In every company, the people who sell, deliver, and develop customer relationships are its most important assets. They are the conduits to the company’s main asset: the customer.
The sales leadership team is the organization owner of this collective asset, and is obligated to manage and nurture it in a way that produces the best sustainable results. Team discipline drives the sales agenda for every opportunity and engagement. His commitment, persistence, and energy cultivate best practices and encourage the right actions in salespeople to achieve consistent sales success.
Sales leaders must demonstrate discipline and a predictable pace in their actions, and transmit that discipline throughout the customer-facing organization. Faced with more initiatives and programs than anyone can handle, sales reps look to their leadership for clues to determine which behaviors, activities, or programs are most important. That’s why it’s critical that sales leaders communicate what they expect and then inspect what they expect.
A checklist for sales leaders
Great sales executives translate their personal skills and best practices they’ve observed into a repeatable discipline for those they lead. They create and activate a process within your sales organization that doesn’t rely solely on sales heroics, but on repeatable, predictable, results-based activities that can produce extraordinary results for your business.
So how does a sales organization know if it has the management discipline that is essential for success? Here are some good questions to ask.
- Is there a standard scorecard or dashboard to regularly assess the progress of opportunities through the pipeline? Does the dashboard include documented customer results? Is it easily visible?
- Is there a calendar that triggers management account reviews and pipeline reviews? Or do they only pay attention at the end of a quarter?
- How do sales managers/executives identify the most important things to help salespeople perform beyond expectations? What process is used?
- How effective are sales managers and executives in coaching sales teams to achieve outstanding performance? Does the training happen regularly or only sporadically when there is a big problem going on?
- Does the management team reinforce the use of selected account management tools by personally using the tools in live account situations?
- Are sales managers disciplined in how they interact with their customers, making sure their role is integrated with the account team, or do they only jump in when the deal is in trouble?
- Are vendors held accountable through their annual SMART or performance goals?
- Is adherence to the sales process a factor in the allocation or non-allocation of resources?
Eight Attributes of Sales Leadership Discipline
Successful sales efforts, with rare exceptions, are collaborative efforts by many talented people. Team members can make contributions to the collective effort based on their own special competence. They have to fulfill their assigned responsibilities extremely well for the collective effort to be a success.
With the right discipline, management can get the same people to produce the result twice. Our research has identified eight attributes of the sales leadership discipline:
- Customer focused. Based on the client’s desired results
- Based on the sales process. Guided by a documented sales process
- Intentionally. Requires prescribed actions from customer-facing teams
- Developmental. Promotes relationships and personal development
- Driven by accountability. Focuses on what leaders expect and will inspect
- Performance Motivated. Make it clear to teams how their performance is measured and rewarded.
- Focused on the competition. Emphasizes the training of sales teams in the stages of the sales process.
- Driven by calendar. Set expectations and follow a schedule
The pace of management demonstrates predictable, reliable, and thoughtful leadership. Sales leaders must cascade discipline throughout their organization so that all levels of the organization are flying in formation, disciplined in their actions, and united in purpose.