Sales leadership is changing… and the old style of sales leadership is no longer as effective as it once was. What are you doing to insure you have the strongest, and most effective management style to motivate and lead your team to increased sales? Join me as I share a template that can define the best sales leadership style you can be applying to your sales team…so they can sell even more!
Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. One of the ways we can do that is by helping you become more effective and persuasive as a leader of your team. One of the ways we can do that is we can describe, by building a four-square matrix, the four major alternatives of leadership style that you have available to you as a sales manager to help your team be as effective as possible.
On the vertical axis we have, are you more proactive or reactive as a leader? A reactive manager is one that says, "My door is always open. Call me when you need me. I'm available whenever you need help." But they don't tend to offer suggestions or advice until you ask. This was the old baby boomer model of the old days. The other option is to be more of a proactive leader. A proactive leader doesn't wait for a salesperson to ask for help. They initiate discussions looking for opportunities to figure out where there's gaps in salespeople's strategy and tactics and what as a manager they can do to help them identify and see the solutions the sales rep can follow that can be even more effective.
On the horizontal axis, we deal with your information controls. On the left-hand side is the more traditional style of management, which really only focuses on history and today. You go into your manager. You say, "This is the problem." The manager says, "What happened?" A good history-focused question. You tell them what occurred. And then they say, "What are you going to do to fix it?" A good today-focused kind of conversation. But then, whatever the solution is that's worked out for this today fix, go ahead and do it. Go out and get it done now. That's all that's talked about. So the problems could very well replicate themselves week after week, because there was no future focus on what was being done.
The other option is to be more future-focused. You still have concern for history and today, but the major coaching opportunity is working on the future, and what are we going to do to make sure this doesn't happen again? What do we do to make sure this problem doesn't occur again? Those are all future-focused type of conversations to have.
So now, if we cross these axes, we come up with a four-square pattern of the different styles of management you have available to you. In the very bottom left-hand corner, you have the manager, the more traditional, baby boomer manager that was very history and today-focused in their communication and very reactive. These are the people that spend all their time on special pricing and on problem solving and crisis management. Well, look at the difference. If you're a more proactive leader and you're more future-focused, you're going to spend more time on coaching and training, and defining and proving selling best practices. The reality of these two different styles of management come down to just some simple words, because see that the person that is very proactive and very future-focused tends to be more of a selling process coach, where a manager that's much more reactive and history-today focused is going to be much more of a transactional manager.
The transactional manager was a style of management that the baby boomers implemented. What we're seeing today, it's much more effective to be a selling process coach and leader. And the difference is really only in a couple of terms. See, the more traditional history-and-today and reactive manager tends to only ask two questions, what and who? What are you going to sell today? Who's it going to be? What do you got coming up this week? Who's involved? Where if we look at more of the selling process coach, they're asking more process questions of how and why. How are you going after the business? And why aren't you calling on this person?
You have a major choice of leadership today of what your style of leadership is going to be and the impact it's going to have on your sales team. I hope you see the opportunity that today leading edge success is based on being much more of a proactive and future-focused selling process coach, asking more how and why questions. What can you do to apply more of these concepts and be a more effective leader of your team so they could sell even more?