By Gary Rhoads
5 min read
Over 35 years of consulting and working with front-line employees and salespeople, I learned an essential insight that shapes how I think about high performing sales teams:
“There are not good or bad companies but only good or bad sales managers. Even in organizations where the majority of salespeople under-perform, you will always find pockets of high-performing sales teams. When you dive deeply into successful teams, you will find the diamond in the rough: high-performing sales teams have a great sales leader. And great sales leaders can coach and elevate their team members to success.”
In a sales organization, the managers most responsible for company success is the front-line sales manager. The manager CEOs and executives spend the least amount of time and resources on—the sales manager. Yet it is the sales manager who is responsible for leading and coaching the reps who do the work. If we strike at the root of high performing teams, the core driver will be a sales manager who has the unique ability to level-up, inspire, and motivate team performance. The critical driver always boils down to a sales leader, who is a great coach.
What are the Building Blocks of Sales Leaders who have High Performing Sales Teams?
Building Block 1: Long-term success is when firms develop, not just recruit high performing reps.
One of the seminal meta-analysis conducted by Churchill, Ford, and Harley summed it up best when they noted it was not who you hire but what you do with those you hire that primarily determine salesperson success. I have seen this time and time again. Everyone knows that billions are spent on resources and training salespeople to succeed with only 13% of the funds having any notable impact. When sales organizations spend resources on developing sales leaders, they get amazing results. High-performing sales leaders lead to top performing sales teams. It’s really that simple.
Building Block 2: Collaborating not elaborating with reps.
When you observe sales managers conducting 1:1s, what do you see? Often you see the sales leader telling the reps in detail what activities or skills to work on for the upcoming week or month. It appears most sales managers naturally gravitate to a top-down process of elaborating in detail what reps need to do. When you peek into the leader-rep relationship of a high performing sales team, you see something different. In such cases, leaders are collaborators; working with the reps to create buy-in on the activities and skills that will best help a rep to achieve their organizational and personal goals. Collaboration is an opportunity to align the goals of the organization to the goals of the individual rep.
Building Block 3: Recognizing we are in the inspiration business
If you ask most sales leaders what their role is as a sales leader, they will quickly tell you that their primary responsibility is to manage their teams’ sales targets through effective budgeting and planning. A few might even mention coaching. However, I rarely hear sales leaders say their role is to inspire reps to perform. Today, the role of the sales manager is to lead, which is why we see many firms calling their sales managers, sales leaders.
Sales Leaders don’t just manage reps, they engage them in their work and provide purpose to their role: hence, sales leaders are now in the inspiration business. This transition and mindset are critical to developing high-performing sales teams. Do your sales leaders see themselves primarily as a manager who dictate the behaviors of the reps? If they do, they’re not in the inspiration business. With millennials, injecting purpose into their role pays significant bottom-line dividends.
If you want to create more pockets of high performing sales teams, than focus on developing your sales leaders into world-class coaches. Organizations who spend time developing front-line managers, quickly experience increased quota attainment, revenue per rep, and experience lower turnover. Providing sale managers with technologies (coaching stack) and skills to level up their teams produces enormous dividends. I have seen over and over again that when sales leaders become better coaches, they transform average sales teams to killer performing teams in less than 6 months. The reason for such improvement is apparent. When you increase the coaching skills of your sales leaders, you get a 10x return: On average, investing in your sales leader grows your return faster than anything else because when you invest in a leader, they impact 10 reps.
Even in sales organizations where a large percentage of salespeople under-perform, you will always find sales teams that knock the ball out of the park. Don’t take 30 years before you find the diamond in the rough: Behind every high performing sales team is a great sales leader. They can flat-out coach and transform an average sales team to a high performing sales team in 6 months or less using the three key building blocks.
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Gary Rhoads is a Founder and Chairman of the Board of Xvoyant. Gary is a Emeritus Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University. You can contact him at grr.xvoyant.com or read him on LinkedIn.