Episode 47: 5 Impactful Strategies to Becoming the Leader People Aspire to be Like

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop your super powered B2B sales teams. So welcome everyone. Today we are episode 47, closing in on the magical 50 for the strongest Sales Teams podcast. And it has been a bumper last 12 months. But as we jump into 2024 and as you're listening, this is late January 2024 for me, it was such a timely moment to remind myself as to why I'm doing this podcast and to put out an episode that for me actually went straight to the core as to the type of people that I personally and we as a business, really want to be helping. And they are sales leaders, particularly new sales leaders and emerging sales leaders, who are finding their way in what is a really, really difficult part of their leadership journey. So today we're actually going to talk about the behaviors that I see very consistently across effective sales leaders. These are the behaviours that actually drive ongoing success that I see regularly appear in those type of leaders who are the ones that others aspire to be like. And let's stop on that for a moment. Leaders that others aspire to be like. For me, these are people and these are leaders that others want to follow and want to be around and in the end drive such strong engagement with their teams that they end up having a team of people who want to work and stay with them and their leadership style. So why is this something that's so important? Well, for me personally, and this is one of the rarer times where I think I get really vulnerable on this podcast and it's something that I experience the inverse of in the early stages of my career. So before I get into this story, let's take a moment to picture you as a person or professional. You go to school, you go to university for A number of people in the sales industry, certainly not everyone, but a number do, and then you go and get a job either straight out of school or through a TAFE course or equivalent or a university degree, right? And then you're going to that first job and you receive typically very good support from your business graduate programs, buddies, mentors, a lot of leader advice. And really, as your first job, business businesses invest heavily in you to help you, get you up to speed, right? From there. At the other end of the spectrum, when you're in that executive level, when you start to reach your fourth, if you're really fortunate, or your fifth and sixth decade, so in your 40s and your 50s in particular, is when you start to have businesses that say, hey, you're now leading big teams and we need to get you some executive leadership coaching, right? Which will typically focus around your EQ more than your iq. And case in point, aq. Let's talk about aq, Adaptability quotient. That's one that's rapidly coming out. And thanks to Steve Clayden for telling me about this one. But this is the time when you actually get lots of support. But in the middle is when you're making those really, really tricky jumps from being an individual contributor through to being a leader of others, right? That's when you go from being a fantastic salesperson who's excellent at what they do through to a person who is required to lead other people, right? So it's the single hardest step in anyone's career. And that's just not my opinion, but it's something you'll find plenty of literature on, right? When you move from being an individual contributor to a leader of others. But this for me and my experience of leaders is actually when they get the least support from the leaders around them, right? You go from a high performing individual to being someone that's actually leading teams and essentially are expected to do a lot of that yourself. So not only are you going through the hardest step in your career, but you're also doing so with a comparative lower level of support traditionally, right. Than you'd get at your early stages or your latter and certainly high performing stages of your career, right? So we've got two roads that come here and they hit head on in what is a really difficult time. And that's why we see so many sales leaders hit what we call that glass ceiling once they move into that management part of their career. For me, my job is to actually make sure you don't hit that glass ceiling, because I hit it myself. At about 27 and was very fortunate to move through it. So let me paint that picture. And after this, we're actually going to go through the five success factors or the five consistent behaviors that I see in leaders who generally succeed. But picture this. I'm 41, right? I'm 20 years in selling, but I was about six years in before I took on a really significant leadership role and my first day in this job. So day one in the leadership role, I'm making the calls, as I thought any good leader would, to meet all of their staff and their team members. So I'm into about my seventh or eighth call. I think this was a team of about 11 people. And I had that call and we were talking about some of the things that I thought I was really looking forward to learning from this person and mail and some of the things that I was really looking forward that I was hoping he would be able to learn from me because I had a slightly different perspective on things. And I got to the end of what was a 15 minute call and went, huh, that went pretty well. I think this is going to be a good relationship. Hung up the phone, thought nothing more of it. The next day, I receive a phone call with a fuming same person as was on the call the day before. And his words were, ben, I quit. And I went, right, tell me about it. Of course, in my head, alarm bells are going off. Oh my God. Second day in, what's everyone going to think? You've lost a staff member straight away, so, so worried about what others would think. And he said, because I'm just not going to work for you. And I said, right, what have I done to upset you? Again, freaking out in my head, right? Going absolutely crazy. And his words were, how dare you tell me what you're going to teach me. You are 20 years younger than me. I've been doing this role for 30 years and how dare you presume that you're going to be able to help me? So he put in his resignation letter and long story short, it turns out he was actually dodging the clock. He was only turning up for work remotely a couple of days a week. And we were really pleased to see the back of him and things did work out okay. But there was a really tough lesson in there for me and that was to really understand the other side of the conversation. Pushing advice, particularly when it's unsolicited, Making assumptions is something that's very dangerous. And that really, really rocked me. Now, I spent the next three months walking on eggshells around all of my staff, which had an equally opposite negative impact on the business because I wasn't actually driving them hard enough to get the best out of them for them to be the best people that they wanted to be. And you can talk about driving them hard enough or driving them in the most appropriate way, but I certainly wasn't challenging them to be able to get the best out of themselves. So my first three months, which ended up being six months before I sorted it out, was a great big fail. I was very fortunate, however, that when I hit that glass ceiling, I had a terrific mentor who happened to be a colleague at the time, who came in, saw what was going on and said, ben, let me help you. I actually spent three years with this person with some really heavy mentorship. Unofficially. The business wasn't paying for it, but he was very happy to help me and we are now still friends 15 years later. In fact, he came with his wife to my 40th, my wife and I's 40th about 12 months ago and we are in contact very regularly. And he's a man that I respect more than most people in my life. Not everyone else is that fortunate. So today what I'd like to do is go through some of the really consistent behaviors that I see in successful sales leaders, particularly those who don't necessarily have the support around them or can afford to get that support on an ongoing basis. Right, so let's get into it. Here are the five things. Number one, goals. This seems really simple. Goals you say, Ben? Well, of course everyone needs to set goals, but for me it's proactively setting what the top three to five goals are that you simply must succeed on to deliver growth or the targets that you have at a higher business level. So I'll often call these strategic success factors. And these are the things that a leader needs to make sure they have their team focused, focusing on day in, day out. So by setting these up now, we are January, right? Very common planning time of year. Not for everyone, but there's a lot of companies that do planning now. If we in January as a sales leader are looking to set those top three to five goals, we can be confident that we are able to govern our day to day activities, our behaviors, our systems, our symbols and our norms. Right. Everything that comes out of these goals can be set up to allow us to succeed. By failing to plan, we are planning to fail. It's a one liner that I've used a lot throughout my career. Setting goals allows you to avoid this Right. Particularly if you keep them very simple. There's generally going to be run around top line revenue growth or profitability levels, gross margin levels. There's almost always something in there. I love it when these ones around customer. So it's a customer goal and a people oriented goal. Right. There's three goals there straight away that often come into sales teams. But typically I'll see these things like brilliant basics or executing fantastic key account management. They're two really common ones that come out of strategic success planning. And then there's often a third one that's quite unique to a business. And I've worked with some terrific big businesses around these goals and they often will move back to the brilliant basics as one of their key criteria for success because it's just so impactful. So once we get these three to five strategic goals done, that's when we start to see businesses work down into the initiatives that need to come next. Right. You'll break those three to five down into a whole lot more activities. Then you get to prioritise, put action points around them and really start to delegate out tasks and hold yourselves accountable. But if you don't set those goals, that strategic planning and that North Star never get put into place. So that's number one goals. Number two is a sales process. Again, for me, a lot of leaders I hear say, Ben, a sales process, it's so straightforward. We know what that is. And then I ask them what's the sales process? And I'm met with a long pause of silence or some really awkward types of conversations where people just, they can't quite get it out. Right. So for me, if you can get your sales process embedded when you're doing your goal setting and have your team buy in, then what you have is a repeatable way of creating value for your customers that everyone will follow. So I love to simplify the complex. Everyone who works with me, the dozens of businesses that I've worked with over the last 12 months and the almost hundred businesses I've worked with over the last 20 years, they all see consistently that I like to simplify a sales process. And I'll generally work to five steps in a sales process and step back to episodes one to six all the way back into last year to be able to see some more information around these. But it's lead generation, the meet and greet and needs analysis is number two, the quoting process as number three or the value creation process you can call it as well. I'm seeing that more and more as number three. Number four Is the closing or agreement process not a dirty word for me? Closing? Because at the end of the day if you don't form agreement, then you don't have a relationship. And number five is the post sale or the key account management process. So they're five really clear steps that the best leaders I see actually work through methodically. They will generally set that top structure up for their teams, right? So those five steps are ready and then they'll bring their teams in and they'll work together through each of those steps to make sure that the team is really bought into what they do. Then within those steps we're going to have time metrics, we're going to have goals, specific activities or KPIs measurement items. And then the systems we use then underpinning all of that are the systems we integrate with and the objection handling process. We run some terrific additional omnipresent parts of a sales process that we should really see prevalent in any of our sales process build out. So for me, the key message here is again, duck back to episodes one to six. But the key message here is to make sure you're creating a sales process that's the team will buy into because then you can then build around, particularly when you pair it with your goals, everything else that needs to happen to bring these to life. So number one, goal setting, very common. In fact, I don't know a sales leader who hasn't set this, who's been successful though they all do it in very different ways. Number two is all around a sales process, getting your sales process right. Number three is metrics and measurement, right? We live in that information age when there are so many measurement metrics out there, right? We've all used CRMs that have dozens and dozens of options, if not hundreds of options to create sales metrics. What I love seeing in sales leaders who are succeeding and it's again very common is that they simplify the metrics down. They simplify them into anywhere from three to eight metrics, right? That teams understand that's the key number one reason is their teams actually understand what they have to measure on, right? So they know what they're reporting on each and every week or each and every month or each and every quarter so they can be focused around their goals and their sales process without spending too much time on their metrics. And then the second one is just that time, right? What we don't want is salespeople spending hours and hours in the office getting ready to report metrics. It doesn't help them create Value for customers, it doesn't build their confidence. And at the end of the day, metrics are actually. Or administration are actually not often salespeople's strengths. They're in the role to build relationships, not to be behind a computer creating admin. So for me, I often use three metrics and only three metrics. And you can go back to episode 15 to hear a real deep dive into these. But I love using only three because each of these other lead indicators or the canaries in the mind, if there's something bigger that's a problem within the team, number one is all around your effort. So that's number of customers that you're out seeing, number of meetings you're taking, number of quotes you're putting out there. There's a few different variations, but it's a very clear metric that talks about how many people you're getting out to see. The second one is all around your strategy, right? Your strategy to be able to get customers into a close. And in fact, I'll often intertwine here strategy and talent. But for if you are getting your number of customer visits into a pipeline that's active. So I look at active pipeline size and it can be dollars, units, it can be over different varied periods of time. However, for me, what I want to see is that we have a big, healthy pipeline because it means strategically our teams or our people are taking the first meetings with customers and getting active relationships that they're building. Right. Last but not least is actually results. That's all about your talent, right? Your ability to close deals and to have those around you help close deals. Right? But clearly that's the number we're often measured on as a leader or as an individual or a group of people. Right? So we have that as something that we should be really focusing in on. So we have effort, number of people, meetings, presentations, you're out and seeing strategy, how big your pipeline is, right? Is it the right size and are they active? Are they engaged? The last one is your sales numbers. So when things go wrong, what we actually get to do is dive generally into one of those. So I'll often see sales numbers being hit, but a pipeline that's very small and number of meetings that are very small, which means that pipeline has been really drawn through to close, but there's not a lot coming through for future months. So we know there's some tough times ahead. Or I might see great number of meetings, really strong pipeline, but sales numbers are off. Right? And we know there that we're getting in front of customers, but maybe we're in front of the wrong customers or we're not creating enough value to get them to close out their deals. Right. Really impactful way to measure performance of your team. And I love the simplicity because it allows your teams to really know what they're being measured on. And then for freestyle, I sometimes see teams add in a different metric or two that works specifically for their business. So it might be number of repeat orders, it might be average price, product size, it might be profit margin. Right. There's a few things in there that you can use that will help have a level of specificity for your business. So number one was goals, Number two was creating a sales process, and number three was about metrics. Number four is all around training. And you hear me talk about training a lot. So if you'd like to know more about training, go back to episode 16, and there's certainly some others scattered through the podcast series that really focus on the importance of training. For me, there's some really clear things we need to do to get training right. Right. There's five Cs, have a customized approach to be consistent, be concise, compelling, and have a coaching framework. This will be episode 50 coming up, will be all around a great training program, so I won't spend much time on it today. However, before you get to that podcast, what I would strongly recommend you do is actually get your program booked in, start to work out when you're going to be training your people. Right. Because once you've worked that out, your content can then come quite easily from there. For me, my recommendation is that training is every single week. That's right, every single week. My teams have killed for training over the past and I don't ever want to let a team down by not training them in terms of how we go about building a program. Certainly jump back to episode 16, but it's all around breaking it down into your three types of skills within a business. Technical skills, which is all about the skills you need specific to your business or product. Selling skills. They're the general skills like objection handling, and then your business skills. These are the types of skills that you need just to be in business, using the CRM, time management, how to hold difficult conversations, those type of things. Right. So three areas, great to prioritize your training against those. We've got lots of free resources which will be as a link to both this episode and episode 50 coming up in a few weeks. But for me, sales leaders that succeed have effective training programs. Okay, so number one, Goals Number two, sales process. Number three was sales metrics and number four was training. Number five is coaching. So where training is knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing, coaching is knowledge enhancement. Another great quote I actually had from Steve Clayden, who's a recent podcast. So if you missed that podcast, jump Back to episode 46. Darcy Smyth and Steve Clayden last week was a great podcast, but for me, great sales leaders have a coaching program that they follow, right? You can even call it a coaching framework. I use the Grow framework. I love it because it's simple. Once again, we come back to simplifying the complex. But I certainly like to be able to have a coaching program that is really easy to work through and that you can practically apply to most situations. So the Grow program, please look it up if you don't know much about it. It's by Sir John Whitmore. Very, very famous and impactful coaching program. Grow, meaning goals. R being the reality of where we're at now, O being the options for the other party and W being what you're going to do next. Right. We won't go into it today because we're very much out of time for this podcast and we've got a lot of punchy information here. But the best sales leaders that I have ever worked with absolutely prioritize coaching. In fact, I'd say it is the number one trait I see out of those five that I've just gone through that really signify a successful sales leader. So if you're short on what to do around coaching, this is one where you know where to find me because it's also the hardest skill that requires the most or the highest levels of EQ and the most practice. So before we finish up, let's go back through those. Those five effective traits that build leaders who people aspire to be like. So number one, setting goals. Number two is a sales process that you build that's simple and the team buy into. Number three is all around sales metrics, right? Measuring what progress you make but doing it in a simple fashion. Number four is a consistent training program. And number five is a clear and robust coaching model. Okay, so that's it for today. So a lot of notes here. They will be available in the show transcript. Right. For those who want to know where else to find us, you can find me on LinkedIn. Very, very common. There's plenty of content out there. Or go to www.strongestsalesteams and you'll find access to a whole pile of free resources and all the information that we've gone through today, but for today we're back to our health and fitness tips. We've had a lot of guest podcasts over the last few months, so we've missed some of these and I'd like to revisit quite an old one. In fact, it might have even been episode one. And because we're in that New Year, new you, New Year's resolution type of phase, I want to talk about how we can vary our desk time so that we're not constantly sitting behind a desk. These are things like walking meetings. I'm a huge fan of walking meetings. Please do them whenever you can. If you don't need a computer and you don't really need to write heavy notes, get out and walk with the person you're meeting with or get on the phone if you can. Number two is get a sit stand desk. I've just bought one. I love them. I'm up and down constantly all day. It gives me some flexibility and my muscles break. And then the third one is find a way to vary what you're doing right. If you're writing a lot of emails, take a break, go for a walk, try and mix in other meetings. But it is a hugely impactful way to make an impact on your day. So I highly recommend you look at varying how you're sitting and standing during the day. Okay, that's it from me today. Happy listening. Until next time. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call. Call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.