Great Salespeople Don't Necessarily Make Great Leaders
When choosing whom to promote to management, business leaders will often look to the highest performing, most consistent salespeople in their team.
This makes sense. This person will understand processes, maintain high levels of motivation and the ability to get results.
However, it is foolish to presume that because someone was a great salesperson, they will automatically be a great manager and leader. The two skill sets are vastly different in several critical areas.
Sometimes, your best salesperson will be an atrocious leader when they first move into management.
Selling vs. Leading
When we consider the role of a salesperson, it is quite self-centric. That is, I am focused on my clients, my results, and working with my prospects to get mutually beneficial outcomes. Yes, in businesses with a more collaborative culture, you see more elements of teamwork and helping each other out, but ultimately great salespeople are focused on selling to their customers.
Great leaders require some of these cornerstones. They too need focus, accountability, consistency and people-skills. Unlike salespeople, their priorities are different.
Leadership is about getting the best out of a team.
That means understanding what makes different team members tick — figuring out how to tap into potential. Knowing how to motivate, coach, and develop people. Knowing when to challenge people and when to give them the answers. Having hard conversations. Keeping people accountable. Appropriately delivering information. Patience. Vision. Empathy. Decisiveness. Openness. Staying calm and consistent under pressure. Being able to understand and bring all the complex dynamics of a team together.
Moving from a sales-orientation to a leadership-orientation requires a new mindset, and a different focus. Skills like motivating, coaching and developing; disciplinary conversations; and keeping people accountable have probably not been acquired naturally with sales experience. I know some salespeople who are amazing at selling, but they are so tied to their emotions that their energy and presence is very inconsistent. This can be maintained in sales but not when you are the person everyone else is looking to for stability and reassurance.
Leadership. It's a very different hat to put on.
An example
Take the typical scenario of a salesperson approaching their manager because they don’t know what to do next with a prospect.
A manager relying only on their selling skills may immediately go and speak with the prospect themselves. Great, a deal is done.
A manager who is a leader may see the opportunity for growth here. They may ask the salesperson, “What do you think you should do next?” challenging them to come up with a solution. They may help that person work through an appropriate next step, giving reasoning.
They may then encourage the salesperson to go and take that step themselves, with the manager there to support them. If the manager does speak with the prospect themselves (because perhaps the salesperson is still a trainee, for example), they’ll do so with the salesperson there to listen. Afterwards, they may talk to the salesperson about what they have learned from that experience.
The first approach is very much that of a salesperson. It means the manager is relying only on their personal selling skills to get results.
This manager is a salesperson with a title, and without acquiring the necessary skills for leadership, they will likely find themselves burnt out and frustrated because they are so reliant on themselves for the team results. The team may come to habitually ask the manager to close their sales for them or do the hard things for them, and consequently, never grow themselves. Their team will probably stop expecting any learning or development from the manager, and may even lose some levels of trust or respect for them as a leader.
The manager will hesitate if they ever have to take a day off because they don’t trust their team to get results without them. You do not create a culture of high performance this way.
Don't get me wrong. This manager may still have great intentions and even greater potential. They simply don't know how to use it effectively. I chose the example response above because it is highly likely that that manager is doing the best thing they can think to do as a manager. A terrible, entirely self-centred manager could simply tell their employee to figure it out and go back to making sure their old clients were being looked after (this is what happens when a competitive salesperson literally stays a salesperson and doesn't even think to consider the business or the people they're supposed to be managing. Surprisingly, something I've seen more than once).
The other approach sees the opportunity to give the team member a learning moment. Of course, there are many ways this situation could be handled depending on the specific circumstances. The key idea is: Leadership is the opposite of self-centric. It is other-centred. As soon as someone comes in with ego or a high need for control, they need to re-evaluate their leadership style.
What to do?
My primary point is that we must remove the assumption that being great at selling will automatically translate into a high performing manager and leader. These assumptions lead to people getting “promoted to the point of incompetence”, and businesses stagnate because of it.
Of course, becoming a great leader is achievable for almost anyone willing to put in the work. You can be a great salesperson who becomes a great leader.
As business leaders, it is imperative to provide the tools for new managers to become great ones. We have enough glorified salespeople with titles. Give them what they need to lead effectively, with mentorship, training and guidance. I have been astounded by some managers before, who may know they need to do something but have no idea how to execute it. For example, I recall one manager who had an employee who was always coming in late. They knew they had to address it, but they didn’t know how, when, or what to say. Hard conversations are a perfect example of an area where new managers may have good intentions but no knowledge of execution.
You can’t promote someone and then wonder why they’re not performing when they haven’t been given enough guidance on their new position in the first place. By understanding that great salespeople won’t put on a new badge that says ‘manager’ and suddenly transform into the leader their team needs, businesses can develop an effective onboarding (or ‘upboarding’) process as individuals move into new roles.
Internally, they should have people they can turn to for advice and guidance on specific parts of the business. Ideally, they should be able to observe other managers engaging in various types of conversations and tasks. Many excellent leadership training courses can be utilised with groups or individuals (if you’re interested in this with me, get in touch).
As far as I’m concerned, taking someone with great potential for leadership and allowing them to move up in a business should be treated like onboarding a new recruit.
There should be clear expectations, training, guidance, feedback and support throughout the process. Building a system that challenges new leaders without throwing them straight into the deep end and hoping they don’t drown, is one key difference between average businesses and great businesses.
A big part of leadership is about creating leaders around you – and entrenching this value into your systems and processes contributes to the creation of a leadership culture.
What do you think?
Sonia
This blog post was originally posted on my training website, Statusone.com.au, on Nov 19, 2019. I have since been moving some of my favourite blog posts from there over to here, as this is now my ‘content hub’ and I want you to have access to some of the cool stuff I’ve written about before. You can still check out the Status One site if you’re interested in corporate training if you want. Also, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter below for updates and weekly exclusive content.