Sales Leaders: Stop Leading Like a Super Salesperson! Here's Why!

The obvious thing is organizations are really good at doing onboarding, and they onboard typically around products and solutions, but they typically don't onboard well around soft skills, particularly as you develop future leaders and they get promoted from being individual contributors to leaders. There's certainly very little onboarding or structure around on how best to do that. One of the biggest challenges is great salespeople don't necessarily make great sales leaders. It doesn't mean they can't, but if they're not well equipped, then, you know, they're likely not to succeed. So as I started bringing on individual contributors and developing them as sales leaders, I needed an easy framework in which I could share, you know, my experiences, but also help them focus on what their core priorities were.

Yeah, that is exceptional. And it's very insightful because like you said, 99 out of 100 times onboarding is mentioned, it is about products. It is about solution and value proposition. It is not about how do you get this person to operate at the next level in this role. So thank you. Tell me a little bit more about the 4 sales leader personas.

So in developing a framework, I tried to adopt a classic sort of Boston Consulting type matrix where it just made it really simple. And in my own experience, experience as moving into a sales leader, there was the expectation that you would be primarily a super salesperson and someone who'd go in and help, you know, close and win the big opportunities. And whilst that's a very important part of what you do as a leader, it's by no means your priority. And, um, you know, that particular persona, the super salesperson, as I'll go through it, is Yes, it's very effective at specific points in time, but it doesn't allow you to grow and scale the business.