The Five Best Practices Of Effective Sales Leaders

Article originally appeared on the Forbes Business Development Council - https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2022/10/19/the-five-best-practices-of-effective-sales-leaders/?sh=46a7e7bc3703

Many use the terms “sales manager” and “sales leader” interchangeably. At Sandler, we draw a distinction between the two.

The former is someone who has been given formal responsibility for the performance of a sales team and who tries to meet that responsibility in a reactive way.

The latter is someone who responds?proactively.

There are many best practices that support an effective leader; in this article, I’m going to share what I believe are the top five. These are practical leadership skills?that we can internalize through action, day after day, until they become consistent, predictable behaviors.

1. Assume accountability for managing the employee lifecycle.

Employees are our greatest asset.?If there’s a staffing problem, that’s because we, as a?company,?didn’t do our job. We can’t make justifications to ourselves or others about how tight the labor market is, how some salespersons underperformed or how we couldn’t have predicted someone’s departure. This is our job, end of story.

Our team is always?in prospecting mode, so we accept personal accountability for the stream of potential hires moving through our recruitment funnel—just as we expect salespeople to accept personal accountability for the income moving through their sales funnel.

We have a clear hiring?process built around effective interviewing questions designed to identify specific criteria that we’ve included in an ideal hire template. We use an assessment to give us additional insights. And we have verifiable, up-to-date data on our turnover?numbers.

We know how those numbers compare to the rest of our industry, and we get honest answers to the critical question of why a talented person might choose to leave our team. If that answer has anything to do with the team culture we’ve created by example, we accept personal accountability for that, too.

2. Onboard for both culture and performance.

We design, update and implement a robust onboarding plan that gives new hires crystal-clear guidance on what benchmarks need to be hit— and when—during their critical first 90 days on our sales team.

This program also provides easy access to all people, tools, and resources they will need to reach those benchmarks. HR may be able to help on the margins, but the parts that touch a salesperson—the parts that either inspire them or leave them wondering whether they made the right decision—are our responsibility.

3. Utilize one-on-one goal-setting.

Determining quotas isn’t goal-setting. It’s more important to find out what the person will do if your goals (the quotas) are met. What they will do with their commissions is what motivates them in turn.

Conducting essential, respectful, private discussions about what might inspire an individual to achieve (and overachieve) financial targets is both an art and a science. It requires strong interpersonal skills, and it’s not to be confused with simply telling someone what their financial target is.

This best practice is all about initiating and supporting a conversation that sounds something like this: “Suppose you were to hit your bonus. What would you do with the money?”

Once we get the person to open up to us about this – which may take a while—our job is to listen well until?they?identify a goal that lights their fire. It might be taking care of their parents. It might be going on a cruise to the Caribbean. We won’t know what it is until we ask. And we?need?to ask, because people work a lot harder for their own reasons than they ever will for ours.

4. Develop “top ten” behaviors.

Consider these ten behaviors and how they might be labeled in?your?world among?your?people.

1. Business development or lead generation?considers the candidate’s?prospecting: the number one behavior that drives all the others.

2. Relationship-building?is the practice of establishing a strong, open relationship based on trust.

3. Qualifying the opportunity?is the ability to determine a prospect’s reason for doing business.

4. Making presentations or closing sales?demonstrate a team member’s capacity to present solutions to the prospect’s problems.

5. Servicing customers?is about delivering superior customer satisfaction.

6. Account management?considers the ability to maximize business in each account.

7. Territory development?includes strategy building and growth in territory.

8. Demonstrating a behavior plan?means the establishment of measurably productive sales activity.

9. Continuous education?should include developing ongoing product, market, and sales knowledge.

10. Executing a sales methodology?shows a mastery of the sales process

These are all important, but that eighth behavior deserves a particularly close look. The behavioral plan, also known as a cookbook, identifies the specific daily and weekly activity metrics, unique to each salesperson, that enable them to hit their personal targets—and achieve that personal goal we helped them identify. This is a private document worked out collaboratively with the salesperson.

5. Nurture a coaching culture.

Thirty-five percent of our time should be spent coaching. You may think this means we are going into “coaching mode,” but that’s not what this looks like at all.

We could sit everyone down and say to the team: “Here’s how I am going to have us solve this problem.” But guess what? That’s not coaching.

We could sit down with our team individually and say: “How’s it going? What are you working on?” Once a member begins to introduce a problem they are running into, we could tell them what we would do.

But that’s not coaching, either.

Telling isn’t coaching. Effective coaching is private and aspirational. The coaching session has a shared goal that connects to the salesperson’s life goal. We lead that session by following the 70/30 rule: We do no more than 30% of the talking. When we listen actively—and support self-discovery—that’s?coaching.

Effective sales leaders must assume accountability.

These are just a few best practices that separate “sales managers” from “sales leaders.” While some may assume their job is to put out fires and cope reactively to the latest emergency, proactive sales?leaders?manage to prevent emergencies from arising in the first place.