How Sales Leadership Should Approach 2021

This message should not be to sales leaders, but that presidents and CEOs and owners, you ultimately are the sales leaders. And that's often not what we see. If that president, CEO and owner isn't willing to learn to lead and manage the sales organization, they will always struggle. Hi, I'm Susanna. I'm Andrews, President and CEO of Stark and Associates, Sandler Training. I've been in the business for 18 years, started as an associate under Ken Stark and I've been a franchisee for six and a half years. We work with presidents and CEOs and sales organizations who are focused on growing the sales side of the business and recognize that they've got gaps, they need to change or improve. Most of them have to decide themselves what they mindset's going to be and they have to get really clear that it's their job to be strong and set a strong foundation and a very strong message about what's required. So that's the first piece and what's required is that sales leader and I'm always going to bring in the president and CEO. They have to do it together and aligned. They have to clearly define and look at, well, where are we today in terms of how or the past and how we. What we were tracking and measuring. Are those the right things moving forward? And if they are, get really clear about what you expect your salespeople to do day in and day out. We call it behaviors. It's the Sandler concept of a cookbook. Build your recipe for success and define it very specifically. Set the tone and the expectations, track and measure it. You can't motivate somebody unless you understand them. Everybody thinks they dangle the carrot, the money, the incentives, and that's going to motivate. It's not. Most salespeople aren't money motivated, but they're driven somehow internally. One I'm going to just sort of reinforce. You do have to be doing the one on one with people. You've got to be spending the time to touch base and find out how people are doing and go back to their personal goals and make sure that you're keeping them visible, asking them what's changed. Because there are things that have changed with people through Covid a recognition that my family is more important than ever and they're spending more time with their family. And so realigning to what you're seeing might be changes in what's important to them and understanding what that is. The other is contests are good and make them fun. There's lots of creative ways to make them fun. We really believe that sales managers and sales leaders need to get aligned and together with us to actually, again, what the heck is the strategy and where do we have gaps? Because most don't recognize the holes. And typically the holes fall into a couple of really big areas. First is planning. They don't have standardized territory plans and sales plans. So every sales reps working from their own gut or what they get up to do every day. So typically we start there, right? We help them develop that structure and put that planning process in place, and then we teach them how to execute them. As a manager, how do you coach to it, how do you hire to it, how do you hold people accountable, how do you go on a ride along all of those things that will make them be effective in that role. One of the presidents that I worked with, an introverted guy, really didn't like the people side. Very empathetic, but never showed it. And there was a quote I had years ago that I had him put on his computer to read every day. People want to know that you care before they care what you know. That was kind of an invaluable message for him that he really had to ingrain in his brain and put some behavior behind. So he got out of his desk every day and he would go walk the halls. He'd never done that. He would have a list of every day and every week. Who was he going to just reach out to to say hello and stroke in some way? And it has completely changed the culture of the organization and his effectiveness as a leader. He is seen as a true leader because people see him as caring and people see him giving the right direction. We believe if there was a pie chart in front of me or behind me that sort of showed the various roles that a sales leader or sales manager plays. It's, you know, supervising, coaching, training, hiring, recruiting, interviewing, and mentoring. The biggest piece of the pie should be coaching, because most people think it's supervising. People supervise themselves when they're motivated and they want to hit their goals. They want you to coach them, be behind them, support them, develop them. So we spend a tremendous amount of time working on helping managers be better coaches. And that means they need to be better listeners. And they have to get out of the mode of telling people what to do. Nobody likes to be told what to do. So we teach them how to learn to ask questions and use questions to help people self discover and take ownership of what they need to do. So it's a really holistic approach to. To developing the leader to be able to develop effectively the people on their team. That's one of my favorite questions. And it's actually probably the most rewarding thing I've done in my job, my role. I've had several salespeople that I have had the opportunity to help identify potential within them with their president and CEO and move them up in the organization. So the first is they have to be people that are motivated in hitting their goals right. They have to show improved success. You have to have a clear defined profile of where you would see them moving so that they can see that that's where they'd want to go. We help companies build that hiring profile. Then what you do is you evaluate them. You take those assessments to see do they have what it takes, and if so, you put them into training. So I've worked with my oldest client, so I'll tell a quick story. Was a sales guy, and his name's Jamie Moritz. I'm going to call him out from international companies. And he was a sales guy that they wanted to move into sales management. So I spent the first three years with him, just working with him to get structure in place, engage his team, start to hold people accountable, build him and coach him into being able to manage. So over the last several years, he has progressed from a salesperson to a sales manager, to a VP of sales, to a senior VP of sales. And now he is general manager over the division that he was involved in. And he's got several managers under him and inside sales, outside sales. It's such a great story, but it's constant, ongoing work and development. Right? So thanks a lot, everybody for listening today. My biggest hope would be that you took away from this time that you invested that there are some things you can do differently in your business. And thinking about it from the perspective of what can I start doing, what can I stop doing, what can I do more of and what can I do less of? So focus on one or two things that are going to help you move your business or take your business to the next level. Sandler can offer lots of resources for you, so check out sandler.com as well as check out the HubSpot Report.