What separates a great salesperson from a great sales leader—and could one shift in your leadership style amplify the performance of your entire team?
Being successful at selling doesn’t automatically mean leading a sales team comes naturally.
Great sales leaders need to understand the impact of their energy, focus their teams on what happens next rather than what went wrong, and create an environment where people can take ownership of improving their performance.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How the energy and consistency you bring as a leader can influence trust, motivation and the way your team responds to challenges.
- Why shifting from a backward-looking focus to a forward-focused approach can help your team spend more time finding solutions and improving results.
- How using a coaching framework can help your team take greater ownership of their challenges, opportunities and next steps.
Play this episode to discover three practical leadership qualities that can help you become a more effective sales leader and amplify the results of your entire team.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
If you’re wanting to grow your skills as a sales leader, this is the perfect episode for you to listen to today.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
Great salespeople and great business owners don’t always make for great sales leaders. It’s something I learned the hard way across my journey.
I was pretty good at the individual contributor style role, i.e., I was a pretty good salesperson, but it took me some time to go from being a great salesperson to being a great leader, and I had to learn some really hard lessons along the way. In particular, I remember in my first two days as a leader, my first position as a leader with direct reports, I was having a conversation with a gentleman who turns out wasn’t doing his job anyway, but I had a conversation with him. I said, hey, I’m really looking forward to learning this from you, and I’m also really looking forward to sharing with you some of my experience, and a lot of my experience was around numbers and ROIs and business cases and so forth.
Anyway, great, phone call ended. I thought, that went well. That went really well.
Next day later, phone call, couple of choice words, I quit. How dare you tell me that I’m not good at business cases and numbers and so forth, and I just went, whoa, where did that come from? What I didn’t understand was that my impact as a leader in that instance was so much less about what I said and more about how I said it without understanding where the person was at on the other end of the phone, and it turns out this person had a lot going on in their life and just didn’t need to be told, hey, I’m going to help you with something. My timing was off.
It wasn’t what I said, but it was how I said it, which was my timing piece. Now, across my 25 years in business, but more impactfully, my 15 years in sales, I’ve gone through some serious learning curves around what being a great sales leader looks like. I’ve coached some terrific sales leaders, and I’ve also learned from some of the best I think in the world around how they approach sales leadership.
For me, what comes from that is some really clear advice on how you as a leader can think about sharpening your sales leadership skills. What I will say for this episode is before you get into it, it’s really important that that curiosity mindset goes on, so you turn that brain to, hey, I may be good at what I do, but I’d love to hear perspectives from someone. I’d love to hear any ideas you have, and I’m going to take those ideas and be somewhat self-critical around perhaps where I can improve.
It’s so important because what I’m about to do is go through some very specific pieces around leadership from an attitudinal base rather than necessarily hard skills. My experience is to improve that attitudinal base. You’ve got to want to hear it.
Turn that, if you can, please turn that curiosity mindset on, and let’s get into today. Having worked with hundreds and hundreds of sales leaders now across in particular the last five years, I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here are three things that I think really represent exceptional sales leaders.
The first one is all around the energy that they bring. Now, I’m the type of sales leader that comes in with lots of energy. When I’m around, you know that I’m around.
That isn’t the only type of energy that I’m talking about, but it’s all about from a sales leader the type of positive energy that they bring to their group around how they can improve, around how they can hit results, around how they can make sure that they are focusing on what they can change rather than what they can’t. The examples I use here around things like focusing on the quality of leads you can generate rather than the quality of leads the marketing team can generate. Focusing on bringing level headedness to work.
The energy is that whenever there’s problems, they approach them with a sense of ease. I love that saying that things are really as bad as they seem, but they’re really as good as they seem either. That’s that very consistent approach rather than the rollercoaster.
It’s about bringing an approach where their teams know that they care for them and that they’re there and ready to listen. There’s some examples as we dive into bringing energy, but for me, the most impactful and positive energy that I see leaders bring are around knowing when they need to be motivators versus when they need to lead by example. When they need to use words to motivate their team versus when they need to use their actions.
Consistency in their energy, so their team’s knowing what they’re going to get from their leaders. Be it high energy, be it medium energy, be it whatever it is, they know what they’re going to get from their leaders and they can trust on that energy coming forward. Then really clearly on this energy piece around bringing the energy that says, we’re in this together.
I love the saying, praise specifically, criticize generally. It very much epitomizes great energy from a leader when their teams recognize, okay, we’re going to learn, we’re going to grow, we’re going to make mistakes, but I know my leader’s got my back. Those pieces of energy there are what I see terrific leaders bring in and I’d encourage you to have a think about those around what you bring.
I know that for me personally as a leader, as I was growing, that I didn’t bring the right energy around we’re in this together. I was too quick to criticize individuals and I was too quick to point out things that they could be doing better, but when I made that shift to start talking about we’re in this together and bring groups into discussions or when we had problems to solve, bringing everyone together as if we can all improve it rather than individuals, it certainly helped me. It was that whole piece around playing the ball, not playing the man or the woman, depending on what the instance is.
Bringing that energy and that is one of the most common and impactful qualities of a great sales leader that I see. Have a think about where can you bring that in. I think my default that works for me to share personal experiences is energy.
I know that when I bring high energy, people tend to follow along with that energy. They like to be around it. I’ve got to be really mindful that I keep my energy positive and upbeat because I know that when I slip into the other areas, it’s just not good for things.
I’ll share with you examples around how I work as we go through this. I’m by no means perfect, but certainly I’ve been doing this a long time and love to share my experiences. The second one here is great leaders I see having a forward focus.
When you ever think about when you’ve been into a sales meeting, whether it’s your own business or you work for someone or you’ve got a team of people, where you’ve been in a sales meeting and it’s all about reporting on numbers, where you’re at, number of leads, close rates, what the dollars are at and in particular how that compares to budget. The meeting then often ends up being looking backwards. Here’s where we’re at.
We need to get to budget. What are we going to do about it? The forward focusing leader acknowledges those numbers and says, okay, let’s work together to work through how we can improve this situation that we’re in. They’re always looking forward.
It doesn’t mean they forget the past. They absolutely acknowledge the past and where we’re at, but they focus on solutions, not why we’re at, not talking through why one of our team members is not effective at networking and why it may be that they’re not getting out there and talking through the issue, but instead going, okay, how am I going to help this person become more effective at networking? Is it attitudinal and they just don’t want to do it or is it behavioral and they’re a little bit scared? They’re not prepared to get out and prospect and generate leads. By having that forward focus as a leader, it’s that old Napoleon quote and forgive me if I don’t quite get this right, but that quote that goes, leaders are dealers in hope.
Making sure that your focus is on how we can make the world better for all of us in the business, for us as individuals, for us as a team, for us as a business and for our customers and spending their energy on getting towards that goal. Spending their energy on helping everyone improve across the team rather than lamenting on why things aren’t working and looking backwards. Number one, bringing great energy, consistent energy.
People know what they’re going to get. They know they’re in it as one team and really engaging with your team members as an entity they can trust. Number two is about forward focus.
Acknowledging where you’re at or acknowledging the past, but then driving full speed, fifth gear, foot on the gas, absolute full noise forward to how you can improve as a business. The third one is, and this is really important because you can bring the right energy and you can focus on what’s ahead of you, but without structure to that, you can end up being a scattergun type of leader. Where I see effective leaders nail how they bring to life both their energy and their forward focus is through a great coaching framework.
There’s a big difference between coaching and teaching. Teaching is generally outbound driven, i.e., this is how we objection handle, this is how we close deals and it’s very much instructor led. Coaching is one that encourages whoever’s in the conversation to work through solutions themselves.
Teaching is really impactful for people that need to learn a brand new skill. Coaching is all about taking that skill or that knowledge and enhancing it. Where great leaders work around coaching is they’re able to understand the problem or the opportunity, work through with their team members what those solutions could be together, and then help them choose the path moving forward.
That’s very much about bringing good energy and focusing on what’s ahead. It very much brings both of those great sales leader traits to life. The piece I like about coaching is that everyone gets involved.
For me, a great coaching session or a great coaching moment is when we recognize that the person we’re talking with or the group we’re talking with has actually owned what we need to do next and runs with it. I find that’s far more effective when we are coaching rather than teaching. Great coaching framework is the GROW model.
That GROW coaching model is actually written by John Whitmore. Go and look for it. Terrific coaching model if you’re out there and looking for one.
I use it. I use it absolutely every day and multiple times a day. Three qualities are great sales leaders.
As we’re moving out of this podcast today, very consistent. In fact, we talk about energy. Hopefully, you notice in these podcasts, I have a very consistent energy and a very consistent focus.
State what the problem is or the opportunity is, work through a solution, recap it at the end, and then give you something to think about. For me, the piece to think about today is from those three sales leader qualities, which by no means are the only ones, but they’re definitely consistent qualities I see from energy, from a forward focus, and from a coaching model. Is there anything you can do better? Is it all three of them? If it’s all three of them, work through one by one.
Is it just one of them? Do you have good energy but you don’t focus on what’s happening ahead enough? We need to do that. Do you have great energy and a great forward focus? You want a bit of structure as to how you can work with your teams. Have you think about that because my experience says that when we get better as leaders, it amplifies the results of the business because everything we do echoes out across our team members.
One thing we can say can help many people within our business do things better again and again and again, which in the end makes us better in our business, less stress for us, less hours, more money in the bank, and so forth. Now, if you’re wanting to learn more about this, we’ve got some amazing programs coming. In the next few months, there’s a wait list that is started now.
These programs will run off a wait list. If you want to make sure you get notified about these, jump into the show notes, click on the link, and you’re there. That’s it.
30 seconds and you’re done and you will on autopilot get notified about these programs, some of which are free. That’s it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.