6 Ways Sales Leaders Drive their Salespeople to Success

How Top-Tier Sales Leaders Drive Their Salespeople to Success

Behind every successful salesperson, there's a top-tier sales leader. These individuals are responsible for setting an organization's vision, strategy, and culture, three primary drivers for success.

As a sales leader, there are many hurdles you need to climb to develop a thriving team. In this post, we'll detail the main traits, actions, and characteristics that top sales implement to achieve a sales-driven team.?

1.???Buyer-First Mentality

While buyer-centric strategies may appear easy, many sales organizations continue to fall short. Only 23% of LinkedIn's "State of Sales 2021" poll respondents felt that salespeople "always" put the buyer first.?

The greatest sales executives design strategies and acquire technology that enables their firms to engage in customer-centricity. Therefore, customers are the focal point of all decisions when developing products, experiences, and services to ensure optimal satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty.?

A buyer-first mentality has never been so important in today's economic market. By focusing on this core area, it can help:?

• Improve customer retention rates
• Increase customers' lifetime value?
• Reduce customer acquisition costs?
• Enhance customer-seller relationships massively?
• Create Better customer-focused products and services?

When strategies are installed within salespeople that follow a buyers-first mentality, success will evidently appear. Sales leaders that optimize this are typically the people that drive their department to achieve great things.?

2.???Empathy and accountability?

According to a 2021?Businessolver survey, 84% of CEOs and 70% of workers think empathy improves company results. Therefore, leaders who showcase accountability toward understanding and sharing feelings with others can make successful salespeople.?

However, despite this, many sales leaders don't implement this practice. The main reason behind this is that?68% of leaders?claim they're?concerned about losing respect if they demonstrate empathy at work.

While keeping teams responsible has always been a critical component for sales leaders, today's leaders must be more sophisticated and nuanced. Human connections and compassionate leadership are becoming increasingly important as work gets more dispersed and external global challenges emerge.

Top sales leaders pay particular attention to what clients and employees are dealing with and meet them where they are. These leaders empathically assist their customers and colleagues, even when it requires them to step outside their usual comfort zones.

3.???Having a pulse on customer experience?

According to the post,?53% of a brand's loyalty?depends on the customer experience rather than the company, product, or service delivery. With sales reps, these people have the biggest influence on why a customer would purchase as they control the experience.?

Sales leaders that exceed in this region are always surrounding themselves with consumers. Simply being around them is enough to understand various important factors like expectations.

What makes this so important is providing what your customers want without asking them. Asking them to fill in surveys, etc., is a thing of the past. Instead, top-tier sales leaders have a pulse on the target audience and understand what experiences they expect.?

Once these leaders have a pulse on the expected customer experience, they develop customer-centric strategies that support them. After, they deploy these plans to salespeople, monitor the process, optimize when needed, and drive them to success.?

4.???Developing and supporting a coaching culture?

A coaching culture influences both the organizational and individual levels.

At the company level, it fosters changes in essential areas such as organizational transformation, digitization, high performance, cultural transformations, and diversity and inclusion.

Regarding the individual level, a coaching culture supports a salesperson's entire journey within an organization, from onboarding to rejoining after a long absence, from leadership development to adjusting to remote and hybrid work, learning and development opportunities, and even internal lateral career pivoting.

The benefits are immense when sales leaders install this culture into their sales team. To put this into perspective, a?research project by Gallup in 2017?revealed the following benefits could happen:?

• Increase in sales (10% to 19%)
• Increase in profit (14% to 29%)
• Fewer safety incidents (22% to 59%)
• Higher customer engagement (3% to 7%)
• Increase in engaged employees (9% to 15%)

With these advantages, it's evident why top-tier sales leaders implement a coaching culture in their teams. Enabling this makes working in a team much more adaptable and rewarding.?

5.???Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Modern sales professionals know that employees and consumers expect to work for and buy from organizations that appreciate diversity.

According to the Forrester sales leader survey,?two-thirds of respondents?believe that their sales teams must represent the environment around them. In addition,?82% of respondents?in a recent Forrester research commissioned by LinkedIn anticipated that their sales teams' racial or cultural diversity would be equally or more essential in the next two years.

The Forrester/LinkedIn surveys revealed that sales firms with top DEI strategies had improved conversion rates, sales accomplishment, and customer satisfaction. Organizations that regard DEI as a business priority will be able to recruit and retain the greatest salespeople?while delivering superior business outcomes.

Therefore, focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion is incredibly important when wanting to learn how to be an effective sales leader.?

6.???Proficiency in generating predictable, agile growth

Every sales executive desires consistent, efficient development.?Real-time, data-driven visibility into the health of?pipelines?and projections is more crucial than ever in today's volatile business climate.?

Unfortunately, many businesses' forecasting is inefficient and unsuccessful. According to a?Gartner report, less than half of sales leaders?are confident in their forecasting accuracy.

As known, forecasting is an important aspect of sales. It allows you to measure success, set goals, and track processes accordingly. Without them, it's challenging to encourage salespeople to reach targets.?

However, having solid, defined forecasts helps you understand a team's strengths and weaknesses more. Plus, sales leaders can act upon this information and improve their teams.?

Conclusion?

The above details six ways how top-tier sales leaders make successful salespeople. Leaders are leaders for a reason; they're there to create a clear pathway for others to follow and achieve a goal. Combining the above lets you know how to be an effective sales leader. The only thing left to do is implement, so begin!?