Salescraft Training
Learn to sell anything to anyone!
Who is your avatar?
You know what you're selling, but what is your customer buying? Hint... it may not be what you think!
I'll share tips and insights from my years of selling to B2B and B2C clients. So welcome to the Podcast!
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Salescraft Training
Unlocking Potential by Redefining Leadership Strategies
Can you imagine feeling empowered to be the "worst" salesperson on your team? The secret lies in leadership that focuses on lifting others to their highest potential. Join us for a compelling discussion about the stark differences between leadership and management in sales. Through my personal journey, I share how nurturing a supportive environment can transform your team into both skilled salespeople and budding leaders. By becoming a trusted expert and collaborator, you'll discover how elevating client relationships goes far beyond problem-solving. Witness the profound impact of positive leadership on team morale and performance, inspiring us to create a community that thrives on collaboration and encouragement.
Explore the art of empowering your sales staff for unparalleled success as we delve into the importance of fostering an open environment. By encouraging team members to reflect on their experiences, we can unlock personal and professional growth. Hear the inspiring story of a young salesperson's journey to regional manager, illustrating the power of mentorship and support—even when mistakes are made. We emphasize the critical need for safe spaces where admitting errors leads to growth rather than criticism. Discover how recognizing contributions and encouraging healthy feedback can cultivate a more cohesive and effective team, redefining leadership to bring out the best in everyone.
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Graham Elliott
You can contact me at graham@salescraft.training
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When I first got into a sales manager role. So to me that is a leadership role, and I also understand the difference between leadership and management, which, if you've been listening to these leadership podcasts, hopefully that's apparent. But the big thing for me was being able to create an environment for my staff where they could really develop and grow and become not only good salespeople but start developing their own leadership capabilities as well, because if you've listened to the other podcasts in this series, to me one of the aspects of being a good salesperson is actually being a good leader with your clients, because you are, you're definitely solving a problem for them. That, to me, is very essential to what sales is about. You're solving problems with problem solvers, but also we are often looked upon as the source of expertise, with someone they're relying on, because we bring to them a level of expertise and knowledge that they don't possess themselves, and that's why they go outside. One of the reasons why they go outside, and I think it's one of the reasons why good salespeople develop a following of customers, if you like, who will come back to them again and again and who will recommend them, and so they build that community of trust where they are seen as definitely the specialist, the technical expert, whatever you want to call it, but the sort of go-to person in that particular situation.
Speaker 1:But they also bring something more than that, and that, to me, is what leadership is. It's about being more than simply being a manager. A manager, in my opinion, simply follows a process and gets things done and maybe makes sure that everybody else follows the same process. But that is not leadership. Leadership is where you go further than that. You state a vision, you show people how to get there, you walk your talk, and a good leader is one who people will follow. That is, to me, the essence of good leadership. So we do that. I believe. As good salespeople, we're a leader to our clients. Not necessarily in such an open way or an obvious way as we are with our staff, if you're in that kind of a role, but nonetheless, I think it's an important characteristic to take on as a good salesperson, to be the leader for our clients. And in fact, that might also be colleagues as well, because it might be colleagues who are in a different part of the business.
Speaker 1:So when I was running a major account for one company, I would have regular meetings with other departments and in fact this has been a feature since then really 'll talk to accounts if they're. If, for example, if we're importing equipment, we often the accounts. People have to buy from currency, so they need to have an idea of what business is likely to be coming in in that currency so they know how much to buy and they're looking to buy it at a good rate. So all those kind of things I'm looking at people who do. In this case it was systems as part of it, so there would be installation, there would be testing, all those kind of things. So I'd be keeping those people informed about when I was expecting orders to come in, what the lead times would be, when we could expect delivery to our facility, to do a pre-delivery inspection before it went off to the client, all those kind of things.
Speaker 1:So I don't again, you know, I don't know what your business is, but it may be that you have elements of that or you have to involve other people in order for your client's experience let's look at it that way to go. Well, but also you need to have everybody else on side, and that, to me, is what leadership is about. So in that situation that I'm referring to there. I would have these. It would be a monthly meeting. That was normally enough for what we were doing, but I would sit down with everybody not necessarily all together, that's the ideal, but sometimes I just drop into people individually and run through what was going on and maybe give them whatever documentation they needed and develop relationships within the business that way. But the the reason for doing that was that, first of all, the client's experience was as good as good as we could get it, and also that the experience from our supplier when they were dealing with us was that they knew what was going on as well and they were kept informed. So that, to me, was a very important aspect of it. So what was driving this particular?
Speaker 1:The topic of this podcast was really about developing a supportive community and as a leader and in a sales leader role and obviously elsewhere too. But as a sales leader, the thing when I first got into sales management what excited me the most was being able to create an environment where my salespeople could grow and they didn't feel that somebody was constantly looking over their shoulder waiting for them to make a mistake. And I've definitely worked in businesses where that was what the sales manager would do, and you felt that, or I felt that not only was I responsible for my part of the business finding clients, making sales, doing all of that but also the support that I could get from my manager would be pretty minimal if anything. And if anything, I felt that he was just standing there waiting for me to make a mistake so he could catch me out. So that is a very toxic environment to work in and I hope none of you listening have had to work in that kind of an environment. And equally, if you're in a leadership role which is why I assume that you're listening to this that isn't the kind of environment you're creating for your people.
Speaker 1:So I remember having a sales meeting with one of the companies that I was running a sales manager, and I actually said to everybody in the group that my aim as the sales manager in that group was to be the worst salesperson in the group, and the reason I was saying that was that at that point I was the best salesperson in the group. I could confidently outsell any one of my team, but my role was to coach them, to teach them everything I knew, or certainly teach them as much as I could teach them from my experience of selling, and then they would add their twist to it, their insights, their experiences, and that would give them that edge over me so that they at some point would be able to take me on, if you like if you think of it in those terms and beat me and do it regularly, because they knew everything I knew, plus what they had, and that would always give them the edge. So that was my intention and it was an open statement, an open intention that I shared with the people who worked for me, and in order to make that happen, I would regularly spend time with them and I've spoken before about working with underperformers and I would use those kind of techniques that I described in that podcast, and the core thing of that was to have debriefs, go in, have sales meetings or sales meetings, as in customer client-facing meetings, which might be demonstrations. It might be establishing what their requirement was, it might be going in and closing the deal. So usually that would be me in a backup kind of role to them. So I'm there, it may be, and don't forget as sales managers, as having a manager tag or whatever your title is. It might be director, it might be something else, but it's. We are a tool for our sales staff to use. And again, that was another thing. I made very clear that for certain deals or dealing in certain situations, it was advantageous to bring in a more senior person. Now there might be reasons for that. It may be that as the more senior person, I would be able to agree to certain conditions in the deal which my regular salesperson wasn't in a position to agree to. So that would be one reason why I might be there.
Speaker 1:I also feel it's a very good idea that the sales manager meets at least the key clients in every area of each salesperson, because people move on and the reality is that you want to maintain those strategic relationships, and certainly with the important clients, the ones who are delivering the bulk of the business to your company. I believe you have a responsibility I'm going to refer to sales manager from here but I think in that role you have a responsibility to make sure that at least the key clients are people that you know as well. It's not to take anything away from the relationship they have with the salesperson who is working with them on a day-to-day basis, but it does mean that if that person goes, for whatever reason, that there is an existing relationship that you can fall back onto and then maintain the relations with that client. So that would be part of it. I might go in to actually run the meeting myself, in which case and that might be the case with newer salespeople I might go in and just run a meeting so they could see how I go. They may come with me to one of my clients if I have a group of clients, and I have done that as sales manager.
Speaker 1:In the end, I found that in some roles, one in particular I decided not to do that simply because my numbers were starting to suffer, because I was spending so much of my time with my salespeople and getting their numbers up and I felt like I was kind of undermining myself by underperforming when it came to having sales meetings where we're all talking about our figures and that really wasn't. That didn't really work. And because a lot of I was running basically a full region at the time or a full area, full sales area comparable to anybody else's, but I had probably less than half the time of everybody else to do it because I was spending time with my salespeople. So that's another thing to consider actually, if you're in that situation whether or not you run with a number yourself or you just run with the overall number and take responsibility for making sure that the part of the business that you're responsible for does meet target so I would go in, but often, as I was saying, more often when I do meetings with salespeople, I would go in to support them. Uh, I, what I like to do actually was always set up beforehand that if, for any reason, they felt they got stuck or they wanted me to step in with anything either they could do it in a very simple way, and that was to ask if I had anything to add. Just make a statement like that Sometimes, and the other way I like to use this, where it was two of us going in is that if my salesperson was leading the meeting, occasionally something might happen.
Speaker 1:They might be asked a question or something else might happen where they just needed a bit of breathing space, a bit of time and it's happened to me, it's probably happened to you. It might be a meeting where it's a little bit full on and you get asked a question and just in that moment you need to step back and kind of consider what's just been asked of you. So there are techniques you can use yourself if you're on your own, to handle that. But equally, if I was there supporting a salesperson, I would just say to them get them to say to me Graham, do you want to add anything to that, or is anything you'd like to add? At this point? And I can think on my feet fast enough that I could just jump in and handle that for a minute or two or whatever was needed for my person to get back on top of things. So and usually I think once the pressure's off you for a moment, you can think it's much easier to come up with and start thinking quickly and come up with the appropriate response. But it's good to take the pressure off. So that was really how I would work it.
Speaker 1:But the key thing was to just debrief afterwards, and the way to do that and I'm sure I've spoken about that in others of this series is just to ask the salesperson first of all what they thought went well. So the reason for doing that is this needs to be a positive experience for the person, because you're coaching at this point, so the coaching experience has to be positive. They have to feel comfortable not only about bringing you into one of their meetings where you're sitting in, because as I'm sure most of you know maybe all of you listening to this know, if you are a salesperson and your manager comes in, that can be it's just another layer of stress that goes on because you don't want to mess everything up in front of your manager. So this is where having that relationship and essentially building an atmosphere of trust with your staff, it makes it much easier to go in and support them and to get a very clear view of what they're doing well and what they're doing not so well. And this is really why I would go in and do that. It was one of the reasons.
Speaker 1:Actually, I also wanted to assess not only their performance but what the potential was for business with that client, maybe in that business sector, because normally it would be across different sectors, because I need to make an assessment of the business potential for that particular person when it came to setting their target and I'll talk about setting targets in another one, because I think that's a different area of expertise and I think it is an area of expertise because if you get that wrong, the business will suffer or you will drive sales people away. You know you can. If you mess it up as a sales manager, in a sales leadership role, you can really do yourself a lot of damage. So I'll talk about setting targets in another podcast, in another one of these this series. But the key thing for me was to make that coaching experience positive, so not only uh.
Speaker 1:So we'd start with what went well. We talk about maybe what could have gone better, because often the salesperson will go on to that anyway and then again I would leave it. What do you think you could have done better? You know, if you just had that meeting again, what would you do differently? So let them come up with a solution, and it's not to put them on the spot, but it's just to see what they've come up with, because often and again you may have experienced this when you stop and look back on an event like that, you can think of different ways you could have handled it, which would have been a lot better, but in the moment you maybe made a decision that wasn't the ideal, but it was what it was and that's what happened and it's gone. So there's, I think, a footballing phrase play the ball that's in front of you, which basically means you might have just stuffed up really badly, but that's in the past. You can't change that. So how do you now move forward? How do you deal with the next client? How can you learn from that experience? So that's the first thing to really have a relationship with your staff where you can have that open discussion. And obviously then I might make suggestions, but it would be along the lines of that's really good, what you're suggesting I think would work, and also have you thought about this, because this might be another way of doing it. So again, it's just a suggestion, but it's really about not making them wrong.
Speaker 1:And I remember having quite a young guy actually, and he was in fact one of the younger guys in the group I was running, but he was a very smart guy, very good with clients, actually had a lot of ability as a salesperson, and I decided to promote him to be regional manager, which meant that he then had staff reporting into him. And I also made it clear to the salespeople in general that if they did get into a situation where they needed authority and usually it would be a discount, but it might be something else, but they needed authority to make this particular offer to close the deal. Normally, and it would normally be something that they would contact me to get the okay to go ahead with. If they couldn't get hold of me, it was contact this guy and then he would make a decision on whether or not to go ahead. And I actually sat down with him and spoke about it because, being a young guy, he he had good experience, he'd done very well.
Speaker 1:But clearly, you know, you have so many years of experience. At a certain age you can only do so much and he was a graduate. So you know all of that stuff was there and I said to him that look, you're in fact before before I announced it to everyone that we want to do that. So this is what I want to do and if someone does come to you, just give it your best decision at the time, what you think is the right one. And the thing to remember is we're all human here and it's highly likely that every now and again you're going to make a bad decision. So and it's maybe one I wouldn't have made, you know. But the thing about it is, we'll sit down and go through it and what we're going to do, I'm going to take the decision apart, but I'm not going to take you apart because we all do the best, what we think is the best thing to do in that moment.
Speaker 1:And again, coming back to our salespeople, this isn't just in that kind of a situation where it's about giving authority to do a non-standard deal with somebody, but it's handling any situation with clients and as people, we do what we think is best, and that isn't always the case. Sometimes inexperience will push us the wrong way. But the important thing coming back to really the point of this podcast is, as leaders, I think it's absolutely essential that we create an environment where our sales staff feel empowered by us. They feel empowered to go out to try new things, to grow as individuals grow professionally, to really become the best salesperson they can be, and knowing that if they do make a mistake, if something does go wrong, they can come straight away back to us as the sales manager and say, okay, I think I've just really screwed this up, because when they do that, if they feel safe enough to do that, you then have an opportunity maybe to fix it.
Speaker 1:But what I've seen in situations where the leadership is poor, where people feel they have to cover themselves. They have to try and deflect blame somewhere else is that they won't put their hand up that something's gone wrong and then generally you'll only find out about it when it's too late, when the disaster has happened. You've maybe lost that client, you've lost that deal, it could even impact a supplier. So it's really important that you create an environment which is not about finger pointing. It's supportive, it supports growth. It supports healthy growth. It supports an environment where you can have healthy feedback with sales staff and maybe they give feedback to you.
Speaker 1:You know, the important thing is not to be afraid of that, and what I've seen with certainly the worst managers I wouldn't even call them leaders, but the worst managers are the people who are afraid of their staff and what they do is they're constantly putting their staff down. They'll claim credit for things that their staff achieve, all these kinds of things. So if you're unlucky, but maybe lucky in a way, you will have worked for people like this. Lucky, but maybe lucky in a way. You know you will have worked for people like this, but and the reason say you might be lucky is you get to see firsthand how not to be a manager, how not to be a leader and hopefully, from that you can learn. And when you are in a position where you are leading a group, where you are leading a team, you can foster the kind of environment that is supportive of everybody.
Speaker 1:And I think when you do that, you have a team that works. You'll develop a team that works really well, and when you have a team that's working really well, you're highly likely to achieve the goals that you've set out, whether they're financial or it's more to do with how you develop the company and the business and the feel of the personality, the culture within that business. You can develop a culture that's supportive, supports growth and has people wanting to come in. Every day they get excited about coming in and doing their job. Okay, so that's it for this one. I hope some of that has been useful. I hope all of it's been useful and I'll speak to you on the next podcast. Bye for now.