I hate to break it to you; great salespeople don’t always make great sales leaders.
One of the cardinal mistakes organizations continue to make over and over again is promoting a top salesperson to a sales manager position. I cannot even quantify the destruction this has caused to an unending number of companies who thought this was a good idea for some reason. Does being an amazing Maître D suddenly qualify someone to become the executive chef next summer? Does being a superstar flight attendant qualify you to start landing planes? I mean, where does this flawed logic come from?! It doesn’t work like this in any other part of life, and it sure as heck doesn’t work in sales. Being a great salesperson and being a great sales leader require completely different skill sets, with completely different competencies, mindsets, education, training, and everything else under the sun. To somehow think that being a top salesperson qualifies someone to lead a team of sales professionals makes almost no logical sense, but companies continue to do it.
If you want to become an effective and inspirational sales leader that extracts every ounce of potential from your team, you need to learn how to do it! The sales leader role is often the most undertrained role in an organization yet it’s the most influential role that determines the ultimate success of a sales team. Sales leaders need to have proficiency in coaching, leading, training, skill transfer, recruiting, accountability, planning, teaching, inspiring, and a whole slew of other things in order to lead salespeople to success. Long gone are the days of managing by fear and intimidation.
Real sales training is based on the understanding that beyond your team’s sales skills, they have emotions, tendencies, thought processes, habits, belief systems, and biases that determine their ultimate success in sales. These factors need to be identified, addressed, and corrected, if you ultimately want them to reach their full potential in sales. That’s why we use the Sales DNA Test. I don’t care what anyone tells you, you cannot train all human beings in sales the same way with some magic selling system from the ‘60s. Doctors don’t give all their patients the same two aspirin, do they? If you truly want to increase sales in your company and give your salespeople and sales leaders a fighting chance at real improvement, reach out to us and we’ll be happy to chat more.
If you see value in getting the help and guidance you deserve to help you become the sales leader you know you can be, or if you think this can help your current sales leaders start to achieve the level of success you know is inside them, please reach out and we’d be more than happy to help.
