Jean-Pierre Lauzier, consultant and sales speaker regularly shares his personal and commercial development advice on Isarta Infos. Today, he begins a series of three columns on the success factors of a sales team. First installment: the role of the team leader!
Bringing a sales team to success relies on three major elements: your role as the sales team manager, your expertise, and the expertise of your team. All elements affecting the performance of the sales team fall under one of these three pillars. In this column, we focus on the first element: your role.
The important thing is not so much what you know but what you do with what you know! For your impact as a sales director to be optimal, you must primarily develop three qualities within your role.
1. Be an Inspirational Leader
To inspire your team to give their best, you must be an inspiring, trustworthy model, demonstrating empathy, listening, respect, and proactivity. Honesty, integrity, respect, empathetic listening, consistency, and fairness towards all strongly inspire people under our responsibility to work in the same direction and with the same values.
To be followed, you must apply the values you want to see within your sales team. What you say must match what you do. What you do must reflect the skills and expertise expected in your role.
Inspiring your team also requires genuinely caring about each team member, creating a real relationship. You must know each member – their strengths and weaknesses, their personal and professional goals – in order to help them succeed. In this spirit, asking questions is crucial: inquire, be curious, seek to understand the behaviors and reactions of your salespeople.
And be proactive, develop a responsible attitude: anticipate expectations, address problems before they arise, take the initiative to act to solve a problem. Your proactivity acts as a reassuring framework that promotes initiative and improvement efforts and inspires the confidence necessary to influence the team.
You must ensure that each employee feels respected and appreciated: assign responsibilities based on their current abilities, encourage them regularly, support their efforts, show that you enjoy working with them, and treat them fairly.
2. Positively Influence Team Members
Do your employees know their goals and those of the company? Do they care about achieving these goals? If the answer is no, you need to create a strong link between the company’s objectives and the personal and professional goals of each team member; without this link, you will have a hard time motivating and influencing them to become better.
By conducting sales meetings focused on improving team processes and expertise, analyzing successes, and respectfully sharing experiences, applying the company’s values and a win-win sales model, you strengthen team cohesion, support individual skill improvement, encourage more effective behaviors and actions, and inspire the team to reach higher heights.
3. Help Each Team Member Perform Better
An employee is motivated and engaged in doing good work when they work towards a goal that matters to them and when they feel important, valued, respected, involved, informed, understood, and competent. You will therefore guide your team by coaching, motivating, and monitoring each team member so that everyone achieves their goals, continually improves their customer approach, and progresses in their sales. This proactive task is your best investment in your team.
To effectively help your salespeople, you need to understand what they do on a daily basis: don’t hesitate to go out on the road to meet current and potential customers to establish more effective sales strategies with the salesperson. You also need to write, monitor, and rigorously evaluate an action plan based on a win-win sales approach for each member, a plan that integrates the use of their strengths and the improvement of their weaknesses.
By inspiring, positively influencing, and helping each member of your team, you will inevitably achieve success, as each person will feel valued and supported in their personal goals, and the company will benefit from the best expertise to achieve its business objectives. It’s a win-win approach!
