this is also called outframing or reframing).

I'll finish up with an example of what i'm talking about.

I have a wonderful client, his name is Damian, and he is very skilled at using stories as a way of expressing ideas and creating buy-in to his perspective.

Sometimes I think that Damian is the expert and I am his client.

Damian and I were talking about some new strategies for generating leads and sales in his business and he wanted to get across to me the notion that we needed to be more innovative and strategic in our approach to finding some solutions.

To do this, Damian told me a simple story about sailing.

"My dad and I used compete in the twighlight summer racing competition in Pittwater, Sydney. We were good, but sometimes we found ourselves trailing the leader, and in that situation, we realised that we had 2 clear choices. We could continue to 'herd' the leader (and hope they made a mistake) and take their wind in the final minutes, or we could tack across to the other side of the harbour and hope to catch a gust of wind that that wasn't present on the leader's side. The latter strategy brought us twice as many victories as the first". I got the meassage!

I hope this helps! Jay