Good, effective Sales leadership is crucial to maximizing ROI and the overall success of your business. But the truth is, to meet sales quotas or to get your sales team to outdo their sales targets, every Sales manager needs to imbibe the qualities of a Sales leader!
As a sales leader, your role is not only limited to looking after sales forecasting, budgeting, delegating, or just hiring and firing!
In an earlier survey by Harvard Business Review, sixty-nine percent of salespeople who exceeded their annual quota rated their sales manager as being excellent or above average.
And, according to the Harvard Business Review, the annual average turnover in sales is about 25-30%. However, studies have shown that far too often, talented sales people do not transition into good sales leaders.
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Is it true then that sales teams with great sales leaders is the key to having a high-performing Sales team?
Leaders inspire and motivate their team to go beyond the Quota!
Here’s what differentiates Sales Leaders
1. Impactful Two-way communication
Effective communication is always a two-way street! A sales leader is someone who encourages their sales team to share ideas and opinions, not one who dictates and tells them what to do.
It takes a leader to realize that the importance of driving a team is not just by telling them what to do and how to do it, but by getting them to innovate with new ideas and suggestions based on trending sales tactics.
In a typical organizational scenario, if a Sales manager tells their team what to do, the employee will be evaluated on how well they perform those tasks. When it comes to employee assessments, it is crucial to set parameters that help evaluate their overall performance viz a viz value to the company and not their value based on how they performed someone’s delegated tasks.
Key Takeaway: Set assessment parameters based on core organizational goals and not on the basis of the accomplishment of transactional or operational tasks.
2.Challenging & motivating them to be better than YOU!
Poor self-esteem drives those in managerial positions to lash out when challenged by a subordinate. While this is an eye opener that signifies the ill qualities in a Sales leader or any leader, what is important to keep in mind is that being in a managerial position doesn’t mean anything unless you drive efforts to get your team to go beyond their full potential by dovetailing strategies and finding new ways to improve their results on a daily basis, with the eventual aim of making them reach or outdo their own potential!
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Innovation vs Checklist
New ideas, innovations and creativity allow new businesses to be established and new products to be developed and built.
In a not so recent discussion at Harvard Business School, business leaders from companies like IDEO, Goolge and Novartis explored the alignment between creativity and the role of leaders. At that discussion, Intuit cofounder Scott Cook, talked about whether management was “a net positive or a net negative” for creativity. “If there is a bottleneck in organizational creativity,” he asked, “might it be at the top of the bottle?”
Key Takeaway:
Sales leaders who allow their team to innovate while encouraging organization-wide collaboration too can enable overall business growth far more easily.
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Enabling them with the right SalesTech Stack!
SalesTech is meant to enable the efforts of your sales team and make selling easier. There is no dearth to the types of sales technologies and features that can enable everything in Sales, from prospecting to cold calling and even forecasting.
Key Takeaways:
->Identify a SalesTech Stack based on what your comeptitor’s Sales teams are already using
->Leverage SalesTech that allows you to better pipeline and improve deal size
Sales Intelligence –> Sales Enablement –> Sales Engagement –> People Analytics Measurement –>Management and Sales Training and some of the basic Sales Technologies any typical B2B/Tech Sales team needs to spend more time doing actual selling and better prospecting!
Verdict
Some leaders are born. Some are made.
Building a strong high-performing tech sales team is no small feat. A combination of smart leadership skills and the right approach to hiring, retaining, training and evaluating sales teams and processes is an ongoing process as a Sales leader that need to be structured at scale over time.
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