Often as Sales Leaders it can be easy to assume that our sales people have the necessary skills, attributes, mindset and experience in order to be successful and deliver outstanding results over and over again. It is something that I know I have taken for granted many many times, to my detriment, the detriment of the sales person, and to the detriment of the team. I assumed that because I had developed a higher level of conscious competence, moving towards unconscious competence in relation to selling and relationship building, that my team would possess the same level of competence. Not so.
Perhaps I was naive to think that selling was as simple as following a sales methodology and repeating over and over again. Well it is simple, however, what I needed to consider more closely was the types of people I had in my team and what made them tick. What I discovered was that some people were quite happy picking up the phone and cold calling to develop business, knowing that sales was simply a numbers game, and yet others looked at the phone as if it weighed 2 tonne and could not bring themselves to pick it up – those people would rather send an email appointment request and meet a potential customer in person. And the big lesson for me was that if I was to expect my team to do something that I either had not done or was not prepared to do, then my credibility would be questioned, and ultimately my leadership would come into question. Continue Reading