Leaders are in Sales, Regardless of their Job Title

All leaders are in sales regardless of their job title.

You sell your team on the idea that they are uniquely capable of meeting the challenges of the moment.

You sell your boss on your strategy as able to drive growth for your business.

You sell future potential hires on your business, your leadership style, and your team vs. the competition.

You sell yourself on the idea that you can do it (even when you feel like you can’t).

This is not my idea

I ended up in sales by accident (a story for another time) but, as so often happens in life, it was a very happy accident. It was reassuring, then, that in my first month as an SMB Account Strategist at Google when the new President of our business came to Ann Arbor, Michigan (where I was based at the time) for a roundtable.

Mary Ellen Coe, now the Chief Business Officer at YouTube, was taking over as the leader of Google’s Customer Solutions (aka SMB Ads) business. At the time this was a business with 10s of Billions in revenue with thousands of sales people in more than 50 countries (pretty big job).

There was just one problem, Mary Ellen had never been in sales.

She spent most of her career as a Management Consultant at McKinsey before transitioning to Strategy and Operations roles at Google so, technically, this was her first time in a quota bearing role.

I was so junior in my own sales career that I didn’t even know what a quota was let alone realize that people might be concerned that one of the biggest sales roles in the biggest businesses at Google was helmed by someone who had never made a Cold Call. But the tension was there and the moderator of the panel opened the discussion with this fact.

The first question of the panel was along the lines of, “Mary Ellen, how does it feel to be in one of the biggest sales roles at Google despite never having been in sales yourself?”

She laughed, effectively using humor to put the audience at ease and then said something that stuck with me, “I’ve led teams for most of my career and all leaders are in sales whether it’s in their job title or not.”

Great salespeople do these 4 things well

I agree, all leaders are in sales regardless of what’s in their job title. If you’re a leader, in sales or otherwise, here are 4 traits to embody. Every great salesperson I’ve worked for or with has them:

1. Discipline

2. Process orientation

3. Curiosity

4. Drive

You can be a good salesperson (read leader) with 2 or 3 of these traits, but to be great you need all 4.

Discipline

Alright, alright I know we’ve talked about my ❤️ for discipline on this program before, but it’s impossible to write about the traits of a successful salesperson and leave this out.

All great sales people are disciplined because they fundamentally understand that the only aspects of a sales cycle they control are the quality of their inputs.

The number of prospects they research.

The consistency and quality of their outbound outreach.

The manner in which they prepare for their client meetings.

The way they structure those client meetings.

The consistency and quality of their follow up.

Great sales people are disciplined, great leaders are also.

Process orientation

It’s fair to argue that process orientation is in someways the sibling of discipline. The reason I call it out for leaders specifically though is that being process oriented / minded is the way you allow yourself to be disciplined.

Especially relevant for leaders, it is the way in which you document and share that discipline with your team in a system.

Discipline outside of a process is just disciplined chaos. Discipline applied consistently to a standardized process is structured success.

Curiosity

Great sales people are insatiably curious. Great leaders are too.

One of the best aspects of my job is when I get to review a sales call between a member of our team and a customer where our team member is genuinely curious about the business / role of the customer they are speaking with.

People talk a lot about customer experience, but there’s no better way to ensure your customer (or team) has a great experience than to be genuinely curious about what they do.

True curiosity manifests as enthusiasm. That enthusiasm becomes palpable and even the most reticent of customers finds themselves drawn into the conversation. Before the customer knows it they’ve built a relationship with the salesperson that’s predicated on trust all because the salesperson took a genuine interest in them and their business.

Drive

Sales is hard, leadership is hard, life (can be) hard. Driven individuals are those that find a way to persist and endure. The ability to persist and endure is crucial to being a successful leader.

There are 2 components to drive:

1. Resilience

2. Problem solving

Resilience

When people talk about drive they often talk about, “the will to win.” But what does that mean?

In my experience that indomitable will to win is fundamentally a measure of resilience. Persistence, Optimism, Endurance even when (or perhaps especially when) things are not going your way.

There’s a line from Kipling’s poem If which perfectly encapsulates resilience for me, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.”

I love that Kipling refers to both Triumph and Disaster as impostors. That’s resilience to me; a recognition that both failure and success should be treated impartially as fleeting. The journey is the destination in our infinite game.

Problem solving

In our house there’s a mantra, “stop complaining, work the problem.”

Great sales people (and great leaders) find creative solutions to their problems without having to be told the exact steps they need to take. For all my lauding of process orientation it’s important to acknowledge that there will always be new issues that you haven’t encountered before as a salesperson or a leader.

Figure it out.

As a salesperson, as a leader, when confronted with a challenge look at it dispassionately and get to work. As Seth Godin says in his wonderful book The Practice, “Problems have solutions. That’s what makes them problems.”

Conclusion

All leaders are in sales. Great sales people share 4 traits:

1. Discipline

2. Process orientation

3. Curiosity

4. Drive

Great leaders should embody those traits also. See ya’ll next week.