The 4 Pillars of Sales Leadership

When thinking about leadership I often think of the da Vinci quote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. To be a successful sales leader you need to do 4 things, all of them simple, none of them easy:

1. Build a team culture where your team members are motivated and empowered to perform their best

2. Set clear expectations

3. Show your team “how” to accomplish those expectations

4. Hold them accountable to those expectations

Each one of the above 4 items is a newsletter post unto itself (yes I’m foreshadowing what you’ll find in the next 4 newsletters) but today let’s lay the foundation. If you’re a current or aspiring sales leader, use these 4 principles as a framework to drive your team’s success.

I currently lead a team of ~30 Account Executives and 6 Sales Managers. By far the best part of my job is mentoring Account Executives that want to be sales leaders one day. If I have my act together, I start our mentoring sessions by walking them through my 4 pillars of sales leadership listed above because every other session we’ll have ties back in some way to one of these 4 items.

Teaching someone about forecasting? Pillar #4, Accountability.

Teaching someone how to deliver feedback? Pillar #3, Coaching.

Teaching someone to effectively performance manage a member of their team? Pillar #2, Expectations.

Teaching someone to embrace their inner camp counselor so their team can form an identity they’re proud of? Pillar #1, Culture.

The 4 Pillars are listed in order of importance (part of me wants to put them in a pyramid because I think the visualization would be cool but when I drew it up it seemed to indicate that accountability was of minimal importance which isn’t true). Consider yourself warned if you see a pyramid crop up later in this post.

“A leader is best when people barely know they exist. When their work is done, their aim fulfilled, their team will say; we did it ourselves.” - Lao Tzu

A co-worker often reminds me that, “happy people sell” and she’s right. While next week’s newsletter will break down the exact tactics of how to create a culture where your team is motivated and empowered to perform their best it’s important to note here that if you don’t have Pillar #1, the other 3 Pillars won’t matter (maybe I should make that pyramid after all).

Here’s why your team’s culture matters, at the end of the day your team members, not you, are the ones who are going to pick up the phone to book meetings, hold discovery calls, and close deals with your customers. If, when they pick up that phone, they believe they’re going to be successful there is a much higher probability that they will be.

When I listen to recorded client calls from our team it’s immediately clear which team members believe in themselves and approach our customers as peers with value to add vs. those that don’t. As a sales leader, it is your job to cultivate your team members’ belief in their own abilities - Pillar #1 is the way you do it.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” - John C. Maxwell

Pillars #2-4 can all be articulated in the John C. Maxwell quote from above, but we have to mix up the order a bit to align with our framework, but it’s my newsletter and I’ll cry if I want to.

Pillar #2 - “Know the way” - Set Clear Expectations

As George Kennedy said in his Oscar winning performance as Dragline in the 1967 classic Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. Without fail, some of the most motivational sales leaders I’ve worked with (e.g. crushing it in Pillar #1) fall short because, while motivational, they aren’t clear communicators when it comes to what they actually expect their teams to do day in and day out.

In the Marines, all traditional briefings start with a simple framework where the leader of each patrol needs to articulate the intent of the mission and define the end state. This lesson holds true for Sales Leaders also. If you haven’t defined the end state (your expectations) the most talented sales team in the world will still fail as you’ll all be headed in different directions.

Being clear in your expectations matters for 2 reasons:

1. It forces you to do the work to know what winning looks like

2. It gives your team a clear North Start to define their quarter, month, week, and day

Need to make 100 cold calls per week to hit quota? Tell your team that’s the minimum you expect.

Notice that the quality of your team’s discovery calls is better when they’ve taken the time to pre-call plan and document it in your CRM? Tell them you expect them to spend the last 30 minutes of their day planning for tomorrow’s calls before they sign off.

The truth is, if you’ve built and maintained a culture where your team is motivated to perform and set clear expectations your team will be more successful than 90% of sales teams out there (these Pillars really should be a pyramid, huh?)

Pillar #3 - “Show the way” - Teach your team “how” to accomplish your expectations

I gave a speech to the graduating class at my high school a couple years ago which focused on my 3 leadership principles (sales agnostic) the second of which is proficiency, which aligns well with Pillar #3 from above. Another area I see Sales Leaders fall short is they aren’t masters of the craft they’re coaching.

It was always surprising to me in the civilian world how low of a bar many organizations put on being brilliant at the basics (the boring things), aka proficiency. One of the things that makes the Marine Corps the world’s greatest fighting force is their firm conviction that they can make a warrior and leader out of anyone regardless of natural talent, background, etc. They accomplish this by being maniacally focused on proficiency of the basics.

Put differently, the Marine Corps believes a squad of Marines with only average courage (let’s be real, not a thing) but exceptional marksmanship will consistently defeat the most courageous opponent. The emphasis on exceptional marksmanship in this case is the direct line to proficiency.

In order to teach your team how to accomplish your expectations you yourself must be proficient in the tasks required to accomplish those expectations.

Obsessing over proficiency yourself will instill a culture of mastery across your team and allow you to clearly observe areas where your individual team members are deficient. This then helps you put a plan in place to help them get better.

Pillar #4 - “Go the way” - Hold your team accountable to your expectations

If I had an MBA I would have led this section off with Peter Drucker’s quote about “what gets measured gets managed” (dang, did it anyway) but he’s right. One of the most liberating aspects of sales to me has always been the objectivity of its performance management. In order to be successful as a leader though you need to actually hold your team accountable to the expectations you set.

Accountability does a few great things for sales leaders. First, it sets a culture of excellence where team members know they are going to stand in front of their own performance, preferably on a weekly basis at a minimum. While some team members won’t like the visibility this brings to whether or not they did what they were supposed to, those team members don’t belong in sales. For your high performers, they’ll find this accountability cadence motivating as they look to compete with their peers.

Second, accountability allows you to onboard team members quickly. Sales can be a high turnover business because of the rigor around performance expectations (this is a feature, not a bug). One of the realities any sales leader faces then is the fact that a non-trivial amount of their job will be onboarding new team members to their team. Guess what? If you know on average that it takes 15 client meetings per week to hit quota in your organization, the sooner a new team member consistently reaches that number the sooner they’ll be successful. Accountability in action.

Finally, accountability prevents Sales Leaders from lying to themselves and falling behind. One of the biggest ways I see new Sales Leaders trip themselves up (particularly in organizations with long sales cycles) is by trying to “spin” their team’s performance to be better than it is. If you’ve done your homework in Pillar #2 and defined your expectations to include the leading metrics that will drive your team’s success, then holding your team accountable to those expectations will allow you to spot patterns of low performance. This, in turn, allows you to take corrective action before it’s too late in the quarter or year to do so.

That’s it! 4 simple, but not easy, actions you need to take as a Sales Leader which make up the Pillars Pyramid of successful Sales Leadership. Subscribe to the newsletter and next Friday I’ll walk through the tactics of how to build a culture where your team is motivated and empowered to perform their best.

P.S. here’s that silly pyramid 😃