As sales leaders, it’s our job to make sure the sales team works productively, meets their goals, and gets the resources and support they need to succeed.
Sometimes, though, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. When we’re mired in reports and meetings, analyzing pipelines and reviewing KPI’s, we sometimes pay less attention than we should to the human factor.
In order to be a true leader for your team – and not just a manager – here are four secret techniques to try out that can help you engage with your salespeople, get better information from them, drive them to higher achievement, and earn the kind of loyalty and respect that helps a sales team reach its full potential.
In the world of leadership, often you find one specific behavioral style that runs rampant. Whether it’s called the Doer, the Red, the Dominant – they all chart out the same, no matter what program you’ve used to discover your type, or what label is applied.
This person is the quintessential leader: they’re aggressive, and they want to get things done. Their time is valuable, and they have very little tolerance for distractions – “distractions” meaning anything that isn’t important to them.
If you are this dominant type, like many leaders, you may find yourself asking questions like this:
Why aren’t THEY adapting?
I’m the one in charge – I’m not changing the way I behave.
They need to either get on the bus, or get left behind.
Well, let’s take a step back. You know the old saw about doing the same thing and expecting different results?
Which is going to take more time and effort: for us to make minor tweaks to the way we behave, or to try to change the way “they” – meaning everybody else – behave? If you’re managing a large number of people, you can’t change them all, can you?
The first step to making this adjustment is simply understanding your own style of leadership, recognizing the way you behave, and figuring out how that is translating to your team. Then – it’s much easier said than done – you ADAPT.
In return, what you’ll get is a team that is following a LEADER they respect and appreciate, instead of digging in their heels as you try to drag them along.
If motivation is the core of success, it is clearly important for your team. The definition of motivation is the ability to change one’s behavior, a drive that compels one to ACT. Your team is depending on you to motivate them.
So you have to ask yourself, what drives their motivation? The answer may be surprising, even alarming.
Consider this scenario: You are in sales and you’re preparing for a meeting with your manager. It’s the beginning of the year, time for the annual goal-setting fiasco that happens every single year… but this time you’re prepared!
This year, you’ve already set your own goals, and even mapped out how you will achieve the goals you’ve set. You’re pumped about your plans and excited to share your ideas with management.
So you walk into your manager’s office. Without any pleasantries or preamble, a spreadsheet is provided to you. Your manager says these are your goals for the year, and then explains at length how the goals were calculated and how the market research was done. She says the sales goal is “a stretch,” but very achievable. When you actually look at the goals, you find the expectation that has been set is actually lower than your own goal.
You had a goal set before walking into the meeting, and had a plan to achieve it. Your manager has just taken you and your plans down a notch, and because of her prescriptive leadership style, she has undermined your ambition and de-motivated you.
How often do you think you do this? Don’t create the plan for the team and force them to comply – allow them to be part of the planning process. You’ll find that they buy into “their” plan much faster and with more motivation than they will ever buy into your plan. By allowing them to be part of the plan, you are compelling them to act – and motivating them to achieve more.
When is the last time you asked a member of your team how they were doing?
Not what, how.
Think about the difference. “What are you doing?” is actually asking: How many calls did you make? Did you update the CRM with that information? Are you talking to the right people? When are you going to close that deal?
“How are you doing?” means… How are you doing?
What are the possible responses you could get to this question? On one end, you may get just a “I’m good,” or “Great,” or even “Horrible!”
However, you will find that by asking this simple question, you’ll get much more interesting answers as well. Answers like, “Well, I’m doing okay… but I’m really struggling with getting all my calls in the CRM every day,” or, “I’m great! Did you see that big deal I just closed? It was hard work, but so worth it!”
As a leader, this gives you an opportunity to find out what is important to your team, what they need from you, and how things are really going!
This gives a lead-in to ask about their struggles and help them think through what the actual obstacle is. What is happening that is preventing them from making progress? Consider how you can help them remove the obstacles standing between them and success.
This gives you the opportunity to talk about the deal they just closed – what did they do to made that happen, and can it be duplicated on the other 150 deals your team has in the pipeline?
Not only that, but your team will feel that you actually care about them, and not just their KPI’s!
Let’s take this idea one step further.
Those “What are you doing?” style questions can actually be great questions if you’re trying to get a simple, very specific answer. They all only require a one-word response:
These are sometimes called closed-ended questions. By asking these types of questions, you will get the exact answer you asked for… and nothing more.
What happens if we open ourselves up to a new track – and open up the questions?
Instead of: How many calls did you make?
Try: Tell me about your calls today.
Instead of: Did you update the CRM with that information?
Try: Can you help me understand the process you’re using to get that information into our CRM?
Instead of: Are you talking to the right people?
Try: Tell me about the people you are talking to.
Instead of: When are you going to close that deal?
Try: What can you tell me about your plan to get that deal to the next stage?
Just changing how you ask the question, switching from a closed-ended to open-ended style, can make a HUGE impact on the amount of information you get.
These open-ended requests for information will elicit longer, more informative, and potentially more useful answers, which not only benefits you… imagine what they do for the thought processes of the sales rep.
Will they keep depending on you to help them plan, or do you think this approach might encourage them to think more independently, come up with their own plans, and truly own their business?
This is part of moving your approach from management to true leadership. The more you get your people to own themselves, the less you have to take care of. So whatever you do, don’t shut them down… open them up!
