Lessons From Leaders

During a 35 year sales and sales leadership career I have had the great pleasure and good fortune to work for some amazing leaders who along the way taught me some valuable lessons. I wanted to share a few of these with you, some of these leaders are no longer with us (I am that old) and some of you will guess who a couple are.

I cannot promise that I always adhered to these lessons all of the time as people who know me will affirm, but they helped me most of the time to be a better sales person and better sales leader.

Listen and write it down

My first day of “proper” selling was in August 1987 working for a Dutch pharmaceutical company called Duphar as a “drug rep” covering North Bristol, the Cotswolds and the Forest of Dean. I can still remember picking up my boss outside a GP practice near Lydney to go on some accompanied calls. I was feeling very nervous about having to perform in front of my line manager as well as having first day nerves and quite a lot of what is now termed imposter syndrome. Was I sales person? Did I really know the products? Would they believe me?

My boss, Ren, put me at ease immediately as he got in the car and handed me a blank, A4 lined notebook and gave me this advice.

“Two things to start your sales career, firstly right down everything you do, say and hear and secondly never forget you will sell twice as much with your ears as your mouth. Your job is to listen well”.

People who know me know that you rarely see me without a notebook and pen and I have boxes and boxes of them in the attic to attest to a long career. With a bit of hunting around I can probably even tell you what happened in those early meetings at the start of my career. What I can say is that over the years these books have been invaluable as aide memoires and learning tools.

With regards to the listening, I think this is the most important lesson I ever learned in life and when combined some years later with the skill of active listening (one for another day) is something we all think we do, but too many sales people just don’t. The number of times I have had to stop sales people who I have been in accompanied calls with from speaking and suggest they let the customer speak are numerous and some of the best salespeople I know actually say very little.

I am going to be honest here and also say that those who know me well will tell you that I can struggle with the listening bit sometimes. I know how important it is but you really do have to persevere to make it happen sometimes.

Be Prepared

This might be an obvious one but all too often we may find ourselves under prepared because we think we know all we need to know and all the questions we are going to asked. In the early 90’s working for ICL (now Fujitsu) I had a sales leader, John, who was notorious for running tough sales reviews and famous for his catch all question of “What are you going to do to make it happen?” and the phrase “I don’t pay you to wait I pay you to act” (people that have worked with me may recognise one or both of these).

While I found the initial reviews difficult I saw my more experienced colleagues taking more time to prepare and actually spending more time with customers to make sure they knew exactly what the needs were and what the expected outcomes were. As strange as it seems now looking back, as a sales team we often found ourselves asking the customers the questions John would want the answers to without realising we should also want those answers.

The outcome was that after a few months, and with a couple of difficult reviews along the way, I became better and better prepared and I made sure I knew what I was going to do to make it happen and that I was not going to be waiting for something to happen.

That level of preparation then reflects in how you prepare for every meeting, another thing John taught me was as a sales professional every meeting you have is a sales call as you should have a desired outcome, if not why are you there? So you should prepare for every professional interaction as if it was a sales call and treat everyone as a stakeholder in your business as ultimately they are.

I can honestly say that having worked for John for a couple of years I am rarely caught out in any meetings through lack of preparation and can say hand on heart that I have not had what I would consider to a difficult sales review since that time. Things are not always going to go well and you are not always going to win but you can always be prepared.

See the bigger picture

Often as a sales professional it can seem that like everyone has got it in for you, the customers, the partners and even the company. The reality is that this is rarely the case and sometimes it pays to step back and look at the bigger picture. I have one of my best leaders, Claire, to thank for this as she was a master at understanding where any given situation was in the bigger picture and acting and advising accordingly.

The customer will invariably have multiple compelling events and multiple workstreams, and while yours may always be the most important to you, that is probably not going to be the case for the customer. Try and put yourselves in their shoes and understand what their drivers are and how you fit into their bigger picture. Also worth remembering there are multiple bigger pictures here, by which I mean the individual customer you are dealing with will have a bigger picture as will the organization they work for. Try and understand where you fit in that jigsaw (think 3D here!).

The same can be said for partners and other stakeholders in the business you are trying to transact. Again, understanding the dynamics and where you fit in is important as it should dictate when and how you act.

Finally, and Claire was a master here, the company you work for has a bigger picture, and the bigger the company then potentially the bigger the picture and the smaller your piece of it is. It is important to both understand and accept the bigger picture but also to be able to articulate it and explain to team members how you and they fit in and why sometimes it may seem that you are being conspired against when in fact it is quite the opposite. As a leader this is a required skill and one I was fortunate to have been taught by one of the best.

Be human

I have one the nicest people I have ever worked for to thank for this one, Tim. Contrary to some beliefs being seen as “nice” is not a derogatory term, and don’t get me wrong Tim was not what we used to call a “soft touch” he was a strong and inspirational leader, but he also had a real human touch and genuinely wore his heart on his sleeve.

Tim was and is an ideas person, but he always put people at the heart of his thoughts and could see the impact that things had on people, not just as teams, numbers or assets but as individuals. I do not think it matters where you sit in an organisation there is no reason not to treat people as individuals and with humanity. Some people might think that makes it hard to take tough decisions, without doubt it does, but you still have to make those decisions. Sometimes you have to deliver difficult messages, roll out tough targets, move people around, move people out. I know, having had to do all of these things in the past. But I also know that if you have a human touch, while it may make them harder to do, it can be seen by the people you interact with and they will know that these things are not done lightly and that you have done what you think is the right thing.

It was also Tim that originally introduced me to the phrase “better to seek forgiveness that permission” something that I strangely find more gratifying doing than having done to me…

Pick your battles

Again, this is not rocket science but all too often we can find ourselves getting frustrated and bent out of shape over things we cannot chance but still feel the need to go into battle over. In my first stint at Dell, Iain, my leader at the time would always ask when brought a problem or challenge like this “Is this your die in a ditch moment, if so I will come and die with you”.

What he appeared to mean is that if this is something career defining, or something that needs to be dealt with or solved to the exclusion of everything and fought for until the bitter end then I will support you in doing so. What he actually meant was do you really think this is worth fighting for or is there a better way to get over or around this or just accept it and move on?

I have applied the die in a ditch approach to all sorts of things in work and my personal life and it is a great way to emotionally separate yourself from things that cannot really be changed. It is a little like the approach that Steve Peters takes in the book The Chimp Paradox (great read BTW) to unwanted, harmful and unwelcome emotions by understanding them better and what you can and can’t influence.

And finally...

I wanted to share these anecdotes and lessons as I probably did not thank these leaders at the time and in some cases almost certainly pushed back on occasion. What I can say is that I truly loved being a people leader, something I was fortunate enough to do for most of the last 25 years of my career and I used each and every one of these lessons repeatedly during that time and they were a part of why I have enjoyed it so much. All I can hope is that you got this far and it might have helped.

Richard Rawcliffe

10th August 2023