It can be lonely, yet very visible, at the top of a sales team.
Uspire’s Sales Growth Expert blog series comes from Amanda Downs, our Director of Commercial Leadership. She led sales teams for 19 years in industry and spent 17 subsequent years working as a sales consultant and coach. She designs and delivers our Commercial Academies for businesses looking to energise their sales teams.
Sales is the lifeblood of any organization. As sales leaders we have the privilege of being at the front end of business success.
Heading up a sales team can be a lonely place and the pressure can be high, especially when times get tough. The sales leader is expected to be an instinctive and capable team leader as well as commercially astute, often owning a target themselves to deliver alongside management.
I got what most do - some generic training in management skills - but what I really needed when I set out with that first team, on top of a decent dose of humility, was specific functional training in how to transition from being a good salesperson to a half-way decent sales manager and then leader. I needed a playbook for how to lead a sales team to success.
“I threw myself into targeting and micro-managing my already capable team to within an inch of their lives. I ran what I thought were good meetings, for which I’d decided the agenda and at which I made ‘we can win this’ motivational speeches…. Lucky for me, I had a great sales director. When I finally did ask for advice, he coached me with integrity and patience.”
The impact of the sales leader is wide and deep. A strong sales leader is a driving force for positive, customer-led change at all levels in your organisation. Sales leaders are rarely born though. If you’ve got this far, there will be no doubt about your ability to sell. Leading the sales agenda and taking a team with you is a wholly different thing and the best in the world are trained, coached and mentored to succeed.
I first developed this G.R.O.W.T.H Framework as a checklist of questions to give guidance to coaching clients to make sure that they are juggling all the balls needed to take hold of the commercial agenda and deliver results through sales teams.
The Sales Growth Expert blog series is intended to unpack the G.R.O.W.T.H. framework. It contains easy-access checklists, ‘how to’ guides with tips and templates for the what, how and why of leading your sales team to success.
It covers elements of the G.R.O.W.T.H framework. You don’t need to worry about the order you read the articles - they can be read in any order.
We’ll be posting articles regularly so watch out for them on our socials, find them here on the website. Use them as a reference guide when managing commercial change, or as a sense-check on your current approach, or when developing your next generation sales leaders.
Here's the first in my series: Emotional Intelligence & high performing leaders