In every company, the people who sell, deliver, and develop relationships with customers are its most important assets. They are the conduits to the company's ultimate asset: the customer.
The sales leadership team is the organizational owner of this collective asset, and is obligated to manage and nurture it in a way that produces the best sustainable results. The team's discipline promotes the sales agenda for every opportunity and engagement. Their commitment, persistence, and energy cultivate best practices and encourage the right actions in salespeople to realize consistent sales success.
Sales leaders must demonstrate discipline and predictable rhythm in their actions, and cascade 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. This is why it is critical for sales leaders to communicate what they expect, and then inspect what they expect.
A Checklist for Sales Leaders
Great sales executives translate their personal skills and the best practices they have observed into a repeatable discipline for those they lead. They create and activate a process within their sales organization that is not dependent solely on sales heroics, but rather on repeatable, predictable, outcome-based activities that can produce extraordinary results for their company.
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 outcomes? Is it readily visible?
- Is there a calendar in place that triggers management account reviews and pipeline reviews? Or do they pay attention only 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 outstanding performance? Does the coaching occur regularly or only sporadically when a big deal is underway?
- Does the management team reinforce the use of selected account management tools by personally using the tools in real account situations?
- Are sales managers disciplined in the way they interact with their clients, ensuring that their role is integrated with the account team, or do they insert themselves only when the deal is in trouble?
- Are salespeople held accountable through their annual SMART or performance goals?
- Is adherence to the sales process a factor in assigning or not assigning resources?
Eight Attributes of Sales Leadership Discipline
Successful sales efforts, with rare exceptions, are collaborative endeavors on the part of many talented people. Team members can make contributions to the collective effort based on their own special competence. They have to deliver extremely well within their mandated responsibilities to make the collective effort a success.
With the right discipline, management can get the same people to produce twice the output. Our research has identified eight attributes of sales leadership discipline:
- Customer-focused. Grounded in desired customer outcomes
- Sales-process-based. Guided by a documented sales process
- Intentional. Requires prescribed actions of customer-facing teams
- Developmental. Promotes relationship and people development
- Accountability-driven. Focuses on what leaders expect and will inspect
- Performance-motivated. Makes clear to teams how their performance is measured and rewarded
- Competence-focused. Emphasizes coaching sales teams at sales process stages
- Calendar-driven. Establishes expectations and follows a timeline
Management rhythm demonstrates predictable, reliable, thoughtful leadership. Sales leaders must cascade discipline throughout their organization so that every level of the organization is flying in formation-disciplined in their actions and united in purpose
