Read the lesson:

Every single person on your team contributes to the overall sales of your company either directly or indirectly.

Question: Who on your team is NOT contributing to sales?

“Oh, well, my bookkeeper doesn’t affect sales.”

Yes, they do.

“My assistant has nothing to do with sales.”

Yes, my friend, they do.

“Fine. But what about the janitor?”

Them too!

Stop looking at sales as an isolated position description, it’s not a single department. Sales is a critical concept your entire team needs to understand, embody and embrace. If someone on your team doesn’t get this concept, let them go find work somewhere else and bring in someone better.

Sales is my favorite topic when it comes to business and entrepreneurship. The gasoline to your engine, the rocket fuel that puts you across the finish line. You have  HUGE potential sitting right under your nose, and it costs very little (next to nothing) to tap into it.

While this article is a broad look at sales, I have other articles and videos you can look through as well. Or, book a call with me, it’s complimentary and customised to you and what you’re focusing on in your business right now.

2 common sales leadership mistakes

1. Too much risk in the hands of too few

Picture this: 50 people in your company with 5 people in sales. That’s 10% of your staff responsible for 100% of your pipeline. It doesn’t make sense.

Personal Experience #1: 

Too often in my past ventures, I focused exclusively on my sales team to generate results. I believed ‘sales’ was about just salespeople selling. I thought revenue came from that small percentage of people with the magical five-letter word ‘sales’ written on their position description.

A common challenge faced by growing businesses is keeping up with results that were once easily attained when they were smaller. They struggle with how to keep that momentum flowing to reach the next level.

After banging my head against the wall with this challenge, I had an epiphany.

I finally realised one of the reasons sales was easier when my company was small was because everyone was contributing back then. The ‘buy-in’ factor from the team was much stronger when everyone talked directly to me on a daily basis.

Why?

The larger my team, the farther people became until a lot of people only knew me by name, not as a person. The larger my company became, the more diluted my leadership message and energy became as well.

Solution #1: 

I had to stop carrying all the weight and empower key team members better. I had to start by accepting that the problem was with me, not with my team. I needed to become a better leader, one which was adapted better at working with a larger team.

Once I tackled this — and believe me, it took a lot of work — I started to see some amazing results! People at lower levels of my organisation started to behave differently. I also started to receive more compliments from customers instead of complaints. The compliments led to strong referrals which lined up my staff to hit more home runs. I also had random team members tell me about what they did to help close on a deal. It was amazing to witness the transformation!

2. Being sold in an interview

A good salesperson will sell you in an interview. They’ll successfully convince you to hire them, even if they aren’t a good fit for your organization.

Yup, I got sold. Bamboozled! Duped. Call it what you may. I let myself get ‘sold’ in an interview and hired the wrong salespeople. Have you ever been there?

Remember that in an interview, the person is trying to sell themselves. 

If they’re actually good at sales, they’ll sell you on hiring them even if they aren’t a good fit for the company. They’ll relate to you, make you feel comfortable, help you overlook that they are a bad fit, and make it easy for you to say ‘yes’. Those are all skills of a good salesperson but have nothing to do with their ‘overall fit’ with your organisation as a whole. 

“Having the wrong people on your team is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.”

How does it happen?

Fear. Pressure. Being reactive with hiring. That’s how.

Hopefully, your company is in a profitable position. You have all the time in the world and little to no pressure in your day-to-day life. On the flip side, maybe you’ve found yourself a little bit like me where my overhead increased, the market dipped, and competitors were in attack mode. It was stressful! And it put the pressure on to hire more salespeople… fast. Too fast.

I let fear, stress, and pressure influence too many of my decisions in the wrong way. Some things can’t be rushed.

As the old saying goes:

“Rushin’ didn’t get no-one anywhere faster.”

Solution #2:

Relax. Be objective and let go of the emotions. Then check your gut and ask yourself: “of all the candidates I’m interviewing, do I really believe this person a good fit for my organization?” 

Never ‘settle’. Keep interviewing until you have the right fit. 

It’s easier to turn down someone in an interview than it is to fire them after they’re employed.

After it happened a couple of times I was able to spot the patterns and filter those ‘good at sales but bad fit’ people out better. It took some trial and error but eventually, I started hiring the right people to replace my lower performers.

Sales is a culture, a universal subject

It’s worth repeating: we need to stop looking at sales as an isolated role. 

Everyone on your team is either helping or harming the reputation of your organisation.

Hear me out.

When an employee goes home to family or out with friends, bitching about your company, it affects your reputation. THEIR friends and extended family inadvertently expand on the negativity and so on. This type of cycle impacts the attitude of your market before your sales staff even show up.

Your image and reputation spread organically, whether you realise it or not, whether you like it or not, and whether you focus on it or not. People talk.

“Anything anyone ever says about your company is critical and it’s going to be in one of two contexts: either it will help your company or hinder it.“

Word of mouth vibrates and reverberates, it gains momentum and gets stronger with time. We want it to be getting stronger in a positive way, not in a negative one. We want your reputation to be strong, and to spread out to the market in that context.

I’m talking about unleashing the hidden potential of your existing team.

Your team must know how important they are

In one of my past ventures I had dynamic salespeople on my team. They knew what they were doing, they brought customers in the door and closed on good deals.

Then reality hit, the rest of my team wasn’t meeting customer expectations that my sales team had set up.

Lower level team members interacted poorly with clients. Bookkeeping was making mistakes on invoices. Operations people were stretched too thin and not giving good service to key accounts. A ton of little things started piling up, creating bad experiences for clients.

Accounts which started as happy (after dealing with my sales staff) began to complain and were angry by the end of the client cycle.

Solution #3: 

Educate your team on how important they are for the competitive edge of your company as a whole.

I would spend quality time with key team members who weren’t representing my company’s core values. A little education goes a long way. 

“A little heart to heart and showing you care about your team can go a very long way”

Does your team prioritize your customer’s client experience as their top priority, or are they just showing up to do their job?

We want to get your team excited about working for you and with you to build a kick-ass reputation for your company they can feel proud about. Anything less than this is a waste of potential.

If you need some guidance on this or more how-to, book a call with me and let’s talk about it.

Rally the troops!

One of my biggest sales challenges came within a recession. No surprise there, I suppose.

With high overhead, not enough sales and lower margins from a recessed economy, I was in trouble. I was scared and moved too slowly to make corrective actions. Ultimately I found myself just two weeks away from not being able to make payroll and pay off suppliers. 

Scary shit, to say the least.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences in my business career. I lost a lot of sleep during those days.

To get through it, I needed the whole company to come together and push through. We all had to drive sales forward. I didn’t have enough money to hire more salespeople so I had to rely on everyone else to chip in on the effort as an entire organisation.

This was an enlightening moment. It helped me realise some of the mistakes I had made in the past as my company was expanding.

When the company was smaller, we all had multiple job descriptions. Salespeople helped with operations, operations people helped out with bookkeeping, bookkeepers were close with salespeople and made happy, friendly conversation with their clients. It was a positive cycle revolving on a strong team dynamic.

As the company grew, my team grew farther and farther apart. Job descriptions started to become isolated, like a cold, process-oriented assembly line. Communication and relationships started to weaken and become fragmented.

With a lot of serious effort, we made it through that tough time. All because every single person in the company rallied together to help with sales. Quality client experience, as a whole, became a universal subject for each team member which led to client trust, positive reputation, and an increase in referrals.

That year ended up being the most profitable year up until that point. It was a complete turnaround from a near-catastrophic disaster!

All because we stopped thinking of sales as an isolated role and implemented it as a universal role that touched every job description. 

Together, let’s put the spotlight on the subject and turn the light on. We’ll explore every corner and get to the root of driving you to the next level. Book a complimentary consultation, it’s on me.

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