If you are a Sales Manager or run your own company with sales people, then you are in a leadership role.

I find that a great many sales managers however do not really understand what leadership is all about.

Let’s face it, leading a sales team to success is perhaps one of the most challenging leadership roles of all. Sales people are often fiercely independent and like to do their own thing.
So how can we as Sales Managers ensure that we are good leaders?

I cover this in considerable detail in our Sales Managers Bootcamp and in other Sales Manager Workshops - but here are 3 quick tips on leadership that I hope you will find useful.

1. Who you are speaks a lot louder than what you say.

Superior leaders lead from the front. They walk the talk. They lead by example. So if you want your people to be enthusiastics, then you’d better be enthusiastic. If you want them to be on time, keep their promises to customers, have integrity etc - then you had better display those qualities yourself and demonstrate them every day in everything you do. You see, your sales team will always be a reflection of you. Top Gun sales teams are lead by Top Gun Sales Managers. Poor sales teams are lead (or should I say not lead) by poor Sales Managers.

2. As leaders we are responsible for creating a winning culture within our team.

Every team has a culture - some a good culture, some a bad culture. As leaders we are responsible for creating the culture we want. Is that going to be a superior customer service culture where your people partner with customers to create win / win? Or an “all buyers are liars” culture where customers are to treated as “the enemy”. Get the deal at all costs. Promise anything - deliver as little as you can. When you find this attitude across a sales team, you can bet that it’s a reflection of the attitude of it’s leader. Leaders create the culture.

3. All superior leaders, Top Gun leaders, have superior standards of excellence.

They have uncompromising values.

They set the standards in their organisation high and make it very clear to all of their people what is expected of them. They have clearly defined and well documented performance standards for all of the vital functions of their businesses and they make sure that their people know what these mandatory, minimum standards of performance are.

They don’t tell their people “you need to prospect more”. What does that really mean anyway?

No - they have worked out with their team and have gained commitment from each member of their team as to the exact number of new prospecting calls that they need to do per week and per month to be on target are - (ie. the minimum acceptable standard).

Similarly they have set minimum standards around;
* number of customer visits
* number of new client meetings
* number of presentations etc

Then they inspect what they expect.

In other words they follow through with their people to make sure these standards are being met.

These are just a few quick tips on leadership and the good thing about leadership is that it involves skills and strategies that can all be learned. We can all become better leaders and the rewards are there for great leaders.

I hope you’ll decide to keep growing as a leader - as Ray Kroc the founding CEO of McDonalds once said, “When you are green you grow, when you are ripe you rot!”

Have a great week. Make it a great week!

Stumble it!