The year 2020 was far from typical. COVID-19 struck humankind and, scientists responded with unprecedented speed to discover and manufacture vaccines. People were isolated from loved ones, but instead of letting that distance consume them, they embraced Zoom and FaceTime video chats. Protests rose up across many major cities, and instead of repressing the cause, many states took notice and started the beginnings of reform.
Do you feel like 2020 lasted ten years instead of just one? If you do, you’re not alone. With everyone anticipating a new year’s turn, it can be difficult to keep your sales team engaged, especially with all of the zoom fatigue and pandemic burnout. As a leader, you can’t just rely on your team being intrinsically motivated, leaving it up to them to engage. Sometimes your team may be inherently motivated. But what happens when they aren’t as engaged?
If they are not careful, it can take anywhere from three months to a year for a new sales leader to burn through all their political capital, and it’s hard to gain it back when they do.
Coming into a new sales organization Mason as a sales leader has political capital. Political capital is defined as the trust, goodwill, and influence you have with organizations, teams, and individuals. It is also connected to the amount of “unbudgeted” spend you have. In layman’s terms, your “pull.”
Mason is a driven sales leader with an excellent track record of improving sales teams and increasing revenue. He has 17 years of sales and sales leadership experience and recently applied for a new role, a step up, with more responsibility with Widgets Inc.
The crux of sales leadership is to hit the sweet spot between not pushing your team hard enough and committing to an overly ambitious goal, right? Too often, sales leaders resort to increasing goals without considering their team’s sales capacity. Knowing your team’s capacity allows them to generate more leads, close more deals, manage time more effectively, and make sure they do not burn out.
Owners and entrepreneurs are the driving force in generating revenue for most new companies. They thought of the idea for the product or service. Created the go-to-market strategy. They actually sold the product/service despite many of them not having formal sales training. Then hired other people to sell it. They’ve done it all, but they often find themselves being stretched and pulled, so they hire a sales leader, but they struggle to give up control. Here’s why.
When you first establish your business, you do it all; marketing manager, human resources, product or service expert, finance analyst, sales leader, etc. But there comes a time when you want to grow your business, and you know hiring a sales leader is a step in the right direction. Here are signs it’s time to hire a sales leader.
Sales runs on relationships and communication. From the opening pitch to closing a deal, your sales team needs to communicate with their customers. What about with you or the team? Do you find it frustrating that your sales team is not speaking up during your meetings? Here are some ways to get your team engaged in meetings.
Strategic Planning is a common term that has a wide range of meanings. It is a critical part of your business plan and a necessary process to help your organization achieve its growth goals.
Recently, you asked your sales team to start entering information into your CRM. Having a CRM will allow you to have better access to what your team is doing, valuable customer information, what stages specific clients are at, better communication across your organization, and more. But there is a lot of push back from some of your salespeople. They don’t want to enter all their information into the CRM and ignore your request to use it.
The more significant issue isn’t the lack of CRM data input. Although that is very important, the main challenge is the disregard of your requests. So how do you handle a problematic salesperson who will not follow your direction? Watch the video and find out.
This quick twenty-minute video includes:
If you want your sales team to follow your direction and requests then you’ll want to use these tools to get your team on board.