You want your sales team to ascend to higher levels of sales in a professional, well-managed way. How do you achieve this?
Your team needs strong sales leadership, and you need to find the right person for the job. If you’re looking for a new addition to your sales management team, you need to find an active sales leader with the characteristics and leadership skills that will help your team grow its sales results. Here are some of the features that you need to find and an infographic showing the 6 Qualities of Great Leaders.
A Sales Leader Comes With a Leadership Attitude
Attitude isn’t everything, but it plays a role in effective sales team leadership. As you look for a sales leader, seek out someone who’s naturally positive, confident, and a good communicator. A sales leader holds herself to a high standard of behaviour, consistently acting in a professional manner that respects customers, upper management, and the salespeople in your company.
Sales Leaders Are Focused
When you’re looking for a new sales leader, you need to find someone who’s focused on achievement and internally driven. If your organisation has targets and deadlines, that individual will aim to meet and exceed them. Regardless of the difficulties in achieving those objectives, an exceptional sales leader will continue to recreate plans to achieve sales goals.
Strong leaders have gut feelings but make decisions based on data.
Leaders Make Decisions Based on Data
An excellent leader will make decisions based on solid evidence, not hearsay or a gut feeling. They’ll look for the numbers behind any success or failure and analyse them to determine how those numbers can change. A sales leader should be able to justify the reasoning behind a decision with substantial data.
Leaders Have a Vision
While your salespeople are working hard to create content or take calls, the sales leader creates the framework and context for this hard work. A sales leader should understand where the company is going and why, and turn this into an operational plan for the sales team. The leader is behind the plans that drive your sales processes.
Leaders Hold Your Employees to Account
An active sales leader isn’t just internally motivated: he also strives to motivate others by holding them to high standards as well. Leaders work with others to establish individual goals and targets for the entire sales team. They measure performance, celebrate successes, and work to understand failures or coach employees who are not doing well.
Leaders Incorporate Feedback
An effective sales leader doesn’t just follow an individual vision of how your company should sell its products. Sales leaders ask for feedback from upper management and salespeople. If a particular strategy just isn’t working on the ground, it’s important for the leader to know so that she can incorporate this into future planning.
Leaders Understand People
Great sales management leadership isn’t just about being a great salesperson or visionary. Great sales leaders understand how to work with people. They are efficient in the hiring process, ensuring that those who join your team are the best fit for your organisation. Leaders can see the positive traits that your employees hold and have experience coaching employees and working with them to incorporate feedback and evaluate and reframe goals. They might have their own leadership styles unique to them, but the best leaders know when they can should adapt.
They can give advice that’s appropriate to the circumstances and have a strong sense of sales intuition honed over the years completing sales and working with employees. Sales management is a unique field that’s not just about selling – it’s about working efficiently with employees to help them bring their strengths to your business.
This infographic from Eliv8 shows the six qualities of great leaders.
