Sales leaders are the fulcrum for driving sales performance in every company. And yet, they can also be the cause of the chronic inconsistencies that many sales organizations have.
You will have no doubt come across these people in your past – the newly appointed (perhaps over promoted) sales leader, who used to be a super salesperson and who now is…still a super salesperson, swinging in to rescue and close deals.
This isn’t leadership - and they can cause more harm than good, frustrating others and themselves as they create dependencies and bottlenecks. At worst, they cause learned helplessness among your salespeople who feel obliged to involve their leader in every opportunity for fear of doing something wrong or not closing.
“Clear the path,” we used to say when I worked for Franklin Covey.
Many newly promoted sales leaders struggle to coach their people. They think coaching is ‘telling’ them how to solve the challenges that their salespeople bring to them.
Most times, the salesperson has the answer and they just need it pulled (coached) out of them by a leader who is skilled in Socratic or coaching questions. Most sales leaders have never been taught how to ask these questions or just aren’t interested in reading and learning about them (many top performing salespeople who are promoted to leadership roles don’t read and are quite proud of that).
For example, I once caused a commotion in a 4 Disciplines of Execution workshop when a sales leader, who in a pique of frustration, blurted out that he didn’t have time to coach and that just telling the salesperson the answer was faster. I called him out and asked if he was a “selfish” person, a pattern interrupt that I learned from studying Tony Robbins’ live interventions.
It was a brave move on my part as he was a really BIG guy…and I weigh in at 220lbs. The other participants sat up to see what would happen next.
Of course, my intent was good and I was being provocative on purpose. It caused him to bristle and ask why I thought he was selfish when he absolutely did not mean to be. Exactly what I had hoped he would do. This started him down the path of exploring why he did what he did and how that might cause less than desired outcomes.
His personal awareness blossomed when I asked him a few more searching questions. He saw and realized how he was making himself a bottleneck and trapping his salespeople into always coming to him for answers.
I also reframed how he saw these coachable moments – rather than not having time. He merely lacked the knowledge of what questions to ask and how to ask them. Once he saw the power of effective coaching questions, he fell in love with the saying, “With people, fast is slow and slow is fast.” He confessed that he had never looked at leadership this way and saw how unconsciously and unintentionally he was not being helpful, but being ‘selfish.’ His whole energy shifted from frustration to engagement, moving from the back of the room to the front during a break in the session.
And, I get it. I really do. I was totally over promoted into my second leadership role during the .com boom – going from top producing sales rep to Regional GM Scandinavia in the space of a couple of weeks. (I do thank Philppe Cothier and David Long for recognizing and believing in me when I didn’t see it in myself).
Leadership can be a very lonely job, especially when you are thrown into the deep end as I was. Luckily for me, I am a voracious reader and when I don’t know how to do something, I read how to do it. I read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm over a weekend and applied it to my new role and ended up running the only profitable office worldwide for this .com company.
Nowadays, I do things slightly differently. Rather than just reading, I like to work with experts in a mentoring and coaching capacity, as it helps to cement and accelerate new behaviours and results.
Many executives have come to recognize that mentoring and coaching is a highly leveraged way of improving their and their employee’s effectiveness and performance. They appreciate having an external sounding board who can view their challenges objectively, raise awareness of potential blind spots and challenge them in their best interest.
If you’re an executive or sales leader who would personally appreciate your own sounding board or have a team of sellers who you think would appreciate having their own sounding board to help them advance deals, then give me a call.