Sales leadership is about more than generating revenue.
Caught between the CEO and the team, under pressure for numbers and fielding requests for visibility, the demands of the role can feel relentless.
The strongest sales leaders are adept at organising their thinking, deciding where to focus resources, helping colleagues engage credibly with customers, choosing the opportunities that are worth pursuing, creating valuable relationships and communicating in ways that inspire the confidence of others.
The strongest sales leaders understand not only how to win business, but which business is worth winning and why.
They fuel success by intentionally creating environments that naturally encourage colleagues to willingly give their best.
Here are some thoughts.
Consciously or otherwise, we're always making choices.
And not all choices are equal.
We never have endless reserves of cash, time, energy and attention.
We have many ways to allocate the assets we do have.
Some steps hardly move us forward.
Perfection burns resource.
Bad choices destroy progress.
Sometimes we catch sight of a good outcome with reasonable certainty and modest cost.
We need to really go for it when we do.
How proactive and deliberate are we in finding those big leaps forward for modest investments and risk?
Just because they buy from us, it doesn’t mean they’re good for us.
Not every dollar of revenue is equal.
Bad revenue comes with hidden cost.
Physical energy for too little reward.
Emotional energy that drains us.
Lost time and attention.
Bad revenue gets in the way of good revenue.
Is our customer base serving us well?
Why is it that so many have to leave their employer to have an opportunity to realise their potential?
Why do many leaders repeatedly feel the need to recruit from outside for senior positions?
What proportion of senior hires from outside work out well?
Could ‘better the devil we don’t know’ be a thing?
What’s more valuable, accumulated knowledge and experience of our business or of other businesses?
Are insiders overlooked for promotion opportunities as a result of poor hiring in the first place, as a consequence of employers having had longer to identify individual failings, or as an outcome of the organisation having had longer to fail to develop it’s people effectively?
Is the impact of the hiring of outsiders into senior roles on an organisation’s culture positive or negative?
How successful is our recruitment, at all levels, and how effective is our internal development?
The answers to human questions matter as much as strategic ones.
Feelings drive behaviours.
What would they say?
About us.
Are we as an individual, are we as a team, are we as an organisation, both energising to work with and energising to work for?
If all the answers are yes, we're in a great place.
If any of the answers are no, why and what are we going to do about it?
Curriculum For Your Short Free Programme
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Introduction
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A Quick Question For Us
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About Our Team
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What Kind Of Driver Are We?
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Helping Them
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Powerful Curiosity
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A Final Word
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About this course
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All of the above is drawn from 35+ years working inside 150+ businesses worldwide. It's not theory, it's what I discovered and observed working and where I saw people come unstuck.
'Luck may play a part but outperformance is never a fluke.'
- Rob Evans, Founder, Outperformance Highway