Sales Leader or Sales Manager?

What is a Sales Leader or Sales Leadership versus Sales Management or Manager?

Which one are you? Do you lead or do you manage?

We can all be very confused and guilty of mixing the terms or roles of a leader or leadership with the role of manager, or management, however, they are both completely distinct. 

Let me explain!

Leadership is often thought of as a person’s rank or the seniority of someone’s role in an organisation, but that is really just management. To make things more confusing, many people define leaders as those who possess charisma, make powerful speeches and have personal attributes such as charm.

But none of these definitions really gets to the point. Perhaps my favourite definition of leadership is this.

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want doing because THEY want to do it.” 

Or this one: “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results of my team, ”

Sales leadership is similarly about getting the sales team to achieve results by leading the team in a way that THEY want to follow and not because they are told to do so.

Leaders Inspire, Managers Improve

Sales leadership is very different from sales management. Management is more about setting a vision and direction and — ultimately –about the entire sales organisation genuinely wanting to follow their leader to success. In this sense, sales leadership is more strategic and comes as a result of a sales leader setting the vision and strategy, as well as about defining the culture of the sales organisation. This comes as a result of setting goals, objectives and top priorities for the sales organisation and then empowering the sales managers and sales reps to succeed. 

Sales leaders do this by creating the organisation’s Sales Strategy. They also author the Annual Sales Plan. The sales leader defines and communicates the Sales Process and the Sales Effectiveness Drivers. They author the Sales Process where they communicate the Vision, Strategy, Culture, Sales Effectiveness & Sales Drivers and also the tactical Sales System which the sales team must use (and must be trained on consistently).

Then the sales leader empowers their sales managers to drive the sales team to succeed. As a result, the Sales Leader is the person who leads the sales organisation to generate predictable and repeatable revenue for the company.

The Value of a Sales Leader

Everyone wants to follow a true Leader. The sales team wants to follow him or her because THEY want to and because they know that this will bring about a positive change, both to the organisation and to themselves. There are few organisations today that have sufficient Sales Leadership. Many companies have good sales managers, but they don’t always have powerful sales leaders.

Leaders know the value of personal & professional development, they understand the power of inspirational development and allowing others to fail and ready to lift them up when they do so.

REAL leaders lead by example, they practice what they preach and strive to make other successful.

Here are some of my favourite leadership quotes to further clarify the meaning of leadership and hopefully inspire sales managers to strive to be leaders:

Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. —Vince Lombardi

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born – that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born. —Warren Bennis

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. — Jack Welch

A leader is best when people barely know he exists – when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. — Lao Tzu

My own definition of leadership is this:

Lead because you want other to be successful, strive to make learning a culture not a privilege, simplify it so everyone understands it.

Self-Leadership is having a developed sense of who you are, what you can do, where you are going coupled with the ability to influence your communication, emotions and behaviour on the way to getting there.

“Self-leadership is the process by which you influence yourself to achieve your goals & objectives.”

Self-leadership should be the foundation of any Leadership or Sales team Development or Executive Coaching Program because self-leadership is a solution for a volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous world.

Learn to lead yourself before you set out to lead others.

If you are looking to build, develop and inspire you or your team to grow your self-leadership skills set and beliefs to create great leadership attributes then I can show you how.

James Fleming

The Power Within Training & Development

Scotland’s #1 Sales & Self-Leadership Development Coach

[email protected]

07479 010 355