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Leadership

Delivering a strong commercial performance is dependent on strong sales and commercial leaders operating as both successful role models and effective coaches. They need to strike the right balance between support and assurance and should also interface successfully with peers across functions.

Why this is important

Leaders play the most critical role in a sales organisation. In a small, high growth business they will be likely leading a team, while also selling directly themselves. As the organisation grows, they will focus more attention on setting the organisation up for future success, with processes, systems and teams designed to win and attract more customers. They will need to continuously set the tempo, the way of selling and high standards of performance.

How to Grow Better and Faster

At BFG, we believe the sales leader has three core focus areas to set them up for success – leading self, leading others and leading the enivronment:

Leading Self

  • Invest in your / their own development.
  • Conduct a 360 degree development survey to help uncover strengths, development areas and provide an opportunity to demonstrate openness to feedback from their team.
  • Attributes can be designed bespoke and may include leadership competencies such as ‘inspiring trust, communication skills, creating vision and direction and strategic perspective.

Leading Others

  • Effective leaders take a ‘situational leadership’ approach, which encompasses being skilled in a variety of management styles such as directing, coaching, supporting and mentoring.
  • The style that is used needs to be relevant to the individual and the task they are performing.
  • This approach should be underpinned by a strong ‘management cycle’ where there are frequent opportunities for structured 1:1 conversations and interactions.

Leading the Environment

  • Ensure that the sales / marketing function and its inputs and outputs are visible to the whole organisation (and to customers).
  • This should also include focusing on creating a strong sales culture. A motivated and vibrant sales team is a blueprint for success and here, leadership depends on other sales excellence dimensions such as incentives, culture and performance management.
  • A winning sales team also interfaces brilliantly with other business functions, which the sales leader needs to facilitate.

Case Studies

Helping a sales leadership team drive performance

This leadership team had managed industrial equipment sales teams for over 2 decades with minimal structure in place around how they managed and led. We supported 3 workstreams to drive their performance:

A. Structured management cycle: we helped design and implement this – including the critical 121 meetings on a weekly basis. We also supported initial conversations being held in the 121’s

B. Sales team culture and competence. The team activity levels needed to increase to drive faster and higher quality conversion of inbound leads and we trained bot he team and sales leaders in improving the sales process to underpin this

C. Coaching the commercial leaders. We checked in on a frequent basis and provided support 121 with the leaders to ensure comfort with the new approaches, while also holding them to account on implementation.