A conversational interview between TJ Walker and a sales leadership expert discussing how the expert engages with clients (primarily sales leadership teams at scaling companies), the importance of training and empowering sales managers as the key leverage point for scaling sales, and leadership development as pipeline/succession planning. The piece also touches on transitioning from introversion to public speaking and leadership communication.
Horrible. How do people engage your services?
Yes. So we have. Yes, yes to everything. I work primarily with sales leadership teams. We have products on our website that I have an on demand leaderboard leadership program that individuals can actually take. If an organization reaches out to me and says we have one leader who can do, can you do some coaching? I'm like, yeah, I don't do a lot of that though. It's more of the scaling companies. But a typical company is sitting revenues all over the board, but most of ours have been sitting at a minimum of $10 million in annual revenue all the way up to 450 million when I started the engagement with them. But it's sales teams that need to scale and you cannot scale through sales coaching or sales training alone because the manager, and this is a well known stat, but the manager has the biggest influence over someone's success and the implementation of any coaching someone's actually received. It's not the outside coaches, it's our inside allies. And so that's what happens. So, so my comp, my clients are people who have typically hit a bottleneck in their business. They're usually the bottleneck they need to empower their sales leaders. There's usually challenges happening that are going on, but they are like, we're ready to roll and they're going to double down on their leaders. And then you can look at any management book or leadership book or case study. The organizations that have always doubled down on their leaders, no matter how tough things get, are the ones that sustainably outperform all the others. It's so common and it's such a known stat. I just go, why doesn't everyone do leadership development? But that's, that's what's happening. And it's, it's the. I was at an event with some learning and development people earlier this week and one guy goes, are there, we were talking about emerging sales leaders. And he goes, are there companies that actually train new leaders? And I was like, hello? Yeah, we actually specialize in that. But, but what it does is that the new leaders, it's not just for the short term roi, and there's a lot of short term roi, but it is the, the pipeline, leadership pipeline and succession planning. It's, it's those leaders, you're either going to fix their bad habits or you're going to help them get off on the right, right foot. And it's much easier. People are more open to coaching when they're new in a role versus 30 years in. Right. They just are.
Everybody looks at really everything but leadership, in particular through their own lens of expertise. I look at leadership through the lens of communication because from my perspective, being a great leader is synonymous, typically being a great communicator. It's very hard to be a great community, a great leader, if you can't also communicate. How did you make the transition from being someone introverted? And maybe you were okay knocking on a door, talking one on one, but how did you make that jump to then speaking in front of a lot of people or giving a sales pitch, maybe for the first time, to 20 people? When before you never talked to more than a couple at a time?
